Rain in London

Today was supposed to be my good-duty day. I went to London specifically to buy Amy (my sister) an England sweatshirt (because she was did not decide until after she left what she wanted for her “souvenier”). Apparently, all of our nice weather was used up in April, because the temperature here has returned to the 50s, and it has been raining cats and dogs for the past several weeks. Thus, of course, it was raining today as I set off to catch my National Express bus to London.

Obviously I took an umbrella with me, but this did not prevent everything I was carrying in my bag/purse from getting wet. This wouldn’t have been so bad, had I not borrowed and brought along someone else’s novel (Naked by David Sedaris, borrowed from Angela) to read. The entire perimeter of the book got completely wet and is not drying in that ever-wrinkly fashion of soggy paper.

I intended to go to Camden market to buy the sweatshirt, because I knew I’d get a good price and there would be a good selection of the kind of zip-up hoodies Amy wanted there. Unfortunately, I happened to walk around Buckingham Palace at the exact time they were changing the guard. This means that the place was swamped with tourists: Germans scrambling for the best view, Chinese with their camcorders, parents herding children every which ways, and police people (women, too) in their neon yellow vests, trying to direct it all from horseback. Thus delayed, I tried to circle around this mob and be on my way. As you may predict, this only succeeded in getting me completely lost. I had arrived in London at 11 a.m. By 1 p.m., I had only reached Oxford Circus (approximately halfway between the Victoria coach station where I had arrived and my destination).

Rather than risk getting further lost and perhaps missing my bus back to Brighton (scheduled to leave Victoria at 5 p.m.), I decided to look around the shops in Oxford Circus for the sweatshirt. I found a few promising items at souvenier shops, and after much contemplation, returned to one I had encountered earlier in my search to buy the sweatshirt. Not more than two minutes after I had made my purchase—which, by the way, cost me five pounds more than my parents had given me to buy the souvenier—I wandered into another shop and found the exact same sweatshirt for nearly fifteen pounds less. That’s thirty dollars!

To further my bad luck, the spokes on my umbrella proceeded to snap one after the other until it was literally impossible to even open the thing. At that point in time, it was not raining very hard, so I chucked the useless instrument in a nearby rubbish bin and continued browsing the jam-packed stores. I managed to successfully navigate my way back to Victoria coach station and arrived back in Brighton at seven-odd in the evening. Unfortunately, by this time it was absolutely pouring, and—because I am trying to conserve my last few pounds here for food and other necessities—I was forced to walk the mile back from Poole Valley Station to Holland House in the rain.

By this time in the evening, I was starving, so I hurried into the kitchen to make myself some dinner. What greeted me, but puddles on the floor from a leaky refrigerator and a sink full of grimy water, soggy bits of people’s leftover dinner, and unwashed dishes. Needless to say, I worked around this to prepare my curry and even received some leftover rice from the ever-generous Fluf.

The final straw happened approximately twenty minutes ago. I decided to go to Tesco Express (a grocery mart located conveniently around the corner from our residence) to get myself some much-deserved dessert. Because it was raining, I was ultra-aware of how slippery the marble steps would be leading down from our front door. Tenatively, I placed one flip-flopped foot (because my sneakers were inside my room, hopefully dripping dry) on the step, and what happened? Out went my foot, and down the steps I flew, to land heavily on the right-hand side of my lower back. What made this fall worse was that because I was only going around the corner, I was holding my keys and my wallet in my hands. Both proceeded to fly from my grasp, and although I managed to find my wallet fairly quickly, my keys were nowhere to be seen.

Luckily, after much searching in the rain and darkness, I managed to recover the keys. (They were sitting by a gutter in a pile of cigarette ashes.) Tesco Express didn’t have the kind of caramel-filled Cadbury’s chocolate I like best, so I returned to Holland House empty-handed and tremendously sore.

What a day.

Dancing in London

There is something about dance that is more captivating than any other art form. When I was in London with my family, we encountered two very different forms of dance, and both equally entranced me. Looking down from the very top of St. Paul’s Cathedral, there was a rectangle of green grass far below. On that area of lawn, a group of boys were gathered, performing acrobatic tricks and various hip-hop maneuvers. From the cultural education I received at Woodland Hills High School (particularly thanks to an individual named Chase), I immediately recognized these individuals as break-dancers who appeared to be either warming up or practicing. I am incredibly fascinated with break-dancing and all it entails: how people can control their bodies in such precise ways so as to “pop,” ripple, flex, bounce, spin, balance and flip, all in rhythm to contemporary music. The moves require strength, coordination, and flexibility way beyond my abilities, and perhaps this is why I admire these dancers so much. However, this does not explain why I am so enthralled by watching them—after all, I cannot hit a home run or putt a golf ball into the hole from ten meters away, but I wouldn’t be nearly so fascinated by watching these feats. Quickness cannot explain it, because I don’t care for NASCAR racing, nor can technical knowledge of dancing, because I actually know very little about the true art of break-dancing. Yet, I could have stood at the top of St. Paul’s for at least another hour watching those boys, rather than walked back down and tried to interest myself in more concrete arches and stained glass Jesus portraits.

The same goes for ballet. On our tour of the Royal Opera House, we had the opportunity to see a ballet practice in session in one of the practice rooms. I barely heard what our guide was saying about the cross-beams composing the floor in order to absorb impact as I concentrated on the dancers inside. They were all so thin, but so strong. The thinnest one was the obvious “prima ballerina,” who was the palest of the three women. She was blond and pale-skinned and wore the most traditional outfit which included a black wrap dance skirt and leotard with leggings. She also wore an obvious amount of makeup, but despite the amount of work the dancers were obviously putting into the practice, not a bit of sweat appeared through her mask of makeup. Indeed, none of the dancers seemed to sweat at all. It seemed almost supernatural.

The prima ballerina’s partner seemed the most unconventional of the four men in the room. He wore a light purple bandana folded several times and wrapped around his forehead to hold back his nearly-shoulder-length hair. Then, he wore blue sweatpants that were torn to reveal gray-blue tights underneath and a worn, thin green T-shirt.

The most graceful of all the dancers in the room appeared to be the male understudy, who remained in the far back left-hand corner of the room throughout the practice. He wore all black and mimicked the movements of one of the secondary male dancers throughout the practice, but with gentler movements and more of a fluidness and ease of motion. Whenever that dancer had to lift his partner, the understudy would stop, shuffle his feet a bit in mimicry, and watch intently. However, he was never given the opportunity to step in and practice with a partner. I was disappointed at this, because I would have liked to see if lifting a woman’s weight would have compromised his grace. He impressed me so much; I have never seen a man dance more softly than a woman, but his movements were more graceful than even those of the prima ballerina.

I would have liked to stay and watched that ballet practice all day long. Yet, this is not because I ever wanted to be a ballerina. On the contrary, I was terrible at ballet when I was a child—completely inflexible, not particularly graceful, and too tremendously tall. I suppose dancing in general is just more interesting to watch than other art forms because it is performance art that gratifies many senses, transforms as we observe it, and is almost interpersonal in its manner of communication. Unlike music or visual art, dance usually allows us to see the dancers’ faces and to interpret intentions and emotions in their body language. Meanwhile, we can be impressed by the physical feats they are performing, rather than something that has already been performed (visual art) or something of which we need more specified knowledge to fully appreciate (music).

Maybe that is why some people are so self-conscious about dancing in public. They are afraid to reveal themselves so openly. They are afraid to be seen.