Tea and Chili

Edit: Thank you so much to Mark (Liesl's dad) for recovering my last post which I'd accidentally deleted somehow. I spent forever trying to get it back, and I thought it was gone for good, but upon checking my email this morning I discovered that he'd found it for me. Yay!

Anyway. So we went to our friend's house and that's where we've been the past three days. We met her daughter, Lilly, who's adorable and really funny. She's four. We also had some chocolate veggie-chili. The chocolate is for the color. It was really yummy. On the note of food, we've been drinking way too much tea, honestly. More than three cups a day of caffeinated, very sugary tea. But this is England, so if you're not drinking tea, living in a castle, or hanging out with the queen--or doing all three simultaneously--what are you doing?

We're now in a hostel in Bristol--a different one than the one we stayed in before. We're leaving for Ireland on Monday morning. I'll tell you  more about that when we get there and see where we're staying and all.

Not to be melodramatic, but I feel like our trip could quite easily be entitled "A Series of Unfortunate Events." (I've never actually read those books--I think I heard the first one as an audiobook--but I've heard that they're quite good). Honestly, though we've had a lot of fun, we've also had a lot of failure. We keep fucking losing things too.

First we accidentally threw away our silverware right before beginning our failed hike. Then we left Liesl's guitar on a bus. Today, we left our food, our cooking pots and some henna that we'd just bought on a bus in Bristol. I know this makes us sound like we're total idiots--we're really not. It's just deceptively difficult to remember everything when you're carrying a 40 lb backpack and getting directions from people that seriously don't ever even know what street they're on.

We're so ready to get out of this country. Every day something happens that makes our lives more difficult and/or (usually and) makes us spend more money. I'm excited to be back here later when we've got our act together, but right now I'm ready to leave. It's not the country, it's just the situation. And our situation in Ireland is a stable place to live for the whole time we're there, so we're hoping that that's where the majority of our troubles end.

We spent some time exploring Bristol this week. We saw some Banksy art, which was cool.

We went through Castle Park again too. It seems like we always end up passing through it for one reason or another. The castle is again a ruin, which I didn't know. It's cool though.

This is what was posted on one of the windows:

How does that even work? Honestly, this country has too many castles for its own good, they're crumbling in the parks, they're converted to train stations...it's crazy. (The Bristol train station is basically a castle, it's really cool). It'd be so sick to actually live in a castle though, I'd love that. The rent probably wouldn't even be so bad for one here either, since there are so many.

One of my highlights of the week was buying this album, on the day that it was released in the UK.

It's really good, I highly recommend it. This is my favorite song at the moment. I really hope that Blaqk Audio comes to the UK while I'm here.

Update: Remember Liesl's thumb? It's still numb. She used to give me daily updates on it--usually multiple times a day. For a little while it was getting a bit better, now it's been the same for a while, still partly numb. She gotten bitten nearly two weeks. Tonight is her two-weeks-a-versary. Send her gifts!

Speaking of anniversaries, September 27th was my three year vegetarian anniversary (yay), as well as my dog Sterling's birthday. He's seven, aw.

Additionally, Liesl smoked hopefully her last cigarette yesterday. She bought a bunch of packs at Duty Free in the Los Angeles airport, planning to smoke them all and then stop. She finished them off yesterday, and she'll be participating in Stoptober, a UK quit-smoking-in-October support group thing. Good luck Liesl! (And good luck Stephanie, you know how people's emotions can get when they quit smoking...).

Anyway, we haven't been up to much as of late, so that's it for now. If all goes well, we'll be in Ireland next time I post. We'll have our own apartment there, and we'll actually be able to unpack our things! Not just throw them on the ground and cram them back into our packs every time we need to up and go someplace else. Won't that be lovely?

Cheers,

Stephanie

...But Home is Nowhere

Greetings,

We decided to go to Bristol from Simon's house, since it seemed like we'd be spending a lot of time in Leeds moving from place to place, which at this point is about as unappealing as walking multiple miles with our backpacks, though actually that's often included in moving around. We contacted our friend in Bristol that said we could either stay with her or squat with some other friends, and that we would work it out.

We got a megabus out to Bristol. It was a six hour ride, and seemed to take a lot longer than any of the other bus rides we'd had. We arrived in Bristol at 8 p.m., and as we hadn't eaten since about 11 a.m., we found the first Thai restaurant in the area, got the best directions we've ever received in the UK, and went and had some delicious food that was definitely out of our budget. The restaurant was pretty nice, and we mused about how funny it would be if we went from this nice to restaurant to a squat that night.

We went across the street and sat on a bench for about two hours with our giant backpacks, trying unsuccessfully to get through to our friends. Eventually we talked to our friend Priscilla who'd said we could come in the first place, and she said that our other friends were waiting for us at a pub. We got directions--a few times--and eventually found our way there, somewhat intercepting a couple that was have a verbal and somewhat physical fight along the way.

We got to the pub around midnight. Our friend Ben told us that there weren't really any suitable squats, all of the potential buildings were to heavily alarmed to break into. He asked around in hopes of finding a party we could go to so we could sleep at someone's house, or someone that would be willing to let the four of us--Ben, our friend John, Liesl and I--stay with them for the night. We had no such luck.

Liesl and I were completely exhausted, and joked about just pitching our now useless tent on the sidewalk in front of the pub and just sleeping there.

Then Liesl remembered something: we'd forgotten her guitar--which we'd been carrying around with us the whole time we'd been in the UK and hadn't played once--on the megabus. Fuck.

We were desperately miserable. Ben said that Priscilla was at a friend's house, so we couldn't stay at her place. We eventually just decided to pitch our tent somewhere.

It was about 2 or 3 a.m at this point. John suggested that we sleep in castle park--yes, there is a real castle in the park--so we headed that way. I wanted to sleep in the castle, but apparently it was locked or boarded up or something.

We tried to find a suitable spot to pitch the tent, and soon settled on a small grassy hill in the park near some trees. We set up the tent and our sleeping apparatus.

I'd like to take a moment to describe our sleeping situation.

We have a two person tent. There were four of us, two huge-ass backpacks, two sleeping mats and two sleeping bags. Liesl and I shared a mat and used my sleeping bag as a blanket. The part of me that was not on the mat was really cold, so I shoved two of my jackets into the crack between me and the tent wall. We probably went to sleep around 4:30 or 5 a.m., sleep here being a relative term. We were pretty much spooning or squished together all night, turning over constantly to try to be more comfortable.

I woke up at 6 a.m. to the sound of rain on the tent. Good thing we had a waterproof cover on it.

...and too bad I didn't close to tent flap properly. I'd actually half thrown my rain jacket out the door, and it was wet. I went back to sleep.

Liesl and I were sure that the cops would come at tell us to leave at the very least, if not take more serious action. But we slept until around 9 a.m., and were never asked to leave by anyone. My backpack had gotten somewhat wet, and my sleeping bag, and our tent. But we packed everything up regardless. John had left, but Ben and Liesl and I headed to Priscilla's to drop off our backpacks, as she'd said we could when Ben had talked to her on the phone the previous night.

We walked all the way to her house in the rain, only to find that she wasn't in. We went and sat under a brick  tunnel to decide what to do. Liesl and I kept looking at each other miserably, unsure if we would have anywhere to stay that night, much less for the next nine days before we went to Ireland (more on that later).

We'd spent our first night as homeless people. Maybe that's a bit of a stretch, since we do have money and whatnot, but I'd say that sleeping in a park because you don't have anywhere to stay pretty much makes you homeless in my book.

We were wet and cold, and sick of carrying our backpacks. We wanted to find a coffee shop or somewhere with WiFi where we could hang out and decide what to do. It was Sunday, so lot's of places were closed. Sunday doesn't mean anything to me, so it always irritates me that things are closed that day. Eventually we walked to a pub and hung out there, emailing the people that we'll be staying with in Ireland to see if there was any chance we could come earlier. We booked a hostel for that night, not knowing if we'd have anywhere else to go, and determined to not spend another night camping in the park in the rain. We got a Facebook message from Priscilla seeing if we wanted to come and drop off our stuff.

We walked to her house to get a cab. She asked where we'd been last night, saying that she'd told Ben on the phone the previous night that we could have stayed at her place. Wow. She said we could stay with her, but we'd already booked the hostel, so we got a cab and drove to it.

It's a really nice place, and where I'm writing from currently. We were so, so happy to have our own beds, and to be able to shower and change into dry clothes. We decided to stay an extra night so as not to have to rely on anyone else.

Moving from place to place all the time is horrible, really, it's absolutely dreadful. It would be manageable without our backpacks, but really, sleeping somewhere different every couple of nights is pretty sucky. All we could think about this whole terrible time was Ireland, how we'd be in one place for nearly three months. We could unpack, and actually move in. Also, we get our own apartment in Ireland. The prospect of this was tantalizing in the face of nine days of unknown living conditions.

We're staying at this hostel again tonight, and we should be going back to Priscilla's tomorrow for two days, then flying to Ireland and Thursday, as long as everything works out. I'm honestly not sure that "everything working out" is even a possibility on our trip at this point. But as bad of a time as we've had, we've also had a lot of fun. I really like this country, but we're both ready to leave now, if only because there's nowhere solid for us to live here.

But for today at least, we have food, a kitchen to cook it in, and a place to stay. That's good enough for now.

Cheerio,

Stephanie

"Is This Real Life?"--Liesl

I'll get to the point: our trip is falling apart.

The title of this post is something that we've been saying a lot lately when rather bizarre or unexpected things happen. (It's not taken from that youtube video by the way, Liesl just said it and we both picked it up). Also, our official sound for this trip so far is "Merr."

We left for our hike in high spirits, made our trains on time, and arrived in St Bees, which is beautiful.

It was obvious from our first step that this hike was destined to fail. Our backpacks were so, so heavy. Someone even came by and told us that before we started hiking that we had way too much stuff. We decided within the first two minutes that we would have to send some stuff back, we just couldn't carry it all.

We walked just a couple of miles that day, right along the coast. It was gorgeous, but I don't want to talk about it.

We stayed in a camping barn and slept terribly. Liesl's hips hurt, my feet were freezing, we couldn't sleep. We'd hoped to wild camp every night, but we were walking through people's land mostly. There are campsites along the way that you can pay for, but there aren't really enough of them to get to every night unless you have a specific and ambitious plan, which we didn't. We were just going for it. We actually got a ride to the camping barn from a nice guy in town that offered to give us a lift, since it was about 3/4 of mile out of our way. The people in the small farm towns have funny accents. They sound almost Scottish. It's the English equivalent of a southern accent.

We left in the morning. The previous night we'd gone through our things and decided what to send back, but there wasn't a post office til the next stop.

We walked about four miles to the next place. The area was beautiful, but it was not enjoyable because of the weight we were carrying.

We walked through mud and a water-logged grassy area. My shoes filled up with water, and I think Liesl's got pretty wet too.

We finally made it to the town. There was no post office. The map lied. It was just a box where you can drop letters in.

There were many kind locals along our short walk. These three older guys that lived in the lonely  little town tried to help us out, offering us a box for our stuff and a ride to a town that might be able to send our package--no one seemed sure--but they said that it would be very expensive. And we didn't even have the address we'd need to send it to.

My shoulder hurt like hell from my stupid backpack. Liesl's hips hurt horribly from her pack. We had a theoretical conversation about maybe not going the whole way, just walking for a set number of days. Personally I was kind of nervous about the hike because of our time. It generally takes about two weeks, but it could be longer and we need to leave the UK by October 6th. I didn't want to think about what would happen if we didn't leave by then.

Liesl said that two weeks sounded way too long, and I agreed. I was anxious about camping every night, which to me means the prospect of never sleeping well. But we'd feel horrible not going the whole way to Robin Hood's Bays. Our discussion eventually reached the point of, should we just go back? I kind of wanted to just do the hike, make it work, but I also really didn't want to do it. The idea of sleeping in a bed sounded wonderful. The idea of carrying a way too heavy backpack for an indefinite number of miles that could be as many as 200 sounded unbearably horrible. I suggested that we abandon our efforts and come back in the Spring. Liesl thought that would be a better idea than forcing ourselves to do the hike and not enjoying it one bit. We could come back with less stuff, we could plan a route, be prepared, maybe train a bit or something.

We both felt absolutely horrible about not doing the hike. I was satisfied with our decision, but there was still really nothing to feel good about. We'd been planning this hike--or at least been thinking about the fact that we would do it--for nearly a year. We'd bought incredibly expensive camping gear from REI, hundreds of dollars worth of stuff. Merr.

It sounds so lame saying that we quit the hike because our rucksacks were too heavy, but there was more to it than that. For one, we were legitimately concerned that we would seriously injure ourselves carrying that much weight. Blisters on our feet, and a strenuous cardiac workout were things that we'd expected of the Coast to Coast, but shoulder and hip pain from too heavy backpacks were not. We didn't know where to stay each night; we didn't have the money to stay in hostels or B&Bs. Even the camping barn was kind of expensive. Yet wild camping didn't seem possible since we always seemed to be on someone's land. And to be honest, camping the whole way is probably only the way to go if you have some backpacking experience, which neither of us really do. There's just too much stuff to carry. In short, we simply were not prepared for this hike. Literally, emotionally, and maybe even physically. We've been moving around so much in the past two weeks, and it's been very stressful. Not to downplay the hospitality of our multiple hosts, to whom we're very grateful, but just moving from one place to another all the time is very draining. Plus our staying up late and sleeping half the day schedule, not to mention our strange eating patterns. All of this--and more, which I can't think of off the top of my head--come together to make this hike destined to be very unsuccessful.

We walked to Whitehaven, a town with a train station, supposedly two miles away. We probably walked about 5 miles instead of two. Everyone who gave us directions only half gave them. We tried to get a bus. One pulled up and drove right off again. We were sitting at this "bus stop"--really just the wall and overhanging bit without a bench or a bus schedule.

We were starving, so we got out our camping food and turned on our little burner. We made some veggie patties. We realized that we looked extraordinarily like crazy homeless people on drugs, sitting by a bus stop in the rain, covered in mud, wearing layers of strange clothes, with our stuff all over the ground from looking through our packs for the food, cooking mushy looking food with our fingers, laughing hysterically at what our trip had come to. I'd even gone and peed in the bushes, not in some rural place but in a normal suburban area. People seemingly on route to walk by us crossed the street to walk on the other side, or turned early. Come to think of it, we kind of are homeless people right now. Nomads, at the very least.

We'd only gone a couple of miles at this point. We were so sick of those fucking backpacks. We'd both literally considered just leaving them somewhere or throwing our stuff away. It was time to try hitchhiking, something that I'd been hoping to do at least once on our trip. We weren't really sure if the thumb thing was universal, but we kind of did that and sort of waved to cars passing by. Nobody stopped, but we really only tried for a minute. We thought that the station was only a mile away, so hitchhiking seemed silly anyway.

We walked and walked, and got directions, and walked and got directions again, and on and on for some time. Finally we arrived at the station, just five minutes before a train to Carlisle was leaving. We booked tickets to Leeds--50 pounds each, just like the trains to St Bees--with two or three connects, one of the layovers being only four minutes. The train was leaving at about 7 p.m. We didn't even know where we were going to stay that night, the last train wouldn't even arrive until after midnight. Our previous hosts weren't expecting us for two weeks, and we couldn't get through to them. We boarded the train, and at some point connected with Liesl's dad's friend, Simon, who picked us up from the train station. We were supposed to call him at 10 to get through to our actual host.

We missed the next train, due to no fault of ours. It drove off as we ran towards it. A guy that worked there helped us out finding the next train and a different route. He said that they were not allowed to book trains less than eight minutes apart. Basically it was the fault of the guy who booked our trains in Whitehaven. Our new arrival time  in Leeds would be at 2 a.m. We had to wait more than an hour for the next train. We got some pizza. We got on the train. We talked to our host, who kindly said that we could stay that night. Though we were willing to just camp on their lawn if it came to that, they left the key for us so we could get inside. They had other guests coming though, so we would have to find somewhere else to go the next night, that now being tonight. Simon offered us a place at his house, just for tonight, so we're very grateful for that.

Both of us fell asleep on the last train. We'd had three connections I think it was. Liesl set an alarm on her phone for us to wake up, and we both missed it the first couple of time. I forced myself to get up, and be awake enough to not miss our stop. It wasn't time to be there yet, but I feared that something had gone wrong and that we'd missed it, just because that would be so fitting. I stared out the window into the dark, trying in vain to tell where we were. Some white letters low on a hill caught my eye. They said Hollywood. I started; what, now we were back in America? As if I wasn't confused enough about everything, now I wasn't even entirely sure what country we were in. (I've honestly no idea why they have a Hollywood sign here).

We arrived in Leeds. Every time we had to get to the next destination we had to put on our stupid backpacks and carry them. We left the station and got a taxi. The driver was nice. The best thing about all of this is that pretty much everyone we'd encountered was very kind to us. So, about 12 hours or so after deciding that we were done with the hike, we arrived at our temporary home, down at least 110 pounds each, not sure of where we would stay for the next two weeks, much less the next three months.

We Skyped with Liesl's dad, who I would just like to take a moment to say is absolutely wonderful, and has been more helpful to us on and before our trip than we could have imagined. We had to talk about what we could possibly do for the next three months. He's found some possible options, but we had to talk about them and fill out some forms. At three in the morning. We did that, and then I went to bed.

We don't even want to talk about the Coast to Coast right now. Maybe we'll come back and do it in the Spring, but that sounds incredibly unappealing at present.

I don't mean to seem down on our whole trip. I'm glad we came, I love England. But we've encountered way more than our fair share of difficulties. Our trip has become a collapsing building, one failed-plan floor falling though to the next, only to have that fall through as well. We're getting pretty close to the ground floor at the moment. Our money is quickly draining away, as is our morale. The point of this trip was to explore the world, learn about different cultures, learn about ourselves, and help other people, and the environment. We didn't go abroad to spend 9 months being tourists. Is wanting to do some community service work too much to ask for?

I just finished repacking my backpack to walk the 1.6 miles to Simon's house. Packing that awful backpack made me feel so many more emotions in such a short amount of time. I couldn't tell whether I was on the verge of sobbing, laughing maniacally and having a nervous breakdown. I think it was pretty much all of them simultaneously. My backpack just gets heavier and heavier each time I pack in, and it gets harder and harder to cram things into it. I'm now literally jumping on it to compress everything so that I can fit in the rest of my stuff. The only extra thing that I have in their is food, so it shouldn't be much heavier. But it is. I'm seriously convinced that it would not pass on the less than 50 lbs airport bag check thing. I just don't have the time and the patience to fold each article of clothing every single fucking time I need to pack the damn thing. I certainly haven't written off chucking the packpack off a cliff.I'm definitely going to get rid of a lot of my stuff, regardless of whether we spend the rest of the nine months living somewhere different every couple of days. I'm pretty sure I'll be a cripple by the end of the month from carrying the thing around. Is it so impossible that it would be better right now to just  find a secluded spot in a park or under a bridge or something and just pitch our tent, live there in peace for a while and not have to carry around our backpacks anymore?

I'm going to stop writing now, as I'm acutely aware of the fact that I'm becoming rather melodramatic in my upset.

I hope to be in a more positive mood next time I write, but as you can see, the outlook is rather bleak at the moment. Be sure to check back for some pictures of the best part of our Coast to Coast experience--our barbecue at the bus stop.

Train (Almost) In Vain

Let's see, where did I leave off...ah yes, transportation.

So on Thursday we went to Camden again, just because it's so awesome. Liesl got some really sick gauges that are one size bigger than her old ones.

On Friday we said goodbye to our wonderful hosts, whom we hope to see again, maybe in December. We left and walked to the tube station, skipping our planned grocery shopping just to make sure that we got to the bus station on time. Fail! We rushed from one tube line to another--carrying our 40 pound-ish backpacks the whole time--only to find ourselves running late, and almost literally running to the station. We missed the bus, and the tickets were non-refundable. The new ones were three times as expensive, though they still weren't that bad.

We arrived in Bristol to stay with our new host, whom we'd met at the North London Punx Picnic. She and some friends were waiting for us at the station, and we walked about half an hour to her house. Just to be clear--we were still carrying our backpacks.

We had an amazing time in Bristol, which is quite a nice town. It's very old, and everyone is really friendly. We got more of an in depth experience of punk culture than either of us had had previously, and had some great conversations with some great people. Did you know that squatting is legal in the UK? And until a couple of weeks ago, it was legal in residential buildings. Now it's only legal in commercial buildings. I was amazed and absolutely fascinated by this. I nearly got to go with our friends to break a squat, but that didn't end up happening.

We learned some British slang, and spent a lot of time talking about politics, religion, British stereotypes, fascism, and imitating each others accents (Liesl and I were way better at the accent thing than them).

We all went and saw GBH on Saturday night. They were brilliant. It was a small venue, and there was no barricade which made for a much more intimate show, with much moshing and stage diving. They even played White Riot by The Clash, which made me so happy, because it's one of those amazing songs that I might never have gotten to hear performed. (And no, I can't go more than one blog entry without giving a link to a punk song).

We stayed up till about 5 a.m. and slept till I can't remember. That's been our schedule, going to bed pretty late/early, and waking up really late. After the club bus incident we slept til 2 or 3 p.m. I was pretty severely deaf, but you'll be glad to know that my hearing has returned to normal. Liesl on the other hand, was not so lucky with her physical ailment. Our friend bit her hand--don't ask me, I don't know what the deal was--and her thumb has been partially numb every since.

On Sunday we set aside nearly two hours in order to catch our bus on time. (You may have noticed a trend with transportation on this trip). However, we left maybe an hour and a half early. We definitely walked pretty slowly at first because of our backpacks. We stopped at a grocery store, and somehow we only had around 15 our 20 minutes to get to the bus station. Our friends who were leading the way were not quite sure of where the station actually was, so it took a little longer than we'd anticipated. By the end, we were again nearly running. I was pretty much 100% sure that we'd miss the bus, but somehow it was still there when we arrived.

The ride was long, but they scenery was splendid. I saw a lovely graveyard in Birmingham which was probably the highlight of the ride for me. I'm dead set on spending some time in graveyards here, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

 Instead of a baby screaming the whole time like on the last bus, there were these super annoying girls giggling raucously and talking loudly behind us. This lasted for most of the ride. I tried the "stop talking" glare, but they didn't seem to notice anyone except for these guys that they were talking to. So guys better have been pretty damn wonderful, 'cause I didn't see any reason that they should have talked that loudly.

We arrived in Leeds, and got picked up by a friend of Liesl's dad, who took us to our new hosts' home. They're very nice. We've spent the last coupe of days hanging out, and getting ready for our hike. We're leaving today! We're both very excited for it. I'm even excited for the train ride, because it's supposed to be beautiful and because it'll be our first time on a British train.

Booking this train was something of a nightmare, though not as scary of a nightmare as you'd have if you watched this creepshow thing on youtube that Liesl showed me the night before last. I'm not even going to tell you what it is, because I know you'll watch it. Anyway, getting to St. Bees where our hike begins is terribly difficult, our book even says so. We must have spent hours on trying to book a train. Luckily, Liesl's dad is a computer genius and kindly helped us out. However, we couldn't actually buy the tickets online because you apparently have to have a UK credit card to do that. (What the hell, right?). So yesterday we went down to the station. We got the tickets in about two minutes, and for a fairly reasonable price. That's the last time I ever spend more than five minutes trying to book anything online.

Our hike should take around 12-15 days. We're bringing Liesl's laptop, which I'm using currently, so hopefully I/we will be able to update the blog regularly. We'll definitely take some pictures too.

Well, I'm sure I've missed some things, but lastly I'd just like to say thanks to all of the awesome people who've hosted us on our trip! You guys are sound.

Cheers,

Stephanie

Buses Suck

Greetings everyone,

For those that saw the last blog entry without photos, I recommend taking another look as I've added some.

I don't even know where to begin this entry. We've done so much since last time I posted.

Camden is awesome, that's where I'll start. If you ever go to London, definitely check it out. I got a pocket watch there, and I've wanted one for so long. Liesl got a purple beanie and some new gauged earrings. That was Tuesday.

We went to Buckingham Palace on Wednesday. It was kind of cool, but definitely not as awesome as the other stuff we'd seen.Honestly though, everything here reminds me of music. Some people think of the Queen when they go to Buckingham Palace, I think of The Sex Pistols.

 Liesl wasn't feeling well, so we laid down in Green Park for a while. She decided to go back to our hosts' and rest, and I went to Covent Gardens.

                                                              Spoiler: 

                                                 Covent Gardens is not a garden.

I was a little bummed out on that personally. But it's still a nice area, so it was alright. Both Liesl and I realized that day that we needed to pay more attention to giving ourselves room for alone time. I loved walking around on my own. I somehow ended up by the Thames, and found the London Court or something, which is a fantastic building.

That night Liesl was feeling much better, so we went out to this lesbian club. It was way more low key than we'd though it would be, but we ended up talking to some people, one of whom we may hang out with when we're back in London for Christmas. Liesl sang some awesome karaoke, but everyone else was lame, so I was her fanclub.

Here's where it actually gets interesting.

We left the club around 1 a.m., maybe even a little before. The tube unfortunately doesn't run that late, at least not a a Wednesday night, so we had to take the bus. Our oyster cards--the ones for the underground--also work for the bus, so everything seemed fine. We went to the bus stop and looked at the schedule. The bus that we needed, the N18, was due to come in 10 minutes.

So we waited. But 10 minutes slipped away, and we were still waiting. Multiple buses with deceptively similar names stopped where we were. Then we finally saw the bus. It was freezing outside, and while Liesl had her warm REI jacket, I only had my not very warm punk jacket. But the bus sped right by us. We assumed that it would turn around and come back our way, or that another bus would follow it.

Another one did come, but it too drove right on past us. We chased it, thinking that it would stop on the next block. It did, but only because of a red light. We tapped on the door and pleading to get on, but the driver was kind of a jerk, and he just shook his head and shooed us away. I can understand that he probably wasn't supposed to let people on at a red light, but what he was supposed to do was stop at our stop!

We were frustrated, tired and cold. We found another bus stop, one that we thought might be in a better place than the other, and it said that the N18 would be there in 14 minutes or something. So we waited. It did finally come, and we got on. It was so wonderfully warm in there compared to outside.

We'd been on the bus for about 10 minutes and we'd reached another of the multiple stops when the bus driver asked us where we were going. Harrow-on-the-Hill, we said. He informed us that we were on the wrong bus. He pointed us vaguely in the direction of the correct bus stop.

I'd like to take a moment to say something about how the English give directions. Now, there are many British stereotypes that are not completely true. The three main that we came up with are that English people all live in castles, have bad teeth, and drink tea all the time. In fact, we didn't have any tea until a couple of days ago (though we have had it many times since then). And yes, some people here have bad teeth, but perhaps it's because they aren't stupid enough to empty their pockets in orthodontists vacations funds. They don't all live in castles, though this isn't so far off, as many of the houses here--and buildings in general--do often resemble castles, or at least are old enough to seemingly have been from medieval times to a west coast American that is taken aback to see any building that predates 1990.

But about directions. "Excuse me, could you tell us how to get to London Bridge from here?" "Yes, you just go along this road and then go right then left." I'm sorry? And I should add that there are no hand gestures to accompany this. If you're lucky, we'll get a "left" or "right," arm gesture, though hopefully we've at least figured  that our by this point. (If you haven't yet determined left from right, you'd might as well cross England off of your bucket list, as you probably won't even be able to find your way out of the airport).

Part of this ineptitude at giving directions surely stems from the fact that there are virtually no street signs here. They just don't exist. Occasionally we've encountered a sign on a corner building, which we can only assume is the name of one of the streets there. Every once in a while there's a normal-ish sign on a pole like we have in California, but that's pretty rare. It's been rather odd though, to hear directions without a single street name. In California, people will just get their own directions if you can't give them the name of even one insignificant little street within your highly specific directions. I used to not know the names of any streets, but once I started needing to get and give directions, I began to pay attention to them. However, this is woefully unhelpful in England.

Anyway, back to my story.

We did find the other bus stop, but the next N18 wasn't coming for 18 minutes. So we waited. For me, it was one of those horrible waits comparable to being in a terrible class at school where you just can't help but look at the clock every one minute. It was freezing, so we moved into an alcove to the door of a restaurant. After standing there for eternity and a day, our bus really did come. The right bus.

The ride seemed incredibly short, maybe because we both sort of dozed off. Liesl woke me when we got to Harrow. I sat up, and spent the next 15 minutes looking for something familiar that was closer to our hosts' house than the tube stop. I was so tired, but I was determined to avoid walking the 15 minutes back to their house in the cold. Alas, the tube station was the only thing we recognized.

We got off and began walking back. It was so cold that my knee caps felt frozen, which hasn't really happened to me before. Of course, right after got off the bus, the bus turned down the street that we were heading to. Sigh.

We miserably power walked back, half because we were freezing and half because we just wanted to get back as fast as possible. Finally we arrived at their house. We went right to bed, and it was so wonderfully warm.

 It was after 4 a.m. That's right, it took us three hours to get back.

More on our travel mishaps later.

Oh, one last thing. If anybody reading this has any writing connections, like travel writing, or blog publishing, please let me know, as I'm hoping to do some professional travel writing on this trip. Thanks!

London Calling

Greetings,

Though we don't live by the river, we have been to the Thames, and it's quite fantastic. But more on that in a moment. Moving back to where our last blog left off...

We went to North London to the London Punx Picnic on Friday night. It was super awesome, we met some really chill people who we talked to most of the time instead of listening to the music, though the bands that we did see were good. We found someone really awesome to stay with in Bristol as well. Our trip definitely took a positive turn that night.

The following night we went back for the second and final night of the show...only to find that it was not at that location. After much confusion and a lot of getting lost we eventually got there. But we were incredibly tired, and none of the folks we'd talked to the night before were there, so we ended up leaving soon. We did go to the British museum that day which was kind of cool. They had a great collection of pocket watches that I was very jealous of.

The next day we went to our couch surfing hosts' house in Harrow, which is a wonderful part of London. Our hosts are great, and there's another American staying here too who's cool too.

Sunday we went to center city London, which is where the Thames is. After a frustrating encounter with a payphone, some "I think it's this way..." wandering and some not so great directions we found London bridge. I was greatly disappointed. It's plain. There's nothing to it really. It's only famous because it was the first bridge across the Thames and because it burnt down. However, there are other nicer bridges around, which I'll get to. We sort of just walked around after that. There was supposed to be this amazing Thames festival, but we didn't find it. We were tired, and it was getting dark so we decided to come back the next day to see more things.

So we went back yesterday. It was so awesome. Almost all of the really famous architectural pieces of London are right around there. We saw them all, or at least most of them beginning with the Tower of London. It's actually more of a castle with turrets, but it's really cool.

 From there we walked across Tower Bridge, which is beautiful, and is definitely way better than London Bridge, even if it wasn't interesting enough to fall down. It actually has two towers. The river is certainly a sight for a San Diegan who never sees rivers. It's not that big actually, and not very deep, something like 50 feet, but it's very nice. It is incredibly polluted though, although it's better than it used to be. There's this cool spot that's closed off where dead bodies of people that were thrown out of the Tower used to wash up. I like stuff like that.

We went to the Tate Modern which had some interesting exhibits, including this one that was basically made up of museum-goers playing follow the leader. When we walked past the first time they were walking backwards up this long ramp. The second time they were jogging around it as a group. Then they were doing different movements and ended up taking them down the ramp to the other side of the room. One girl came up to us and said that the piece was called associating something. Another time a different girl came up to us and without giving any introduction began telling us the story of how she wanted to be a smoker when she went to France but didn't like it. Then she rejoined the group. It was very odd.

It's rather unfortunate that to go inside most famous buildings in England you have to pay. This seems to me to be something like having to pay to go to the beach in San Diego since old buildings are so abundant here. We went to St. Paul's Cathedral, which was huge and amazing. We would have had to pay to go in, but it wasn't open anyway.

From there we took the tube to Parliament. The tube is a lovely invention, an underground trolley that goes all over London. It's not too expensive, it doesn't take that long and it's fairly easy to figure out how to get from place to place. San Diego public transportation, consider yourself totally shown up by the London Underground.

We got off the tube and went up the stairs just in time to hear and see Big Ben striking 6 o' clock. The parliament building is awesome, it's so ornate and huge. It's crazy that people actually work there, as if it's just a normal office building no doubt. Westminster Abbey is right across from it, and it too is amazing, though I have to say I'm partial to Parliament. It's the only building that's ever instilled any desire in me to be a politician (not going to happen...).

We went to this really good noodle place called Wagamama for dinner. We haven't really been eating solid meals much on this trip, so it was nice to have some real food. We're getting better about that now.

Anyway, today we went to Camden, but as this post is very long I'm going to leave it at that for now.

Cheers,

Stephanie

Detained in the UK

Hello readers,
Where to begin...our first 24 hours in the UK have been somewhat less magical than we'd hoped. Our troubles began at customs. The customs people seemed somewhat suspicious at our lack of solid plans (i.e, not having the address of where we'd be in Scotland), and we were each given a slip of paper that said we'd been detained. While sitting on a bench we joked about how low key the whole thing was, how it wasn't like we were in some locked room or something. Liesl decided to sing "Anarchy in the UK,"changing it to "Detained in the UK" to suit our situation. We laughed about it. But soon we'd be sitting there for an hour, then two...

Eventually a female officer came and took us to a back room. She took our fingerprints and our pictures. The situation was definitely starting to look more serious, and our light mood had definitely taken a downward turn. We were then led into a room. A locked room. Just liked we'd joked about. There were two other girls there, and we realized that a major reason that they thought we were suspicious was because of our looks. All of us had different looking hair, whether colored or dreaded or braided with lots of little braids, and three of us had facial piercings. Discrimination? I think so.

We were taken to the customs area and our bags--all of them--were searched. The female officer spent a strangely lengthy amount of time reading my journal, my personal journal, but what could I do about it? Asking her to stop would have been suspicious. I actually felt really violated by that. Searching our bags was one thing, reading my diary was another.

They seemed satisfied by the lack of illegal things in our bags, and we were taken back to the locked room to wait. Everyone was decent to us, and even nice, but the general atmosphere was rather austere and callous.

We hadn't eaten since early that morning, and by now it was mid afternoon. We had some fruit and water that they gave us. We also hadn't slept properly since the night before our flight. We'd both slept a bit on the plane, but not much.

The main officer then interviewed us separately. Liesl went first. She was in the small windowed interview room for quite a while. I was exhausted, and worried, and I still felt like I was physically on an airplane, light-headed, and like the floor was moving.

Liesl came out of the room with the officer looking very solemn. I got up and went into the room with him, preparing well-worded, polite answers to his not yet asked questions. He asked me questions like what I was doing in Scotland, who we were staying with, what kind of work we'd be doing, things that we'd been asked numerous times already by multiple different people, including him. I answered confidently, though I was still slightly worried and not feeling particularly well.

Then he said three things, flat out, that made my world pulsate, then come tumbling down around me: a) we needed visas to do any kind of work in the UK, volunteer or not and we could not get them outside of the United States; and b) even if we could get visas, they would almost definitely not give them to us for either our Scotland work or for WWOOFing; and c) frankly, he was not sure whether or not they would be able to let us into the country at all.

This was one of the few times in my life that I seriously took a moment to wonder whether maybe I really was simply having a horrible, realistic nightmare. We'd never even considered that we might not be able to do our volunteering, let alone not be admitted into the country.

I asked any questions that I thought would help: could we get visas through the US embassy? Could we at least stay for our tourism month? Was there anything we could do to get out of this situation? The officer said that he understood that the situation was somewhat ridiculous, and that he would appeal to the better nature of his superior in our favor, but that he didn't know what the outcome would be.

I left the room, failed pretty miserably at suppressing my tears, and sat down on the bench. Our trip, 9 months of planning for 9 months could simply be obliterated with one decision, which was not even ours to make.

The officer returned and took us both into the little room. He said that he'd gotten us one month in the UK, which was very lucky, and was the most that he could possibly do. He said do not do your volunteering in Scotland and do not come back to WWOOF. We had to leave the country by the 6th of October. We could return after that, but this detainment was something of a black mark on our records, and we would be intently scrutinized upon trying to enter the UK again. We would need to make sure that we had confirmation for all of the places that we would be staying, and basically that everything was totally valid and unquestionably allowed.

As unspeakably devastated as we were, we've decided to make the best of this month--and our entire trip--regardless. We finally were allowed to leave the airport. We got oyster cards--passes for the underground--and took the tube, as it's referred to, to our hostel. We had to drag/carry our heavy bags for a little ways, but it wasn't too long. We checked in and went to eat dinner. We've brainstormed some ideas for the five months of our trip that were seemingly destroyed. We're trying to find out for sure whether or not there is no possible way for us to salvage our previous plans, but we're pretty unsure about it as of now. We'll update more when we have more figured out.

So how about the good news? We found somewhere to stay through the couch surfers website. We'll be heading there and Sunday, and they seem super awesome. Tonight and tomorrow we'll be at our hostel, which we like quite a bit. After I write this, we'll be heading to North London for a punk show tonight, and we'll likely spend the rest of the afternoon walking around and site seeing. I for one am totally stoked to be in London. I've wanted to come to England for years and I'm finally here! Liesl's glad to be here as well. We're planning on having a great month, we're still doing the coast to coast walk, and we'll let you know when more good news comes our way.

Cheers (as they say here)

Stephanie