P&PS

Oxford is amazing. I may have overdone it a bit, but I can't think of a single thing I wouldn't have regretted leaving out. I spent most of my short morning wandering around trying to follow the directions I had written down, until I came across the information center. I know I could have looked up directions on my phone, but there's something about paper maps and directions that make more sense to me.  I bumped into a lot of cool stuff as I walked around: a couple of buildings closed for a graduation and the graduates themselves, an Oxfam shop and a street market.  Plus, I got a nice overview of the town which made the book nerd and history geek parts of me very very happy.  I may have imagined Oxford dozens of times in a bunch of different time periods, but there's nothing like experiencing it in person. Radcliffes Camera and the Bodleian were absolutely stunning. Radcliffes camera was undergoing renovation so the view was a bit restricted but the view of the new ...

Sleep last night was a bit disjointed. Going to bed early meant getting woken up a couple of times by people chatting as they returned to go to bed.  It also meant dealing with the humidity that comes from breathing in an enclosed space before the room outside your curtained bunk has time to cool off completely. I was up at 2 am recording more snippets of memories: the prevalence of support for local and/or organic food, how nice it was to see an entire aisle of eggs sitting on shelves instead of in giant coolers, rapeseed oil in all of the ingredient lists instead if canola, and the dark wood and orange linens of the hostel contrasting with their space age-esque bathrooms. The list continued to grow throughout the day, with Red Box as an office supply company, the grass on the side of the road is tall and yellow, cows grazing in meadows in astonishing numbers, trash cans are labeled "rubbish" and called dust bins, "Greens" are filled with cobblestone not grass,...

On Sunday I was up early to go to the Columbia Road Flowers' Market and check out the shops before tackling part of the Jubilee Walkway .  The sites pictured include the market as well as The Royal Hospital (I took a bit of a detour to Whitechapel), Saint Paul's Cathedral, Tower and Southwark bridges, The Globe Theatre, Clink Street, the Winchester Palace ruins, Southwark Cathedral, Hays Galleria, St Katherine Docks, The Tower of London,  All Hallows by the Tower Church.

LAST DAY IN LONDON (AKA LONDON DAY FOUR) AND EDINBURGH DAY ONE I wrote this up shortly after my arrival in Edinburgh.  If it sounds a bit different from my usual posts it’s because I was ridiculously tired and reading way too much John Green at the time. It's my last day in London so of course the weather has to pull out all the stops. Possibly it's the universe's subtle way of saying "move on" but whatever the reason it's freezing cold, then it's hot, then it's raining, than it's not.  My umbrella may be broken but I’m still spending a good part of the day in Saint James' Park, sitting in alternating bands of sun and shade, finishing the last book in the Hunger Games Trilogy.  I've come to love London and there's so much left I have to see.  I’m about to go take in Buckingham Palace.  I've already seen Parliment and Big Ben.  Later today I’ll move onto the London Eye, the Southbank neighborhood festival , Blackfria...

Pictured: Radcliffe Square, The Bodleian Library, Christchurch College, Oxford Castle, The Ashmolean Museum

Deciding to take today off was a good decision despite the fact that I feel a bit like I missed out on something vital not documenting this experience with something more than words.  My trip from Heathrow is a giant mess of trying not to fall asleep, laughing at the station where "mind the gap" was repeated at two second intervals, and being terrified of some of the gaps that blurred past the window. Heathrow before that is a bit clearer in my mind, the passport check and customs and even before that the pear shaped woman on the "toilet" signs, which I found hysterical, and the endless amount of walking I insisted in doing because mining walkways and carting luggage makes me nervous. It's not any of that though that I'm worrying about forgetting.  It's the guy selling flowers outside the Tube station, the way none of the streets in this neighborhood run in ways that make sense to me, the greengrocer talking about his new baby, the fruiterer I sat outs...

Decisionitis Utica, NY 16 April 2013 8:56pm pm local | 9:27 pm est I had a bit of decision paralysis over the weekend in regard to my impending stay in London. I’m sure there’s a more scientific word to describe it other than ‘AHHHHHHHHHH’ but regardless, it was a bit of a problem. I know myself well enough to know that I shouldn’t plan a dozen things to do in four days. There’s a good chance jetlag will kick my butt or the weather won’t cooperate. Plus if there’s one time I don’t mind a bit of spontaneity (and by that I mostly mean epic tv watching) in my life, it’s when I’m travelling. The problem is, I watched a couple of London travel vids on Youtube, and suddenly wanted to do everything. And by everything, I mean everything, things I wouldn’t normally consider like ferries (hello motion sickness) or bus tours (I prefer the walking alternative) mixed in with all the usual suspects. In the end, I gave up and went back to reading the book I started last week (Cl...