26 Jul 2012: Brumming It Up

26 Jul 2012:

Brumming It Up

Derby, England, UK/London, England, UK

H: 25/27 L: 14/16 Weather: Partly Cloudy/Clear

Sleep in Derby felt really good - I was in a real, actual bed (have I mentioned that Chelsea is the best cousin ever?) and was able to sleep in quite a bit.  Unfortunately, though, as I set out for the day, I was running a bit late.  Despite this, I decided I had about 10 minutes to spare, and so I wandered into the town's Catholic church in the center of town.  Erp, bad idea.  You see, when I go into a place, I tend to want to enjoy it, and so I stayed a bit longer than I had.  The darn Catholics almost made me late for my train!

I ended up meandering through some random parks, only having a vague idea where I was headed, grabbing some tickets, and running to the platform just in time for when the train was supposed to show up, only to find... nothing.  No train, no passengers, nothing up on the place where they put the train's departure information.  Eerie.  While wandering around, I check the departures list, and my train isn't listed at all.  What on earth?  Over the station intercom, I hear a voice say something about my train, but I can't make it out clearly, in part because I have absolutely no top-down expectations of what it could be saying.

Luckily, the thing about "no passengers" is a lie, because I find a random British guy complaining to a dude wearing a reflective vest in the station.  He, I, and an Anglo-Chinese family all joined forces to try to figure out what was happening and what to do next.  The British guy updated me on the situation: there was vandalism in Bedford that meant all trains using the line we were trying to were severely delayed, if not cancelled.  Well, great.  We were apparently supposed to go up to Birmingham and then down to London from there.

Incidentally, this also causes me a bit of a struggle: I know that, in the US, Birmingham is pronounced /ˈbɜɹmɪŋhæm/ ("BER-ming-ham"), and I know that a local way to say the name of Birmingham, England is /brʌm/ ("BRUMM").  However, I know that, as an outsider, calling it "Brum" would be borderline offensive; it's not like knowing that Boiseans prefer the "s" of Boise to be pronounced as an "s" rather than a "z", but something I think that's available only to people actually from Birmingham.  I guess /ˈbɜɹmɪŋəm/ ("BER-ming-umm"), and it turns out that's completely right!  Hooray for vague familiarity with the silly things British people due to placenames.

So, we run over to the line that's going through Birmingham, and get on that train.  As we come to a stop in Birmingham's station—an ugly linear sort of place that reminds me much more strongly of an airport than a train station—the train (engineer?  driver?  operator?  big voice on the intercom?) human being cheerfully informs us that there's a 12:10 train headed to London that we could probably catch... except for the fact that it's on the opposite side of Birmingham's depressing station.  I dash across the place, only to have the "gate agents" stationed there that we need to take the 12:30 train instead.  I do, and find the train almost empty; the rush of people right at 12:30 fails to materialize, and the whole experience is kind of weirding me out a little bit.

We're headed to London's Euston station, and I realize that I have no idea where that is in London as I'm coming in about an hour late.  I start panicking, but luckily because it's London there are maps and guides everywhere steering me towards the Underground, and I discover that Euston is right next to St. Pancras, where I was originally hoping to go.  Whew.  I make it to a Tube station and check in at my hostel, then head to Westminster, where I was scheduled to meet with my linguistics BFF Bailey 45 minutes previously.  Thankfully, she ran late too, but Westminster Abbey closes ridiculously early, so we went to the Victoria and Albert gallery instead.  I spend my time wandering around, looking at Medieval paintings of the Virgin Mary and tapestries about boar hunting.  Right around the tapestry depicting boar hunting there's a computer with a modern recording of a piece that was apparently very popular in the 13th century, and listening to said piece was really weird because the thought that this was pop culture from 800 years ago is just bizarre.

After that, I met up with my friend Peter from the political forum I've been a member of since forever for dinner and drinks afterwards.  He takes us to somewhere south of the Thames, where we wander around looking for a restaurant.  Surprisingly, without really knowing what we were looking for, we found a place that served great food at relatively inexpensive prices, an unusual occurrence indeed in London.  I ended up having salmon and linguine pasta.  You can imagine how much I liked that.

Everything is delicious and happy, and Peter is, like everyone from the forum, wonderful to talk to, and it's about time for him to head back to Oxford.  We decide to stop for one last drink before he heads out, then we race up to Victoria station, where he's booked a ticket back.  Except we make it up there, running from place to place, and as we make it into the train station we see that his train has left him behind.  Argh.  It was, in fact, the last train from London to Oxford that evening.  I feel guilty, but, to his credit, Peter takes it in stride and catches a train over to Reading, where, I would later learn, he stayed with a friend overnight.

Finally, I'm able to head myself back to my hostel, and by then I see security guards closing the entrances to the Underground.  That's something I didn't realize: the Underground closes at something like 1:30-ish in the morning.  Late night closures are pretty common in the US, but in large cities closing times are sometimes later than that.  New York City, being a very special snowflake, keeps subways running all night long.  I run into the nearest open entrance I see, and try to see whether I can find an appropriate line still running.  lLckily, I'm able to grab the last Circle line trains of the night and then connect to a Metropolitan line train where there was a Jamaican band being fangirled at by a British woman who had never heard of the band before she stepped onto the Underground.

By the time I get into my hostel, it's about 2:15, and I'm absolutely exhausted, so I pretty much head right to head to sleep.  But disaster strikes.  When taking off my glasses, one of the tiny screws on the right side of my frames pops out and my lens drops to the floor.  It doesn't break, thank goodness, but suddenly I have glasses without a right lens.  I spend about 10 minutes frantically attempting to see if I can find the screw or a quick way to fix it or anything, then collapse exhausted into my bed.  I'll just have to figure it out in the morning, I suppose, or just walk around with a single lens in my glasses for the rest of my trip.  Unfortunately, as I would later realize, I had been the victim of a nasty case of foreshadowing...