What Visiting the Same Country Twice Taught Me
I shouldn’t have been afraid to return to one & neither should you
A vast majority of the people I know would far prefer to revisit what’s familiar to them and many of them do. How else would the Cheesecake Factory still be in business today? When it comes to traveling, though, I’ve never had this inclination. Most specifically with one city: London.
I can still remember my first visit to London. I know that traveling from New England to OG England doesn’t sound all that interesting, but as someone whose definition of the word “vacation” previously consisted of sitting on their grandmother’s couch for two weeks a year in Hickory, North Carolina, this was a new and scary world.
One of my oldest friends, Katie, had moved to London and if there was ever a time to go somewhere far away, it was when there was a couch available to sleep on.
The first issue occurred prior to even boarding the plane and that was… In my excitement and attempts to remain organized, I over-indexed and managed to hide my passport from myself. Luckily, there’s an entire office for morons like myself where you can go last minute to acquire an expedited passport. As it turns out, if you pay the government a whole bunch of extra money, you can get what you’d like in a timely fashion. Imagine!
At nine in the morning, I rushed through Boston, dropped the paperwork and a small fortune off at the last-minute-passports-for-dumbasses office and a mere eight hours later, I was able to drag my stressed out and sleep-deprived self back to pick up said passport and roam onto a plane.
I sat down next to my seat-mate who revealed herself to be Australian and traveling to the UK to renew her citizenship. I stared at her for a moment and found the only words that came to me, “I’ve never flown on a plane over water before.” That’s probably not the statement you want to hear from your seat-neighbor prior to the start of a six-hour journey. At any rate, and most likely to my new Aussie friend’s relief, I opened the tray table and passed out on it out of exhaustion.
Eventually, I landed at Heathrow and placed the most expensive payphone call of my life to my parents so they could know that planes can, in fact, successfully fly over water.
I had a huge kink in my back from sleeping hunched over all night and the arrivals at Heathrow do not look as good as Love Actually makes them out to be. For one, it’s definitely not that clean and second of all, absolutely no one seemed to be smiling or remotely happy. That is except for me, upon seeing Katie kindly and patiently waiting for me.
I was lost, confused, still groggy, and back then an actual human asked you scary questions like, “where are you staying?” rather than a machine which now scans you through. However, I couldn’t help but beam at seeing a familiar face and realizing that I’d left the continent of North America for the first time.
It was what I would later call the best week of my life for years to come. I saw so many pieces of history I’d previously only read about; we took trains out to see the coast; we made a Thanksgiving dinner one night as it was November and Katie’s friends joined us for what I would consider a culinary unspectacular meal (though they all seemed to enjoy it).
I even ate possibly the most disgusting breakfast of my life in the spirit of cultural immersion. I mean, a black sausage, beans, and half a grilled tomato. WTF is that even, England?
But, the point was and remains, that this was farthest from normal I had ever been at that point in my life. The foods were new, the people were incredible and snarky but kind all the same, and as bustling as Boston can feel, it paled in comparison to exiting Katie’s Clapham flat at rush hour and riding a double-decker bus to Victoria station before heading out for the day (because also, I had no idea how else to get anywhere and I didn’t own a cell phone with Google maps in 2013).
Nothing would ever feel that fresh, we would never be that young, and we’d never feel as free as we did when we were twenty-five. It was a week of perfection and it was tempting to leave it in a time capsule so my beautiful London could never be ruined.
But a mere six years later…
I had embarked with my two best friends, Chris and Amanda, on a mission to go find some buried treasure… Yes, I know, three adults on a mission to find some buried treasure. As an aside, that story happens to technically begin in Astoria, Oregon, filming location of The Goonies, and involve a map that was handed down for generations in Chris’ family. I really couldn’t even make that up if I tried.
Moving along, we reached an impasse concerning our fine, if somewhat crispy map (it was partially burned in the seventies in a house fire). The next step in our treasure hunting journey was to try and find other maps of the same era to cross-reference as erosion from the earth, and sadly humans left us with today’s portraits of inaccuracy. And where did said maps exist? The British Archives located in, you guessed it, Kew Gardens, London!
I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth here. I was excited to return to London where my journeys around the world had initially kicked off, but there was trepidation as well. I worried that this beautiful, perfect place in my memory, which had been forged into a Utopia with the application of time would be forever tarnished somehow.
What I learned…
Just because I’m older, and just because I can’t replicate the same experience doesn’t mean I can’t have a new one that’s as good but a little different.
London was perfect then for a number of the aforementioned reasons. The novelty of something new, the energy of youth, and the freedom of being unencumbered by homeownership, parenthood, or a serious career path.
London is perfect now despite my life looking a lot different. I didn’t hit every tourist stop this time around, nor did I have an inhabitant showing me her local spots, and I needed to wear insoles in my Converses (hello thirty-one).
However, we went on an amazing adventure and handled texts that were created over two hundred years ago, I saw a new and different side of the Thames I’d first neglected, and we met some amazing strangers from Mexico, who led us to some more amazing (and local) strangers from England, and before you knew it, I was watching Amanda drunkenly recite Shakespeare with said stranger at four in the morning atop Primrose Hill.
I had been living in the splendor and subsequent fear of a memory, but I shouldn’t have. When you see an old and true friend, you can always pick up right where you left off and move forward; and to London is an old and true friend.
