As always, there is a reason as to why I wasn’t updating the blog last week, besides just the usual laziness and a surprising lack of Lindsay Lohan news. As the above picture indicates, I happened to find myself in London where everything, including internet access, is insanely expensive. So even though I was a witness to the whole “Hugh Grant throwing a can of baked beans” incident I haven’t had a chance to write about it until recently. (I have two things to say about that whole chain of events. 1) I would never had expected Hugh to be a consumer of baked beans and 2) He has a surprisingly good arm.)
The trip itself was one of my usual excellent adventures. It was a work excursion (yes, my job has me crossing the pond pretty regularly and no, I have no idea how I lucked into this position) that I wasn’t told about until two weeks ahead of time. This was a slight problem as my passport expires in June and you can’t travel into the UK on a passport that is expiring in the next ninety days. Which brings the whole “Expiration Date” concept into question. Wouldn’t that mean that my passport had already expired since I couldn’t travel on it? Anyway, I was able to get my passport renewed in less than a week and flew overseas. In the middle seat in a packed plane. I have to thank my parents for getting me an MP3 player for Christmas as I basically put my collection of New Pornographers songs on shuffle mode for eight hours. It made it a slightly bearable experience.
So we land and I make my way through Heathrow as I have on many occasions and wait at the baggage carousel. My boss (who had the exact same flights as me) gets his bag and I wait. And wait. And wait. To no avail. Yep, my luggage had disappeared somewhere between O’Hare and Heathrow and the nice airline employee told me that if it appeared they would let me know. Pissed as hell I head to the hotel, check in, find out that my room wasn’t ready yet, and drop off my backpack with the concierge so I can go shopping since I didn’t carry any clothes in my backpack and I had meetings in the morning.
Head out of the hotel to discover that a) the hotel was right next to Buckingham Palace and b) the London Marathon was finishing at Buckingham Palace. (By the way, for some reason I was referring to Buckingham Palace as “Buckminster” for the whole trip. Partly this was my combining Buckingham and Westminster, partly it was the fact that I feel that Buckminster Fuller deserves a palace named in his honor). So I fight the crowds and it dawns on me that at this moment I am overseas and am literally down to the clothes on my back. I don’t even have my backpack anymore. And I freak out because I really can’t handle that type of situation.
Of course, at times like this I ask myself “What would Ivey do right now?” And I put myself in his snowshoes and thought “Ivey would say ‘There’s nothing I can do aboot this so I might as well find a pub with a hockey game on.’” I do him one better and find a Gap and am able to buy slacks and a dress shirt, which cost more than I even want to think about. This after I went past all of those top end clothing places I read about where I could have bought a five hundred dollar shirt that would have been lost on my way back to the states.
Anyway, so I was happy that I at least had clothes for my meetings in the morning and wouldn’t be talking to clients in jeans and a Notre Dame football shirt. Head back to the hotel to get my key and officially check in. Get to the reception desk and I see Stephanie the desk clerk. Who was about six foot four, blonde, and vaguely eastern European. And regardless of the fact that I hadn’t slept in a day and a half, she was the most beautiful woman that I had seen in ages. Which led to the following conversation.
“Is there anything else that I can do for you?”
“Yes, when do you get off work and can I buy you a drink? And how interested would you be in obtaining a visa to the States?”
Ok, that conversation technically didn’t happen but I really did think about asking it. I showed restraint because a) I had been wearing the same clothes for 30 straight hours and I must have looked like hell and b) I’m chickenshit in these situations. However, I did spend the rest of the trip contemplating things I could break in my hotel room just so I could head down to reception.
My luggage did finally show up the next day, which meant that my running around wasn’t for naught but at least it wasn’t a world ender. It wasn’t as if I was entirely concerned about my luggage since all I had in it was clothes. Just that I had my favorite dress shirt in there, my favorite Notre Dame shirt, and my Notre Dame hockey shirt. And how can you run around London without proclaiming your support for a college hockey team?
More stories tomorrow including England’s longest bar, foreign languages, and yet another trek through Westminster
The five random CDs for the week:
1) The Neville Brothers “Family Groove”
2) The Police “Message in a Box” (Four disc set, so that adds up to five for the week)
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