All around me, spreading out beyond my visual range, out to the curvature of the Earth, lays London. As I gain height the city crawls out before me, each road and alley, shop front and pedestrian are mapped out, and as the height gains they all merge together to take new shapes, becoming like moving things, snakes, or worms, pulsating around the streets. The buildings out to the edge of the horizon vanish i the haze of the falling rain. As it falls the rain is illuminated eerily by the sun on its early morning rise above the buildings. I gaze out at it and try to feel inspired. A London city sunrise. The blazing sun glows bright orange, peeping through gaps in the blocks of flats that are between it and my eye.
The booth is filled with tourists. I guess even ten am isn’t early enough to beat the morning rush. We all gather a respectable distance away from each other around the window facing east down the Thames. We stand, mesmerised. An American couple that look about my parent’s age and dressed exactly the same as me fished sunglasses out of their bags and put them on in order to avoid glaring at the sun for too long. They were dressed in shorts, hiking socks, hiking boots, fleece, backpack, and as it was raining they even wore the same rain coat as me, transparent and hooded, covering even our backpacks. A group of two German students noticed commented, I recon, on what a good idea It for them to bring shades with them.
Two Japanese (or Chinese, if I am honest I have never been able to tell the difference between the two races, something I am not proud of) take endless pictures from every conceivable angle. They take pictures of each other, they take pictures of the other people in our egg. They snap the floor, they get the huge metal poles that are holding us up, and they get me. I stare out of the glass toward the Houses of Parliament. Everywhere I look there ar cranes poking thei eads up through the tangled mess of city. Here I am, finally, in one of the most exciting busiest tals of Europe, perhaps t rld, and it looks as though it i being built. How old is this place? I lapse in to my High School history classes to try and raise a memory that might give me a clue. I remember the date Lincoln was shot, but thats no use. And the plague, that was even longer ago, right? What date did we declare independence? Two hundred years ago? I seem to remember a bicentennial recently. Now I wish I’d paid more attention. So I guess London is at least two hundred years old, and they still h nished it. Even this fails to fill me with any inspiration. How do they keep finding room to build things? Or why, if they knock a building down, dont they just leave the space it left behind as space, instead of squeezing another bui ding in the
Everyone I know who has been here has come back spurting endless tales of how wonderful the place is and how I simply must go one day. Now I am here and the emotion is lost on me. Perhaps they weren’t as impressed as they made out. Perhaps they just said it was such a wonderful city because it took them so much money and so much time to get here, and as everyone always comes back saying how amazing it is, they didn‘t want to look out of place by telling everyone what an over populated mess it place is. An occasional green dome of leaves surfaces above the sea of buildings like a great whale taking a breath on its way across a much much greater ocean. Once, I try to remind myself, it would have been trees as far as the eye can see. Two hundred years or more of progress hasn’t made the city any better or more efficient or futuristic, as the ancestors of todays occupants then might have imagined it would. The city simply spread out, like an organism, a giant bacteria. Twisting and tangling itself amongst the congested roads and smoke dirtied buildings. It incorporated any organic matter it touched, making a high rise sardine can full of miserable people who don’t talk to each other. I ponder what the average height of London must now be. From up here it looks as though there are no roads or pavements. They could easily put a lid between the roofs and start building again on top of the buildings that are already there. I look out to the horizon. If the buildings weren’t there, how much lower would the skyline be? A false horizon of a fake view.
One of the Japanese tourists approaches, trying to give me her camera and saying ‘Prease?,Prease?’ She gestures at herself and her friend. They’re wearing matching raincoats that reach the floor. They need them in this glorious English summer of rain forest sized downpours. Poking out from underneath are the bare toes of sandaled feet. Around both their necks they have a matching black ‘Nikon’ camera bag each, the big type that holds all the electronic equipment they’ll need for the day. People from anywhere else on the planet would take a packed lunch out with them sightseeing. These girls are taking a myriad of equipment for capturing the moment. Both bags probably hold all the exact same gadgets. I accept the digital camera and take several identical pictures of them standing together. In the background London slowly ascends toward us the London Eye reaches it peak and keeps turning forever on wards. The other lady then produces an identical camera from her Nikon bag which she hands to me with an identical ‘Prease? Prease?’ I take several identical photographs on this one too. I hand back the second camera and they both bow at me wearing big excited smiles. ’Frank roo! Frank roo!’ They’re young, though as far as I can tell older than me. I decide that they are Japanese, though this is not based on any evidence or information I’ve received and is for no other reason than I don’t want to remember them as being simply ‘Oriental’. I wonder how far it is from London to Japan, and from Japan to America. I begin to lapse back in to High School Geography classes but stop myself to laugh at the two Japanese ladies looking at the same pictures of themselves on the two different cameras. I imagine them when they get home having two sets of the same photographs of the world to bore their friends with. I didn’t even bring a camera. I could barely afford the airfare so all optional extras were out of the equation.
The Egg, or Pod, or glass death trap or what ever you want to call it reaches ground level again and we are ushered out quickly by a polite English girl with bad teeth. All stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason, and today they are out in force. We, that is me, the Chinese (or was it Japanese?) girls, the fat Americans I am trying to avoid, and surprisingly a couple of English couples, all exit in to the rain. The Egg rotates a few yards to the awaiting masses, and a few more desperate tourists are hurdled in to our Pod. The intimacy is lost. It is no longer our Pod, it becomes their pod. From the Pod we are hurried down a ramp and out of the way. My fellow pod dwellers disperse into the milling of the never ceasing crowds of London streets. Our time together is now over, though we will remain forever united on the memory cards of their digital cameras. I fish my umbrella out from beneath the other junk in my rucksack; pantyliners, lipstick, a spare pair of socks, my purse. I risk a look at a tourists guide to London which I had previously been too afraid to use in case a potential mugger saw me and decided to pick me as his next target. Thers no hiding that I am a tourist though really. I look lost and I’m wearing a plastic Mac and a backpack. I stand in the rain for a minute staring at it and try to decide my next move. From the other side of the river Big Ben chimes it’s way lazily through four bells, as it’s been doing for hundreds of years. To me it’s four in the morning. I have been awake all night, and all I want to do is sleep but I am determined to see London while I have the chance. There are trendy bars and coffee shops lining the bank of the Thames, over charging people for burnt coffee. I decide to head toward the Tate Modern, and pick up a strong black coffee from a Starbucks stall along the way. What looked like a quick walk along the river on the map soon begins to feel like a never ending trek when the rain increases its intensity and I begin to wish I had found a tube station and taken the time to decipher the tube map. I stop for a rest on a wet bench and warm my hands on the coffee. There are plenty of empty place to sit, as no one seems to want to sit in the pouring rain next to a cold dirty river, and I can’t blame them. I put the polystyrene cup up to my face and breath in the heady fumes, closing my eyes and allowing myself to dream of being back at home, sitting in a Starbucks in town, taking advantage of the Wi-Fi to download the answers to the test I have to take at school. How can I be home sick already? I have barely set foot outside of my beloved America and already I’m dreaming of being home again, no worse, of being sat in a Starbucks at home doing school work.
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