England Thus Far

I’ve been in England now for just over four days, and am having an absolute blast. Getting off the plane at Heathrow, there’s a weird period of dissonance wherein it’s difficult to grok that you’re in another country, owing to the universal dictum that All Airports Look The Same. Also, there’s a not inconsiderable portion of my brain which expects, for whatever reason, that the sky in England should be a different colour, perhaps because this would be the most demonstrable means of telling that I was no longer in Kansas. (Well, Melbourne. You get the idea.) The point being, it takes a while to sink in. There’s a lot of green, a lot of blue, and then suddenly you’re walking down the road to the shops and there’s a deer, an actual honest-to-God deer staring at you from the foilage, blinking doeishly before bounding off into the trees, and you’re picking blackberries on the bridleway to eat for breakfast, and then it hits you that you are very emphatically not in Australia, and that this is a Wonderful Thing.

We’ve had a preliminary scratch at the surface of London, by which I mean we’ve done the obvious touristy things like gawking at Big Ben and watching the changing of the guard and strolling through Harrods and raiding the bookshops on Charring Cross Road in anticipation of later, more in-depth excursions (yay!), but have not yet found Londinium, something which I am very eager to do. We have slight colds, which is annoying but probably to be expected given 24 hours in a plane after weeks of exhausted running about, but are otherwise well.

And now, I shall drink some more pineapple juice and read my book. In England!