The Land of Invisible drivers

Greetings,

Welcome to planet Earth. It took me a few days to get here after my stumble through Heathrow airport, onto the tube and up into some strange flat in Southwark London. From the head spinning drunkenness of a sleep-deprived trans-Atlantic flight, I've finally landed my feet on the ground and found myself in the land of invisible drivers.

My writing has grown a bit rusty, like a 1972 Schwinn left out in the rain, so forgive if this first update lacks some pizazz.

And so, the carefree high of summer has come and gone and I find myself transported from its sunny, warm days to the gray, rainy streets of London. It seems that since arriving, my life has become a set of those theater (or should I say theatre) masks - an extreme of happy-s and sad-s, one minute a smile, the next a tearful frown, emotions swings around wildly like the swings at your local amusement park. But it's all a part of adjustment and will, at some undefined point, start to tend towards comedy more than tragedy.

Today makes one week.... one week since you looked at me... oh no that's the Barenaked Ladies (remember them?). No, today makes one week since I arrived in ye olde London. I'm feeling more adjusted than day one when I tried to drag my leaden luggage through the tube and down the street to my flat. (I really shouldn't have packed all those anvils - they made pulling my suitcases around quite difficult.)

So one week ago, long ago and far away it was, on a morning gray as a shark, big teeth and all, I made it to my apartment building, weary as an a beat up truck, my tank running on empty. Mawdley House. "Looks more like maudlin house," my exhausted head thought bitterly. Why maudlin? Well I just have to blame it on fatigue. Perhaps at the end of my stay, that will be an appropriate term, but at that point I was looking for a word more like shabby. I gazed up at the concrete and brick mess of building, the paint on its wrought iron railings chipped like broken teeth. Dully lit stairways forbodingly led the way up to an unknown land that was my to be my flat. The building as a whole almost looked like a motel, front doors exposed to long runs of open-air cement walkways stacked up on the side of the building like empty bookshelves. From some drippy corner I could almost hear the refrains of the Darth Vader is approaching song.

Happily, after opening the blue front door of Flat 16, I was please to find a cozy place with light pine wood floors. Besides the plaster peeling off from the kitchen ceiling like a bad case of eczema, and despite the sad unfortunate lack of a living-room area, things seemed pretty nice. Things got even better, just like when you find 10 dollars on the street, when I met my roommate Rebecca who is a doll, and I'm not talking Barbie doll, I'm talking Rainbow Brite. (Whatever that means. She's a lot of fun either way).

That weekend wandering around in a jetlagged oblivion - a state that always makes me as pessimistic as a talking parrot on downers. Alone and drowsy yet in denial of my fatigue. Only very joyous events such as a man zooming down the street on his bicycle with a stuffed-animal bat attached to his helmet seemed to brighten the dour of my London skies-like mood.

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And for now...

Yesterday, the morning at my internship was alarming. Quite alarming. By that I mean I set off the alarm at office. EGADS! Apparently, office is alarmed. Despite the fact that I was only entering, the alarm system screetchingly insisted that I was breaking and entering. We'll have to sit down and have a chat over a nice spot of tea, Mr. Alarm and I, so that we can become acquainted. For half in hour, though, I lived in anguish, feeling much like a chicken running a marathon with its head cut off, as I waited for my two bosses to arrive and shut the dastardly screaming thing off. They'd had a miscommunication that morning and neither was at 9 as usual. Finally the siren (and not the seductive type unfortunately) stopped itself, but I still felt shook up as a margarita.

Besides this small fiasco, the internship is going well. The two women who run the auction house are quite lovely. They're nice as the sugar they don't put in their tea every day. The office is in a huge rambling old warehouse, not as glamorous a home as one might imagine for expensive old clothes. The white-washed cinder block and empty-feeling cement building was once a radio factory, but video killed the radio star, so lots of other businesses moved in. So what do I do there all day? mmm? What do you think? I sing, I dance, I twirl my baton, and a rat a tat tat. I also, in spare time, tag vintage garments, take photos, measure waist and busts and hips (no real people involved) and take the occasionally lovely walk to the post office. Maybe I should put that on the next personal ad I write... likes long walks to the post office.

Every day I take the red velvet layer-cake of a bus back and forth from work. Yesterday is the first day I did not fall asleep to the sweet rocking waves of the Londonian transport on my way home. Must mean I'm adjusting. Good thing too, because I was becoming a bit inane: Printed on to the macadam in the work parking lot I read M07S. "What in the bloody hell does that mean?" I wondered in my faux-British accented thoughts. When I turned and looked again, I realized that I was reading the word SLOW upside-down.

Adjusting... funny how that works... not well all the time. Thank GOD they have writing on the streets to inform you about how to properly cross a street. "Look left." "Look right" the edge of the street screams in bold white letters. Despite my obeisance of such indicators, I can't help but feel that every time I cross the street that some lurking danger in approaching from the RIGHT side of the road. Were it not for these words telling me otherwise, I'd probably have been mowed down by many a funny looking black cab by now.

Sometimes I feel like London is the US dressed up in a funny accent and some pretty buildings. Things here don't feel as alien as France. There are no googly-eyed, tentacled, green things walking around the street. Damn I loved those guys. There are also no patisseries on every corner and no HeeHeeHee HAW HAW HAW's bubbling out from the sewer grates. Whereas in France organic food didn't exist because all food already was, here organic in on your neighborhood Tesco shelves. That means there's all the chemical crud in my food that and the insidious devil potentially behind American obesity: high fructose corn syrup (aka Satan incarnate). Yes, it's true - high fructose corn syrup goes dons the disguise of glucose-fructose syrup in the UK and its all over, like a severe case of ADHD. Damn, foiled again. Chemicaphobes beware.

I went to a French meetup group in an attempt to parler francais and to meet people. Near every person I met worked in finance. What do you work in? Finance. You? Finance. You... let me guess... a bus driver? No. A clown? No. A panhandler? No. A banana? NO, finance!

And today I tried to open a bank account today. Let me tell you, doing that is harder than doing 100 sets of 10 push ups with an sumo wrestler on your back. That was my tragedy mask of the day. No success yet. The comedy mask? Stopping to get gelatto and landing myself a job training for Sunday as your faithful gelatto-scooping and coffee making aficiando.

And now, my friends, my family, my wayfaring admirers, my tired, my poor, my huddled masses yearning to breathe free, I give you an assignment. Although my roommate is sunshine-y and lovely as a day on the sands of a Carri bean beach, I still don't know many people here, so my loneliness is killing but I will survive hey hey... especially with a little help from my friends. Look at my lyracizing- hardy har har har. If y'all know any fun people in London, please (with many cherries on top) put me in contact with them. Instead of trying to crash a BBC party solo like I did yesterday night, I need someone else to do it with.

In parting, I transcribe for you the writing on our bathroom wall (Simon and Garfunkel would like that even though its not a tenement.) The following sign informs us to clean our hair from the shower, but its really a beautiful poem incognito, or so I think:

Please after
Shower
Don't Forget to
Rinse
Hair Left on Bath
Away.

Now, if that's not a Robert Frost, I don't know what is.

Signing out,
Hannah