27 Jul 2012:
At Least Nothing Was Stolen?
London, England, UK
H: 24 L: 16 Weather: Intermittently Cloudy
I bound out of bed excitedly, ready for whatever adventures await me in London, before I realize, oh wait, my glasses are broken, I need to do something about that. I ask at the front desk, and they tell me there's a place not too far away... but the clerk also says the word "expensive" about every other sentence when directing me there. I ask for tape instead, and tape up my glasses to make the lens stay in the frame. Well, great. Now I look like I've been in a fistfight.
After eating breakfast, I head down to Westminster Abbey to meet up with Bailey and her friends once more. It's absolutely gorgeous, and I take tons of pictures. The most amazing thing about the place, of course, is all the famous people buried there. Pretty much anyone who is anyone in the UK gets their remains put there, or at least a memorial somewhere in the building. Visitors are given an audio tour narrated by Jeremy Irons. It's a fun tour, and whisks us through there pretty fast, but to do so Mr. Irons has to skip over a lot of the famous people you pass by.
For example, in the writer's section, we're rightly pointed towards the memorial to William Shakespeare (not buried there, of course), but right there just to the left of Shakespeare is the memorial to Jane Austen, who isn't even mentioned. Towards the exit, Mr. Irons mentions the tomb of the unknown soldier, but not WINSTON CHURCHILL who is buried RIGHT THERE and OH MY GOD WINSTON CHURCHILL and like fifty other Prime Ministers, and Darwin and William Herschel and I WAS IN HEAVEN OKAY ALL THESE PEOPLE.
We then head to Regents' College London to have lunch in the school cafeteria (they had pretty good fish-and-chips) before tooling around Regents' Park for a while. Regents' Park was gorgeous, and Bailey and her friends were delightful as always. It was fun to hear them reminisce about their time together in London. Then, it was time for me to be off to the museums, to spend a bit of time before the big concert. Said "big concert" was a staging of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony—my absolute favorite song, ever—as a part of BBC's Proms series, an extended series of summer concerts that are quite famous in the classical music world. The best part of Proms is that they sell tickets at the door for only £5 that are said to be easy to get; you may have to wait in line for a while, but they're supposed to be well-worth it. Concerts are said to almost never sell out, unless you show up with like 15 minutes to spare.
I got to Prince Albert Hall, where Proms concerts are held, at 4pm. The concert started at 6:30pm, though, and the lines didn't seem very bad, so I decide to come back in a half an hour, as there are some wonderful museums on Exhibition Road that are completely free. This was a mistake. The museum I was hoping to see was the Science Museum, and, me being me, I absolutely love science museums. They're pretty much my favorite things in the whole world. So of course I couldn't stay for just a half an hour. I feel particularly guilty when I let it stretch to about 45 minutes because I discovered an exhibit they have where they have a bunch of rooms set up to show a performance of "The Planets", complete with surround sound and videos of the performers. I was cutting down on my classical music time to listen to classical music!
Then, disaster struck. I decided to give myself 5 more minutes (yeah right) and check out an exhibit I saw called "Who Am I?", just because the name sounded interesting. BAD. LIFE. DECISIONS. It turned out to be the best exhibit on psychology I have ever seen at any museum, hands down, full of wonderful interactive tools that actually taught kids about modern things that we think are cool in psychology: neuroscience and kin bias (without calling it that) and digit ratios and OH MY GOD IT WAS JUST THE BEST THING EVER and thinking about it on the way out of the museum I practically started tearing up because you have no idea how awesome it is to finally see your discipline respected enough that they put it in a museum, and not just any museum, but a science museum, like it's just another part of science, every bit as important and valid as geology or chemistry or physics, and they actually did it right, it wasn't just stupid Freud stupidity and Skinner boxes, but real, modern cognitive psychology that real people actually care about these days but no one knows about because we have done a bad job of advertising.
(Sorry, had to rant there a bit. Back to regularly scheduled programming.)
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| Me as a young child, according to a random face technology thing they had. I mean, obviously, my classes and facial hair were a very important part of my self-identity at that age. |
I make my way back to Prince Albert Hall. The lines had clearly gotten longer, and it takes me a bit of walking to find where they even enter the hall, let alone where I need to get in line for the end of them. I'm looking for the Gallery seating line, but end up running into the Arena seating line; I decide, eh, good enough, and follow the line to what I think is it's back. It turns out I accidentally wandered into the Gallery line, but, eh, that was what I meant to do in the first place, so yay.
In the Gallery line, I find myself next to Bai, Sherri, and Balazs, who are students from the University of London. We end up chatting and getting to know each other. Balazs served as kind of the go-between for Bai and Sherri, as he had been to several Proms already. As we waited in line, we got issued little slips that had numbers on them denoting our place in line; I got #872. We were a little confused about what that meant. Were there really 872 people in our line, or 872 people in both lines, or did they just start numbering at some arbitrary number in the middle (say, 500), or what?
Eventually, after about an hour and a quarter, we started moving. The line was long, but it was actually moving at a pretty steady clip, so that was comforting. Eventually, it seemed like we were assured of getting tickets, as we were being led down a narrow corridor right outside Prince Albert Hall with about 10 minutes to spare before the concert. We stopped for a bit. People in better clothes than the Prommers were milling around us; apparently they had been shepherded over towards us to deal with problems with their tickets.
Balazs mentioned that one of his friends had been waiting in line once and was offered a ticket by someone who happened to be walking by. I was impressed. "That must be really rare. No way that that would happen." Within about a half a minute, one of the guys in suits milling around said that he had an extra ticket he couldn't do anything with, and he was willing to give it away, no strings attached.
I wish I was making up the timing, because I know it seems too perfect. But it was that perfect. So I looked around at the people around me, thinking they had heard him, and said, "Give me a moment," to the guy in the suit. I asked them what they thought. They didn't say anything very definite. I kind of shrugged at the guy. He moved on.
After all, I figured, we were about to head in - we were only about five minutes away in the line. And I had gotten to know my little group, and liked them, so it would be nice to enjoy the concert with people I liked and knew already. Plus, we had gone through the entire line together, so I felt a sense of obligation to them already; I shouldn't just split off from them for the promise of treasure, as that would be unfair.
Instead, we moved up in line. When we were about 15 people away from the front—perhaps 3 meters away—a clamor came from the front of the line. There was a guy with an official-looking name tag shaking his head. You know what that means. Sold out. To say I was devastated would be a serious understatement; this had been the single event that I had been looking forward to most (not counting seeing people, of course; talking just in terms of activities), and now I couldn't experience it.
Looking back on this, it made me realize that I'm not a Ravenclaw, as much as I enjoy learning. I'm a Hufflepuff. And a Tully: "Family, Duty, Honor". That's duty right before honor there. So, sure, great that I was being loyal. But this incident really made me think about a couple of things that I find really frustrating about myself.
First, of course, is my passivity. As a good Minnesotan, I learned to not try to rock the boat too much and make unreasonable demands of others. This is useful in many situations. I tend to get good service from wait staff, airline employees, and others who are in positions where they're used to dealing with unreasonable, pushy individuals on a regular basis. But it can also be bad, as it was in this case. If I was less stupidly passive, I could've simply explicitly asked the people in my group for permission to take the ticket rather than somehow expecting them to grant it to me, especially because they obviously weren't paying attention to the unfolding situation.
More importantly, though, it really highlighted my risk-aversiveness. A lot of the reason why I didn't take the ticket is my fear that somehow I wouldn't have a good time sitting with people I didn't already know in a situation that I hadn't planned for. So I did absolutely everything I could to avoid this slightly negative situation, and it ended up ultimately leading to utter disaster. I'm used to my risk-aversiveness depriving me of some mildly fun situations (a lot of the typical fond memories people have of college will never be mine... but, of course, many of the bad ones won't be, either!), and once and a while it leads me to mildly unpleasant things, like making someone feel slighted or the like. But this made me think about how many of the really horrendous (well, horrendous for me, which is to say "kind of bad") situations I've found myself in have been the result of my risk-aversiveness. The tally was pretty sobering.
In any case, we set off through Regents' Park towards the University of London, where the others were going to have dinner. They apologized to me—repeatedly—for what they assured me was the awful quality of the food there. What they should have been preemptively apologizing for, though, was the rudeness of the desk clerks there. I had never really encountered a person in a similar job who was so outright rude. For example, he told us that Balasz would have his University account charged to cover the meal, then once the meal pass was purchased completely changed his story and said he'd accept payment directly, then ridiculed us for being confused about the situation when he did a 180 on what he was talking about in the first place! Grr. We spent dinner discussing orthographies, of all things, and then I bid them adieu to hang out with Bailey to watch the opening ceremony.
Our plan had been to meet up briefly at her apartment, then go out and find a pub or a public viewing spot to watch the Olympics with Londoners. But, as you might expect from my London adventures so far, it did not go according to plan. I made it to her Tube stop just fine, but was immediately lost. The problem with the Underground is that there are five hundred different exits for each stop, and the little hand-drawn map I had made for this one apparently matched a completely different stop. Once I found my way to a different exit that had a local map by it, I had wasted important time. Finally, though, I started walking in the right direction... but ended up getting lost again anyway, and when I finally found the street Bailey lived on I realized I hadn't written down her house number, so I walked up and down a few times before finding the right one from my fuzzy recollections of Street View.
Finally, I made it into the apartment, but by then the thing had started - no pub for you! We settled down to watch the Opening Ceremony together. It was pretty quiet in the apartment, and Bailey and her friend fell asleep a couple of times during the ceremony (which I don't blame them for; they had had to stay up late to work on essays and such all week!). I suppose I enjoyed it, but it seemed kind of short in some ways. I did appreciate the random appearance of JK Rowling, though, and the fact that NHS is so widely considered to be a national treasure that it was used in the opening ceremony of the Olympics.
When it was done, it was time for me to head back to my hostel. I had to take the buses in London for the first time, and unfortunately my Oyster Card (used for all public transit in London) was almost out, so I had to pay quite a bit using coins. I had a sort of weird route, where I had to transfer between two buses (the 20... something to the N28 or the N31) at a largely unmarked location, but I figured I could do it.
So I got off at the transfer point and waited, watching several N29 buses go by, waiting faithfully for an N28 bus. Then I got on an N29 bus and headed away. It took me a few stops before I realized, oh wait, I was on an N29 bus, not an N28 bus, and how on earth did I manage that, because I had seen several N29 buses pass me by, as they were meant to, and oh bother where am I and what am I going to do and augh. So I doubled back and ended up getting off at the wrong stop because I got off at something-ham Road when I had to get off at something-ham Street, who even knows, and there were loud Frenchman all around me and what is even happening it's 2am and I'm really cranky right now and please just get me home. And then I found an N31 bus and I flip out because I'm suddenly afraid I'm going in the wrong direction but finally, finally, finally, I'm actually going in the right direction, and I finally stumble into my hostel.
Even despite the awful sleep-aggravated confusion, though, there were some people who were really nice. The bus drive on the wrong-way N29, for example, let me just pay with the single GBP I had on my Oyster Card even though that was way less than the actual fare and was very nice in redirecting me to the N28, and the lady on the wrong-stop I got off at who went off the bus at the same time made some nice small talk about the Opening Ceremony that I very much appreciated. So there's that much, at least.
I really wanted to go to bed, but instead I looked up the "Doubletree Westminster", where my cousin Chelsea said she and her brother Garrett were going to be meeting up the next day, and tried to sketch out how to get there. Mostly I was just exhausted. So exhausted. I only got to sleep at 3am.
In the Gallery line, I find myself next to Bai, Sherri, and Balazs, who are students from the University of London. We end up chatting and getting to know each other. Balazs served as kind of the go-between for Bai and Sherri, as he had been to several Proms already. As we waited in line, we got issued little slips that had numbers on them denoting our place in line; I got #872. We were a little confused about what that meant. Were there really 872 people in our line, or 872 people in both lines, or did they just start numbering at some arbitrary number in the middle (say, 500), or what?
Eventually, after about an hour and a quarter, we started moving. The line was long, but it was actually moving at a pretty steady clip, so that was comforting. Eventually, it seemed like we were assured of getting tickets, as we were being led down a narrow corridor right outside Prince Albert Hall with about 10 minutes to spare before the concert. We stopped for a bit. People in better clothes than the Prommers were milling around us; apparently they had been shepherded over towards us to deal with problems with their tickets.
Balazs mentioned that one of his friends had been waiting in line once and was offered a ticket by someone who happened to be walking by. I was impressed. "That must be really rare. No way that that would happen." Within about a half a minute, one of the guys in suits milling around said that he had an extra ticket he couldn't do anything with, and he was willing to give it away, no strings attached.
I wish I was making up the timing, because I know it seems too perfect. But it was that perfect. So I looked around at the people around me, thinking they had heard him, and said, "Give me a moment," to the guy in the suit. I asked them what they thought. They didn't say anything very definite. I kind of shrugged at the guy. He moved on.
After all, I figured, we were about to head in - we were only about five minutes away in the line. And I had gotten to know my little group, and liked them, so it would be nice to enjoy the concert with people I liked and knew already. Plus, we had gone through the entire line together, so I felt a sense of obligation to them already; I shouldn't just split off from them for the promise of treasure, as that would be unfair.
Instead, we moved up in line. When we were about 15 people away from the front—perhaps 3 meters away—a clamor came from the front of the line. There was a guy with an official-looking name tag shaking his head. You know what that means. Sold out. To say I was devastated would be a serious understatement; this had been the single event that I had been looking forward to most (not counting seeing people, of course; talking just in terms of activities), and now I couldn't experience it.
Looking back on this, it made me realize that I'm not a Ravenclaw, as much as I enjoy learning. I'm a Hufflepuff. And a Tully: "Family, Duty, Honor". That's duty right before honor there. So, sure, great that I was being loyal. But this incident really made me think about a couple of things that I find really frustrating about myself.
First, of course, is my passivity. As a good Minnesotan, I learned to not try to rock the boat too much and make unreasonable demands of others. This is useful in many situations. I tend to get good service from wait staff, airline employees, and others who are in positions where they're used to dealing with unreasonable, pushy individuals on a regular basis. But it can also be bad, as it was in this case. If I was less stupidly passive, I could've simply explicitly asked the people in my group for permission to take the ticket rather than somehow expecting them to grant it to me, especially because they obviously weren't paying attention to the unfolding situation.
More importantly, though, it really highlighted my risk-aversiveness. A lot of the reason why I didn't take the ticket is my fear that somehow I wouldn't have a good time sitting with people I didn't already know in a situation that I hadn't planned for. So I did absolutely everything I could to avoid this slightly negative situation, and it ended up ultimately leading to utter disaster. I'm used to my risk-aversiveness depriving me of some mildly fun situations (a lot of the typical fond memories people have of college will never be mine... but, of course, many of the bad ones won't be, either!), and once and a while it leads me to mildly unpleasant things, like making someone feel slighted or the like. But this made me think about how many of the really horrendous (well, horrendous for me, which is to say "kind of bad") situations I've found myself in have been the result of my risk-aversiveness. The tally was pretty sobering.
In any case, we set off through Regents' Park towards the University of London, where the others were going to have dinner. They apologized to me—repeatedly—for what they assured me was the awful quality of the food there. What they should have been preemptively apologizing for, though, was the rudeness of the desk clerks there. I had never really encountered a person in a similar job who was so outright rude. For example, he told us that Balasz would have his University account charged to cover the meal, then once the meal pass was purchased completely changed his story and said he'd accept payment directly, then ridiculed us for being confused about the situation when he did a 180 on what he was talking about in the first place! Grr. We spent dinner discussing orthographies, of all things, and then I bid them adieu to hang out with Bailey to watch the opening ceremony.
Our plan had been to meet up briefly at her apartment, then go out and find a pub or a public viewing spot to watch the Olympics with Londoners. But, as you might expect from my London adventures so far, it did not go according to plan. I made it to her Tube stop just fine, but was immediately lost. The problem with the Underground is that there are five hundred different exits for each stop, and the little hand-drawn map I had made for this one apparently matched a completely different stop. Once I found my way to a different exit that had a local map by it, I had wasted important time. Finally, though, I started walking in the right direction... but ended up getting lost again anyway, and when I finally found the street Bailey lived on I realized I hadn't written down her house number, so I walked up and down a few times before finding the right one from my fuzzy recollections of Street View.
Finally, I made it into the apartment, but by then the thing had started - no pub for you! We settled down to watch the Opening Ceremony together. It was pretty quiet in the apartment, and Bailey and her friend fell asleep a couple of times during the ceremony (which I don't blame them for; they had had to stay up late to work on essays and such all week!). I suppose I enjoyed it, but it seemed kind of short in some ways. I did appreciate the random appearance of JK Rowling, though, and the fact that NHS is so widely considered to be a national treasure that it was used in the opening ceremony of the Olympics.
When it was done, it was time for me to head back to my hostel. I had to take the buses in London for the first time, and unfortunately my Oyster Card (used for all public transit in London) was almost out, so I had to pay quite a bit using coins. I had a sort of weird route, where I had to transfer between two buses (the 20... something to the N28 or the N31) at a largely unmarked location, but I figured I could do it.
So I got off at the transfer point and waited, watching several N29 buses go by, waiting faithfully for an N28 bus. Then I got on an N29 bus and headed away. It took me a few stops before I realized, oh wait, I was on an N29 bus, not an N28 bus, and how on earth did I manage that, because I had seen several N29 buses pass me by, as they were meant to, and oh bother where am I and what am I going to do and augh. So I doubled back and ended up getting off at the wrong stop because I got off at something-ham Road when I had to get off at something-ham Street, who even knows, and there were loud Frenchman all around me and what is even happening it's 2am and I'm really cranky right now and please just get me home. And then I found an N31 bus and I flip out because I'm suddenly afraid I'm going in the wrong direction but finally, finally, finally, I'm actually going in the right direction, and I finally stumble into my hostel.
Even despite the awful sleep-aggravated confusion, though, there were some people who were really nice. The bus drive on the wrong-way N29, for example, let me just pay with the single GBP I had on my Oyster Card even though that was way less than the actual fare and was very nice in redirecting me to the N28, and the lady on the wrong-stop I got off at who went off the bus at the same time made some nice small talk about the Opening Ceremony that I very much appreciated. So there's that much, at least.
I really wanted to go to bed, but instead I looked up the "Doubletree Westminster", where my cousin Chelsea said she and her brother Garrett were going to be meeting up the next day, and tried to sketch out how to get there. Mostly I was just exhausted. So exhausted. I only got to sleep at 3am.
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