Flaneur Dispatch 1---- Old Friends

I arrived in London all bleary and disoriented after a strange, brief layover in Iceland where I saw fjords gleaming in the moonlight and some guys in white snowman suits throwing my bike box onto a luggage cart and giving me a heart attack. I also almost probably saw an ice troll. I need to go back to Iceland.

I also shared the plane with lobsters.

I'm rooming in a modern sort of student housing in Battersea which is, disappointingly, not a squalid garret with a rapacious landlady and a priest hole and a lot of rotting silk lampshades. I upended my suitcases on the floor and galloped around the beautiful, ancient (by my standards) streets and reveled in everything being written in English.

The cars are, disappointingly, large. 

I spent the week before school started going to the most amazing museums I have ever seen. I always smugly insisted that the best art and history and science and design museums were in New York City, and now I have to eat carrion crow and admit to being dead wrong. Everything here is absolutely exquisite. 

Saint's heads at the Victoria and Albert

Although I have seen a great deal of the British-owned art in books and reproductions, it is still extraordinary to round a corner and see something I have known and loved my whole life, vibrant and real before me. I don't generally lose it in art museum, but there were a few times I had to sit on an (exquisite) bench and process that I had just seen Dali's 'Metamorphosis of Narcissus' and the only from-life portrait of Shakespeare in the same day. 

Oh, and hello, young John Donne. 

It adds to the sense of blissful overload that so many of the buildings are vaulted and crenelated and graciously laid out and I can wander and wander with my eyes popping out and a lump in my throat. All the streets are mentioned in songs I love, all the neighborhoods feature in books I've read (although I can't recognize them; I need to read more modern stuff) all the statues are of people I've heard of. 

And this guy gets the respect he deserves. 

Cycling is an interesting challenge, as the crosswalks aren't on the corners and the other cyclists are super fast fitness machines. The roundabouts are all backwards and the 'cycling superhighways' are on streets one definitely does not expect them to be on. I'm glad I brought my tourer; since I can take it on the (exquisite) National Rail I can ride out considerably farther than I could in Japan. I visited a few bike shops for all the things I forgot, and the proprietors (all named Ian) couldn't have been nicer. 

AC was not allowed into Westminster Abbey

The first week of school was surprisingly, delightfully intense. It was such a pleasure to actually have a lot to do and I cheerfully worked late and woke early and was glad to see a trace of the haggard look of first year return to my face. The school facility is great and the professors, so far, open and knowledgable. The commute to school is a bit hairy, but I'll find a nice quiet route eventually.  

I'm sure I'll get a more nuanced view of the place with time, but right now everything from my overwhelmed eyes to my overeducated language center is thrilled and happy, though there is always the now familiar ache of missing the people I love at home. I go about quoting poetry to myself or my unfortunate companions, reveling in the early flowers and the rare bursts of cold sunshine. 

And should I have excessive grit, I know where to put it.

Tomorrow I will go to Greenwich and see the boats. Boats!

-Isis