London: Arrivals

 We arrive at Gatwick International airport at 7:20 am London time, nine hours ahead of Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, and all things familiar.  Our eyes open to the voice of the captain welcoming us to the United Kingdom.  I squint out window at the approaching terminal, then over at Grant, and then Max across the aisle.  We all look like shit.  All things considered though, I feel remarkably well rested.  It was probably the ambient Max gave me before the flight, because it definitely wasn’t the handle of duty-free whiskey we had all but poured into our endless train of ginger ales courtesy of our lovely stewardess Miss Beverley who looked like she could be my godmother; you know, in that motherly, yet not immediately relatable sort of way.  What happened to all the hot stewardesses, the vixens of the sky?  Oh, that’s right.  We're on US Airways.  All the attractive flight attendants are busy canoodling Mr. Moneybags on Virgin Atlantic and Air France.

There's a buzz in head; a buzz that I’m quite sure isn’t from the whiskey.  Although now that I think about it, the whiskey could also explain this new warmth nuzzling my core.  But it can't explain the giddiness.  As we walk through the terminal to the train platforms, strapped with backpacks and duffle bags, the little child inside me is somersaulting and zig-zagging through fast-paced businessmen and vacationing families, running circles around police officers donning yellow vests and batons.  It's a feeling the likes of which I had never felt before.  A freedom, and a correlated lightness I notice in all our steps.  Despite the forty-pound pack digging into my shoulders, a yolk has been lifted up and thrown by the wayside.  Is it the passing of my collegiate years?  Is it the distance from home, or should I say the distance from our attachments at home?  Or maybe it's the previously pending, now present two-month absence of phone service at my immediate fingertips.  An iPhone on airplane mode for two months becomes simply an iPod with a camera and of course Word Warp.

Whatever the yolk, the feeling of it no longer there is immaculate.  Eyes darting from this sign to that, pausing at funny spellings and comma placements, we find our way over to the currency exchange, then the ticket booth, and finally to seats on a train into Central Station.  It's a pristine train, pairs of clean red captain’s chairs facing each other on either side of a clean royal blue stiff-carpeted floor and clean light gray walls with knee-to-ceiling windows; an environment that, to me, bears striking similarities to some Star Trek-esque vehicle’s interior.  If only all the dreary-looking morning rush hour English folk were wearing tight solid color long sleeves and black pants instead of their dreary-looking English clothes. Oh, well.  I think the windows are my favorite part of the train.  An attraction to the ability to focus on something for a second, maybe two, before it’s gone and you’re immediately intrigued by the next curiosity down the line.  The only constant all the way to London Central is an inclination towards masonry and brickwork (at times it feels like we're flying through old movie sets of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Harry Potter)  in most of the rail-side structures, and the weather.

It's muggy.  Big surprise right?  It's only early July, the heart of summer, and what are we greeted with as we exit the terminus out onto Wilton?  Why, a light drizzle of course, and a hot drizzle at that, not so strong as to prevent Max from lighting his first cigarette on foreign soil; a Marlboro Red.  Now Max is usually a Camel Blue kind of guy, but the Reds were going for $22.00 a carton at duty free.  Welcome to Europe.