A Girl...

Abroadening

When we wake up at my apartment, I blowdry my hair sitting on the couch watching morning talk shows in closed captioning ("I'm 150 percent sure I ain't that baby's daddy!"). When we wake up at Simon's apartment, I blowdry my hair sitting on the toilet seat (closed) reading a book. For a while it was whatever "bathroom literature" was available--The History of White People in America, Is It Just Me...--but lately it's been the London travel guide Simon's mom let us borrow for our August trip.

We'll fly into Heathrow four days before Mel and Kilo's wedding and drive from there directly to Oxford to assist with preparations. After the nuptials, we'll be abroad for nine more days, and our plan is that once the celebrating has wound (winded?) down we'll drive back to London to kick around the city for a weekend. Simon's been to London three, four, five times(?), but I've never been, and considering that I've entertained a minor love affair with the whole country since I saw my first Shakespeare play at age twelve, it will be a pretty big deal. I want to wear a bustled dress and carry a lace parasol on our stroll through Regent's Park. I'm glad I learned to drink tea and was born liking biscuits (cookies!). I already feel a shoddy (not to mention geographically irrelevant) Yorkshire accent coming on. I'm excited.

This will be our first real vacation together (aw), meaning it will be the first time we're not traveling home to stay with family. In London we'll be on our own, doing the hotel thing and the public transportation thing and the museum, theater, and restaurant thing. I'm eager to tackle the anarchic streets of yet another world capital (I grew up on a numbered grid), and of course I love spending extended periods of time with my beau without that pesky job thing getting in the way.

I haven't yet started my list of things to do and see in the city, but I'm on the verge. Happily for Simon, I'm not the type to plan out every millisecond and implode if we get off track, but I do like to have a basic outline so we don't end up outside the playhouse on a "dark" day or show up at the British Museum with only an hour before closing time. Happily for me, Simon is perfectly content to go unscheduled altogether because he has a wonderful talent for making aimless dawdling a good time.

Last Sunday we ventured out to indulge his craving for hot bean juice, and on the way to the coffeeshop, we stopped in at a thrift store, three bookstores, and a restaurant. After coffee we went to a gift shop, a stereo store, a musical instrument store, a movie theater, a department store, another coffeeshop, and we would have gone into a car dealership too if they'd been open.

This method of whiling away a lazy afternoon is very different from what I'm used to, which can be described as walking directly to my destination, no stopping, no turning of the head to the left or the right, no deviating from the goal, again, not because I'm a stickler for a plan but because I hate "wasting" time. There might also be something in the fact that I often have a hard time leaving a store emptyhanded, and do I really need that adorable picture book about the kitten who thought the full moon was a bowl of milk. Not really.

When we were walking around the Haight with my parents a few weeks ago, Simon said to just let him know if I wanted to duck into any of the stores because he was up for whatever. In response I told him he was going to have to be the one to duck into stores because if the ducking were left up to me or my parents, there would be no ducks but just one big goose egg, as in a large zero for the number of stores we'd have entered. (Oh, I kill me.) My parents are like me--we go out with a target in our sights and time spent "just looking"--instead of price comparing, fact finding, or purchasing--is time wasted. If it weren't for Simon, we never would have hit the overpriced vintage store that featured the armadillo purse.

Having spent last Sunday "just looking," I'm forecasting a great time in London discovering things not in the guidebook. I'm excited at the prospect of Simon and I creating our own rituals and traditions and further defining our overall holiday style. We have the roadtrip thing pretty much down (Cosmos, Oreos, posing for photos), and soon we'll get to figure out how we do long flights, jetlag, daily plans, meals, money, alarm clocks, blisters, planes, trains, and automobiles that drive on the wrong side of the road. I'll add "have fun" to the top of my list.