London

(PRE-POST: We Also posted Venice today! Don't miss that one!)

One last hurrah. We booked our flight out of London, so we spent one night there. Our flight was actually out of Gatwick Airport, which is a bit of a journey outside of London, so we stayed in a little town called Crawley where our Airbnb was 15 minutes door to door from the airport by train. Pretty much all we did in the town was eat lunch at a kebab place. The two men working there (different shifts…we stayed there for a while) were very friendly. They were Turkish, and knew their kebabs! They both (independently) asked what Monisha’s ethnicity was, noting that she looked like she could be part Turkish. Monisha’s been told in several of the countries we’ve been to that she looks like she could be from there.

We Skyped Brian (Monisha’s dad) a few days before going to London, and he recommended we see a play in London if that sounded fun to us. He said the caliber of acting there is phenomenal, and his friend always knows what good plays are going on there. It sounded great to us. So he got us tickets to see The Ferryman at 7:00pm on Tuesday night.

We had a perfect plan: check-in to our Airbnb at 1:30, take a nap (we slept about four hours the night before and then one more hour on the plane), then go to London. We thought we’d have time for a leisurely dinner, go see the play, and then stay out and go to a few blues / jazz bars Monisha found online that had live bands playing every night! Sounded ideal. Unfortunately, transportation issues meant we couldn’t get to our Airbnb by 1:30 and we had to wait until 4:30 to check-in. Hence spending a bunch of time in the kebab place. This meant no nap…serious bummer. The train schedule to London at that time also meant we had to check-in and then rush off immediately to have even a hope of enough time for dinner. The schedule looked like we could have a relaxed, though still quick, dinner in London before the play. That was, until the train we were going to take was canceled. The one we could make had us rushing through the train stations, metros, and streets to get us to the theatre at 6:40pm. We were very happy to not miss the play, but really wanted food (we were already hungry and the play was 3 hours long). Things ended up working out for us. Next door was an awesome Japanese takeout place with ample delicious looking options. We got sweet and sour chicken with noodles, and wonton soup. We scarfed it all down, and bellies full, we took our really good seats to watch a play in London.

The play was fantastic. We couldn’t have enjoyed it more. Gripping, suspenseful. Amazing actors, including some really cute and talented young children, a baby, a goose, and a bunny (unclear whether the animals were real or not…they looked very real! But Nolan assures Monisha they were puppets) It was a perfect way to spend our last evening.

The travel options back from London to our place were not as plentiful as we had hoped. We went back and forth between rushing to a station to catch a route leaving now, and relaxing because it looked like there was another option a little later. In the end, we found a good option that gave us a little time at one of the blues bars with a live band. It was a cool place: fun music, good atmosphere, people dancing.

We opted to walk instead of metro to the train station so that we could stroll the streets of London. We walked by Buckingham Palace, saw the London eye from afar, and got a little taste of London at night.

Our transportation back home was less stressful, and produced a fruitful grocery trip at a place in the airport (where we had to transfer). We got yogurts, chocolate milk, and baby bananas for the morning, plus a pasta salad to snack on then. In the morning, after about 5 hours of sleep (and having had a similar amount the night before), we were a little loopy. We still are now, I suppose. Anyway, we ate some baby bananas in the morning. They were so cute. I [M] don’t know why I liked them quite so much, but they brought me a lot of joy. And made their way into some morning song lyrics.

  

  

And now…well, here we are on the plane. We’re coming home. They just announced that we’re arriving in 30 minutes. It’s hard to express how we feel. We feel a lot. We listened to several songs on this flight that really struck a chord with us. It’s quite emotional, actually. We’ve been traveling for over three months now. During the first real conversation the two of us ever had, Nolan told Monisha that when he graduated, he wanted to go travel the world. Monisha said she saw herself doing the same. Here we are, four years later. We just did it, together. We had three months of adventures together that we’ve been looking forward to for months, and in some sense, years. It’s amazing that we have those memories. It’s sad that those experiences are over. But now we’re coming home. To friends, family, Box, Rosebud. To the start of a new era of our life.