The Charmed Life

This year, the stars aligned perfectly for a European vacation with my friends from Harvard. Marion had a polo match against Oxford (the men’s team – yes, she is that legit!) over the weekend, and then planned to spend a week at her home in France before heading back to Boston for a physics internship, while Mariam was expecting to spend a week in London with her best friend from Georgia (the country) who just completed a journalism program there. Because I would be in Austria for the summer anyway, it just made sense for me to join them. And when Eunice heard that a trip to London and Paris was being planned, she couldn’t pass up the opportunity. So, before fulfilling January’s promise to myself and returning to the country of my dreams, I spent the weekend in London with my friends.

Most of Saturday passed by in a blur. I was exhausted from my one hour of sleep on the transatlantic flight, and I walked zombie-like through the streets of London with Eunice and Mariam. I was captivated by at least a few things, though, as these pictures attest:

This seemed to be pretty typical for British houses

Mariam and I riding on the top of the bus.

Parsons Green, the park near where we stayed

I finally was able to take a nap on Saturday evening, which gave me energy to go out on Saturday night with Mariam and her British-Georgian friend Kato. After a bit of pre-gaming (which should have taken place at a pub, but in fact took place on the tube, with the much cheaper beer cans from the grocery next door and with some German girls who had the same idea), we went to an underground techno club, where the scenesters were out in full swing. And because transit accessibility is too mainstream, obviously, it took us nearly two hours to get back to Kato’s flat on the night buses once the club closed. But it was with a feeling of triumph that I finally climbed up her front steps at five in the morning: Any night that ends with the sunrise on your back is a good one.

After catching up on some much needed sleep on Sunday morning, we dressed in our finest and boarded the commuter rail to Ascot to watch Marion’s polo match against Oxford. This was pretty much the opposite of the underground club just a few hours earlier: Jack Wills shirts, very expensive cars, finger sandwiches, and sundresses abounded.

Me, Eunice, and Mariam on the polo grounds

The heated deck where everyone watched the game

Warm tea and pastries was just what we needed on that cold, windy day in the English countryside

Harvard got trounced (12 – 3 ½, don’t ask me how half points are possible), but I was very impressed with Marion’s ability to hold her own against the Oxford men on a borrowed horse.

After the match, Mariam, Eunice, Kato and I went to eat Indian food at Brick Lane and then hung out at an outdoor beer garden in the area for a few hours. The tattooed crowd was again out in full swing, but we wanted to get home early to go to the Tate Modern the next morning.

The Tate Modern was awesome. It was organized thematically, rather than chronologically, and seemed to focus on post-war art rather than the water lilies that seem to be synonymous with modernism at many galleries, which I appreciated. There was also a temporary exhibit that displayed photographs of “The War in Afghanistan” (in singular) from John Burke, who visited the country during one of the nineteenth-century British colonial wars, and the contemporary British photographer Simon Norfolk. The photographs, and the parallels, were stunning.

And that was the weekend. Eunice and I did grab lunch at a “typically British” pub near where we were staying in Fulham right before heading to the train station.

Fish and chips with jalapeno tartar sauce 

Ploughmans: assorted meats, vegetables, cheese, and bread

But no bus tours, no cheesy pictures in front of Big Ben – we decided we were above that. Because, as Eunice pointed out, this wasn’t the trip of a lifetime for us. We fully assume that we’ll be back in the UK many times, so doing those “typical London” things didn’t seem as critical to us as exploring random parts of the city, jamming to dubstep, and rubbing shoulders with the British elites. We live a charmed life, and I hope I never forget it.