After several days of schlepping around with a cold, I felt up to ignoring my growing pile of books and papers for one more day for a trip to London. Gabriel had tickets to the exhibit of Chinese terracotta soldiers at the British Museum, and escorting her to the train station quickly became a pro guided tour of her favorite places around London. We dodged our way through consumer-crazy Oxford Street to get to a working underground station (continual work going on to prep for the Olympics... in 2012?!) and emerged at Leicester Square, where Kao, Zach, and I danced to some familiar songs at a multi-story Burger King (OK, they watched as I looked awkward dancing in public :P) and where I longingly looked at the huge Odeon and at least three other movie palaces around the square as they quietly screened some prohibitively pricey movies for the London Film Festival. Ambling up and down a few streets nearby, we found Chinatown and took lots of pictures of the lanterns and arches and scads of restaurants like Asian tourists. Gabriel led us up several narrow flights of stairs in a restaurant that looked like it should be an apartment building, and on the top floor she ordered us noodles and about 12 different dishes of dim sum for a cheap, shared feast. I marveled at the quality of the scallops in the scallop dumplings I had requested, but the best dish had to be these white bread dumplings filled with barbecued pork--they were like barbecue marshmallows! I ate a whole tray of them (only three, but I still felt like a pig) and must a) figure out what they are and b) try to make some myself ASAP. Our leisurely lunch lasted through several pots of jasmine tea, and by the end I had to laugh with Julianna about having a "Room of One's Own" moment, where the good food set a glow in the base of the spine and led to great conversation with friends.
As a party completely composed of English nerds, we had to poke around Charing Cross Road and all of the old, first-edition bookstores. I pawed through a lot of amazing prints of maps, portraits, and advertisements that were over one hundred years old and sitting in 1, 2, and 5l. bins along one of the alleyways of bookshops, and I dodged into the new age bookstore with Sarah to reminisce about my "rock box" collection in elementary school over the cases of mystic crystals and to read the back of a memoir written by a guy who has stopped eating and is "living on light." Gabriel found some quality prints from a magazine from Oscar Wilde's time (she studied the originals!), and Sarah found the British first edition of her favorite Hemingway novel to get for her father, an avid book collector. After awhile, though, I felt a little adrift--I don't study many modern-ish novels that I could find first editions of, and I would hardly know a first edition if I saw one. I felt like I should be interested in and know about these things, but I didn't. A walk past some more inviting bookshops, like Waterstone's and Blackwell's, cheered me up, and by the time I hit the serpentine shelves of Foyles, full of new and not moldy books of old poems whose margins I could write in without committing a crime, I was back to myself.
We got to the British Museum with plenty of time to ooze through the single entry door (seriously, England, get with the queues!) and gawk at the white upon white of the enclosed marble courtyard, the reading room the size of the Globe inside it, and the milky glass of the spidery Millennium dome above. Gabriel peeled off to visit China, and the rest of us stuck together long enough to see the Rosetta Stone. I wound my way to the back of the Greek and Roman rooms to walk along the Elgin Marbles, the facings of the Parthenon "rescued" from vandalism by Lord Elgin in the early 1800s. I scanned the walls like I scan pages when I don't have time to read a whole book, and I easily found the most important part (to me) of the eroded marbles in a back corner, the depiction of a cow being led to sacrifice that we're almost sure inspired part of Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (it even said so on a panel of wall under it). I didn't have my moment of falling and weeping, but it was pretty cool to think that about 200 years ago my favorite poet looked at the same frieze, and then went home to write a poem.
We took a twilight tour of Kensington, Gabriel's old neighborhood (and one of the wealthiest in London, by the by--Hugh Grant lived in a smaller house one street up from her parents' ex-pat housing, and she'd often see him riding his bike :P), after one more foray through the crowded subways. Never take the Tube on the night of an England rugby match! We plodded by the stadium-like Royal Albert Hall and followed its spotlight to the majestically phallic Albert Memorial just before a security van screeched up, lights flashing, to tell us the park was closed. I noted the Uniqlo and Zara that I'll have to return to (and the closest underground station that I'll do so by), and we walked into the schmanciest Whole Foods I've ever seen because Sarah had never been in one before. I suppose Kensington is a lot like Buckhead, and indeed every other Buckhead street would have to have its Whole Foods or else the masses would starve. We got our dinner at a really nice Lebanese restaurant where Gabriel said her brother (and often she, too) would go for a shawarma every day after school. I can see why. My chicken shawarma was possibly the best sandwich ever, and for only 3 pounds I'll feel free to travel to the most expensive section of London to get one several more times.
I shuffled around the house and moaned most of the next two days as I finished up my history paper over what seemed a decade and finished a box of "drug tea" (that sick people cold and flu tea that has something special in it to make you feel better while you're really getting addicted) in record time. Monday night I skipped Keble dinner not to make a bowl of vegetable broth and a crumpet but to go sit in on a conversation with Philip Pullman at the University church. I walked a scenic alley between the Sheldonian theatre, the Bodleian quad, and the natural history museum and watched the lights from the cleaning scaffolds glint off the hundreds of 6" square glass panes on the Divinity School walls; I have to say it was one of the greatest sights I've seen here. I stopped by the Radcliffe Camera gates to brood (kidding :P) until Julianna met me to claim some of the remaining seats at the back of the church and two cups of the nonalcoholic mulled cider. The hall was packed (but somehow we ended up sitting behind another group of Americans? I swear Oxford is really just an Ivy League school), and speakers on the centuries-old walls chirped "the people's atheist's" banter with one of the University's Anglican officials. I worried at first that the talk might take the uncomfortable path of trying to convert Mr. Pullman--the clergyman, like most English people I've met, grilled him with pointed questions and blunt, "Of course YOU'D say that" answers--but eventually Mr. Pullman was willingly given the stage to talk about the impact of his beliefs on his writing and the movies (he likes them!) and even had time to throw in gasp-inducing comments about his new story about Lyra relearning the alethiometer, the title of this blog entry, and a quip about Dumbledore's very public outing the day before ("J. K. Rowling has started something completely new in literary criticism--she outs characters after she's published the books!"). My friends who had not gone to the Woodstock talk went to chat and get his autograph, but I biked home content after another fun evening with one of my favorite famous people in Oxford.
I mean it. He's like Michael Stipe is to kids in Athens. He's always there, but you feel really lucky to see him and have to tell all your friends about it like he's just become your new pal, from across the supermarket/roundabout/auditorium.
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