Day 9; March 31st, 2017
I finally just get pissed off because the horrid
harpies talked for so long and then after they finally went to sleep, one of
them turns into a chainsaw. At 1am, I
pack up my things, hike it over to the parking garage, and proceed to crunch
the back bumper into a concrete support that I didn’t see because I’m tired and
the $!#%ing back window is the size of a postage stamp.
The drive is loooooonnnnngggg and I’m so tired
that I have to pull over several times to sleep for thirty minutes a pop, just
to make sure I don’t drift off the road.
I get back to Faro and I’m wondering what scratching the bumper’s gonna
cause, but they just say “you paid for the coverage; you’re fine.”
I try to sleep in the plane to London, and do a
bit, but it’s really hot on the plane for some reason. I am sound asleep when we make the hardest
landing I’ve ever been on and I wake up thinking the chair is going to break
and that my spine has just compressed three inches. I figure out a bus to get into the city to a
metro hub that will then get me to Victoria Station where I’m meeting my friend,
Aurora.
*****************************************************
I started this trip by going the wedding of
friends of mine I made through playing trivia. I met Aurora at trivia as
well. She was an 18yo College of
Charleston freshman and she was a waitress at O’Malley’s and she was nice and
super friendly and we made friends with her.
She went off for semester abroad in England her sophomore year and I
kept in touch (I having lived in England as a child and then in Germany whilst
in the Army and enjoying living vicariously through other people doing the
same). There, she met Alex, a
horrifically good-looking, tall, athletic, smart, nice student at the
University of Nottingham. Aurora also
being horrifically good-looking, tall, smart, and nice; they started dating.
When she came back to the states, she joined the
trivia team from time to time instead of slinging beer at us and when Alex came
to visit, he joined in too. They are
easy to get along with and they travel a bunch.
Keeping tabs on their adventures, be they sailing the Greek islands in
the Aegean or backpacking around Southeast Asia, has been fun (and frustrating,
because I want to be doing that).
They’re engaged to be wed later this year and if
it’s a hop, skip, and a jump, I figured I’d visit them in their stomping
grounds. Also, Alex is very successful
and comes from a good family, so he and Aurora live in a flat next to a castle,
looking out over the Thames in Chelsea. That's not a bad way to visit London. He won’t say it, but I’m not altogether sure Alex won’t be the Prime
Minister or Emperor or something by the time he’s 30.
Completely whupped, I find her and, yup, that’s
Aurora. As always, she’s smiling and in
a good mood and we take a bus to their flat and she apologizes and makes me
promise not to judge them for living in a really nice place.
“You can try hard and succeed; you can try hard
and fail; you can be lazy and fail; you can be lazy and succeed. If something good happens to you; you don’t
need to apologize for it. Embrace it and
enjoy it.”
Aurora’s no slouch in the success department
herself, mind you. She graduated with a
degree in marketing from CoC and she’s starting a prestigious internship at a
well-known international firm. Maybe she’ll be the Empress and Alex can be her
Prime Minister.
We get to the flat and, yup, it’s very nice. I
have a chance to shower, which I need because I look like
half-a-can-of-wet-ass, or maybe a whole can, and I slug a coffee and then we’re
off out the door to go out and have a damn Friday night.
I’m exhausted and I am loaded up on caffeine and I
know I have to keep up with 24yos. So I
push. When I push, it’s like making
myself perform. I decide I’m going to be
a super-American braggart. Sure, it’s
annoying, but if it works, it’s something to talk about or react against, for
good or ill. Long form improv with an unknowing audience. So I wear my poncho and we get beers and we’re
headed to an underground arcade, of sorts, that has a mini-golf course and bars
in it.
We meet up with Alex’s little brother, Guy, who’s
also horrifically good-looking, tall, athletic, smart, and nice. I, of course, tell them I’m the best and
there’s never been another better and they really should all just go ahead and
give up before we even start. And then we play and Guy wins because that’s what
I get for running my mouth like an ass.
And then we head to a block nearby that is all
Indian restaurants. They have different
fronts, but they share a kitchen, so it doesn’t matter, really, which one we
get in, but Alex knows which one’s the one we want to sit in and in we go.
And, yeah, Indian food in London is amazing and
Alex and Aurora say they’re impressed because they thought I’d have fallen on
my face by now. I’d warned them that my go-to exhausted move when I’m drinking
is to quietly go to sleep sitting somewhere in public, but somehow I stay
up. Then it’s back to their house and we
put on The Big Lebowski on the tv and crack open the bottle of Irish whiskey I
brought them and we do some pretty serious damage to it and Aurora and Guy fall
asleep on the couch and, fine, he beat me at putt-putt, but I’m better at
drinking!
I don’t know that I want to be better at drinking than a college
senior, but here we are.
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