Beginning with a British Breakfast

So....Emmy is being a bum in bed. This is her mum making a guest blog contribution tonight.

Today we awoke to Emily's annoying cell phone alarm. I kept asking her for just 5 more minutes of sleep. She kept oking that for 25 minutes then she became insistent and started to pull me out of bed by the legs. It's been a bit of a mother/daughter role reversal here in London, she thinks. I like it. I can put myself in auto control and be a follower.

No showers. No hot water yet.

We went down to breakfast which was very British....toast, sausage/ham, an egg and baked beans. (Em exchanged ham for granola.) Sometimes there will be a tomato and a mushroom included in the morning platter. Needless to say, we're not used to such a big breakfast and definitely not used to white bread. But, it was filling and kept our sugars levels under control for a good five hours.

Off we went to Em's apt. where she dressed for working out at the gym and we hiked to the park where her gym is located...a 2o minute walk or so through a quiet neighborhood with old brick apt. buildings. Many occupants left their curtains open for us to snoop inside at their home decorating. We seemed to see lots of filled bookcases. Our favorite was the couch with 3 doggies piled on it asleep. Now when Em calls during her hike to the gym, I'll have a picture of her route in my mind. There are 2 postboxes along the way. The second she says is her backup for when she forgets to mail cards in the first one.

Em described to me the student groups and the dog parties that take place in the park. She lead me into her gym to show me around. Well, basically I had to stop in one spot and look at a room about the size of our dining room and kitchen together filled with dated equipment, but neat, tidy, and bright because of wonderful windows looking out on parts of the park. It's a huge contrast from Marie's American health club with all of the latest. That's not to say that bigger is better. Just different.

I went out on a park bench to read, but of course was captured into people and dog watching and experiencing all of the things that Emily had portrayed. First of all, the dog parties. It truly was a dog party. Dogs were not on leashes. They were out in the middle of the green playing together having so much fun while their masters chatted. Every so often a new dog would arrive and come running into the dog party like a bullet, and then was welcomed with some romping and rolling. It was unbelievable. In the States the leashes would be tight and everyone paranoid of a dog fight. One newcomer was a little more rambunctious, jumping up on everyone and every dog. Tolerance was high and it didn't matter that he was a bit of a pain in the "tail." I wished people could be so tolerant of each other.

There were big dogs and little dogs. Actually it was kinda like Go Dogs Go and their party on a tree. The dogs were missing their hats though. There was the little chubby, chub pug that I found especially interesting. He wasn't getting enough exercise. I felt the master or dog sitter was just biding time and didn't really enjoy walking him. There was a fenced area in a cafe where owners would take their dogs to join them for tea. Mr. Puggy Wug didn't want to go in that area. I felt like his walker sorta wanted to dump him in there. He certainly wasn't as wild as Petey Weety Woo, my grandson pug. I could just imagine Petey attending this dog party and it terminating in total chaos.

I also watched people. One old man that walked round and round was interesting. He was short, stooped over, covered in a long dressy coat that was 2 sizes too big and hat that covered his head so you only saw his crooked old pasty face and wire-rimmed glasses. He talked to himself a lot and seemed to be minus a focus or direction. It made me wonder what kind of life he'd lived that had turned him into a bit of nutter.

Then there were 3 stocky men in their 30's or so. They definitely weren't there for the exercise as they were meandering at a snail's pace with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths. I think I would have to label them as loiterers.

Mothers came in with their dogs and children. One woman with bright maroon-dyed hair was using this time to loudly vent to her friend about this and that as the kids rushed excitedly into the playground.

I saw a school group of girls come in with what looked like miniature hockey sticks. Em says it's field hockey. It was fun watching them as some were so animated with their cheeks glowing. Others were grumpy like their next event would be a drag and they didn't want to be there. I decided I'd rather be the happy, smiling child.

Finally, I felt it was time to see how Emily was faring and she had just finished running. She did a few stretching exercises while I read Catcher in the Rye. The catalyst for reading or rereading this novel was the death of JD.Salinger recently. And, coincidentally Em had been wanting to read it because of the many references to it in the play that she had just seen called Six Degrees of Separation. Ok, so Em ended her exercises in the Chinese splits. Ya know, I used to be able to do that and as a young 14-year-old girl I remember promising one of my friends, Sue Rohrer, that we would still be able to do the Chinese splits when we were 95. I was such an idealist back then. I'm a realist now. As I looked at Emily I felt some cracks and creaks and pains run through my body.

Back we went to Em's apt. for refreshing showers and packing lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, carrots and fruit. That tasted very good as we sat on a bench in Regent's Park. Nothing like pb & j for a picnic. When it came time to get rid of half a loaf of moldy bread, the geese waddled in for the feast. How they sensed it was coming, we don't know. But they looked like they owned the sidewalk as they wobbled towards us. Feeling guilty, I tried to remove the moldy parts. The geese were so funny thinking they were the kings over the seagulls and pigeons. The runners probably were perturbed at our pack of pigeons which blocked them and made them break their stride. The surprising part were the GBH's as Em called them. These Great Blue Herons came in and waited majestically for crumbs which they captured perfectly in their mouths. A couple couldn't believe the GBH's were there, so they stopped and Em shared bread with them. They appreciated joining in the fun of feeding the birds. 2 photographers took advantage of our bread-crumb enticement of the birds. It was sad to leave our new bird friends.

The Goose Brigade
The Ol' Coot

As we walked out of the park enjoying the purple and white crocuses popping through the ground, we kept noticing all of these groups of young boys speaking French. As we passed one group of little boys, they thought they were very clever and would speak to us by practicing their English. Their leader said, "Hello" to us with a slight French accent. Emily and I responded at exactly the same time, "Bonjour." The look on these boys' faces was hysterical. Emily and I were laughing for 10 minutes. Their eyes popped wide open and thier mouths dropped and then they all burst into laughter. They hadn't expected that. And it was a bit freeky how quickly Em and I responded exactly the same time in the same manner. I asked them how they were in French. Our only regret is that we didn't stop and visit with them, being in motion with a mission kept us moving. Should have stopped and smelled the roses.


We did stop for a photo shoot of a semi-cooperating coot. My friend Charmi had just been talking to me about coots, the birds not old coots. She told me how their feet weren't webbed, which I never remember noticing. So, I had a good look at the cooties feeties and sure enough, each toe looked like 3 pieces of jointed snakeskin. They were bizarre little dinosaur feet. A coot photo for Charmi tomorrow.

Off we went to Madame Tussaud's where we joined the queue. After at least 1/2 hour we arrived at a sign that said another 1/2 hour wait for tickets. A group in front of us turned around and said, "Mission aborted." We'd waited too long not to continue. But, we discovered my camera battery was dead. So, we knew we couldn't go today which in the big picture was better because being in that line so long with all of those people had sucked the enjoyment energy right out of us. So we purchased tickets for the next day, pretended like were Sherlock Holmes walking down Baker Street, solving the mystery of where the post office was. There the clerk loved us 'cause we were interested in her commemorative stamps.....British mailboxes, the Tudors, the dogs and cats of Battersea, mythical creatures, and yea yippey the 100 years of Girl Guides. An old man in one of the lines was correcting one of the clerk's language. He told her to say "alright" rather than "OK" because "alright is British and Ok is American." She responded then, "Alright. OK." We thought it was funny he was correcting her because he wasn't speaking with a good British accent and sounded and looked Dutch.

Off to St. Paul's cathedral..........across Millennium Bridge.............snack of sugar coated roasted peanuts whose vendor was grumpy to Em...............to the Tate Modern Art Museum. Ok, I noticed that there was a postcard of Rodin's sculpture The Kiss inside. I couldn't believe that the French would give up The Kiss. It's one of my all-time favorite sculptures. What was it doing in London? It belonged in Paris. So, I told Em that it had to be a copy. The French would not do that. Em said she'd seen it so it was there. So we went in search of the answer to this puzzling phenomenon. We discovered that there are 3 sculptures of the Kiss. I guess Rodin wanted to mass market them.

I was enraptured by a modern piece encased in glass. Em knew all of the scoop on that one. This cloud like thingy was representing the bride and these cone like things were her nine suitors and these little bullet holes were these guys trying to get to the bride, their pheromones or somethings and only one hole made it into the cloud so he was the lucky buzzard who got to be the groom. That was a short version. I concluded with a brief synopsis of what Em had told me and she replied with the best quote of the day. I won't repeat that line unless you want to know badly enough to ask me personally. Visited some Andy Warhol and left only to trip on the steps and fall because I was looking at the nut seller to see if he was still being grumpy and not watching where I was going. After Em saw that I was ok, and the people I'd silenced around me began chatting again, she laughed hysterically for about 5 minutes. It wasn't that funny.

We walked to Shakespeare's Globe theatre, but didn't enter. Em will be seeing Macbeth there later and will have to tell us about it. Watched street gamblers losing 20 pound notes at a time with the guess which-of-the-3-shells-is-hiding the nut. It was so weird seeing people lose 30 bucks just like that.

Home via the Tube... up a subway entrance of 125 steps because we tired of waiting on the elevator... stopped at 2 groceries...made Aunt Susan's chili bean soup for supper along with baked potatoes, salad, fruit plate, rolls, and Em's choice of cookie dough ice cream. We shared this meal with Em's friends Brooke from Maryland, Linda from "North" Virginia, and Kathryn from Winston-Salem. What fun to meet the friends Em talks about. They deserve more time and space here, but it's 1am and I've rambled on too long. Sorry. Emmy is lucky to have such good friends experiencing London with her.

As we entered the subway to return to my hotel, Emmy was happy to see her friend Tim who works down there. She loves to talk to him because afterwards she is smiling for 10 minutes. He makes lots of travelers feel that way she says. He told a story about something nice he learned from other Elon girls about Em. He credited me because he said the fruit doesn't fall from the tree. I told him I was a nut tree. So, Em is just a little acorn. hahahahahaha I was so glad to meet him because Emily really appreciates him taking the time to talk to and make weary travelers smile or do something kind like help them carry their luggage up the steps.

More later..........