It's weird, I know, but I really *enjoy* airline food. It's more the process than the taste, obvs, but all the little packets to open? With your specially-calculated individual serving of butter or cheese or salt or chicken in mushroom sauce? The ritual of putting the chilled butter pat on top of the foil-wrapped hot meal, so by the time you've finished your tiny dish of salad (with concomitant individual tub of dressing), it'll be warm enough to spread. Nesting all the empty containers inside each other for ease of pickup when you're done. I also really dig the "why yes, I *will* have wine with that, thank you," and then getting a glass of free wine.
Yes, I know I've already paid for my plane ticket and it's not really free wine. But it feels like it is, and that's what really counts.
Then again, it totally sucks when you spill your glass of red wine on the front of the only pair of pants to which you have access for the next 36 hours. Not that I'd know.
This means, I'm sure you've guessed, that I'm back in the Wild Lands of India. It's all monsoony this time of year, and everything is gloriously green and growing. This also underscores Reason Number 9,276 Why I'm Glad I'm Getting Lasik: glasses that fog up the second you step off the plane. Or out of the car. Or out of the hotel. Go on, Atmosphere - just you TRY to fog up my EYEBALLS after I can see properly with them.*
I left New York on Friday night, and just checked into the hotel about an hour ago. In the interim, I've had four hours of driving from Mumbai, a nine hour flight from London, and a seven hour flight from New York. Oh yeah, and a little matter of a 12-hour layover in London. Be still my tremulously beating Anglophilic little heart! I engineered the itinerary such that I'd get to have a bit of a wander through the area I like to call "Oh good god yes, I've come home."
Covent Garden, the Embankment, all 'round Parliament and Westminster Abbey. If I'd read the tourist pamphlet I'd bothered to pick up, I'd have shown up at the Abbey in time to go inside and look around, but apparently that wasn't to be. Hyde Park is lovely and has some incredibly weird droopy trees. Old Compton Street is really, really gay. Unrelatedly, I totally had lunch and a couple vodka tonics on Old Compton Street.
Seriously -- I just feel so *right* walking around in England. It makes me really sad when I realize there's so much there I don't understand, having grown up elsewhere; the grocery had, like, dozens of different biscuits and I really feel somewhere deep down that I *should* know what they all are and what the good ones are and what the bad ones are, but I don't. At least there were approximately ninety zajillion English boys walking around to distract me from my dearth of biscuit-related knowledge. I found myself muttering under my breath about every three steps, "Hello I love youuuuuuu!" So that part was fun.
At this point I think I'm seriously overdue for a smallish nap of some kind -- I think I've gotten maybe 2 hours of bumpy, upright-sitting-in-a-plane sleep over the past two nights, and I'd prefer not to pass out in the middle of dinner. More updates, as they develop.
P.S. On the drive here, I TOTALLY SAW MONKEYS.
OH and P.P.S too: GUESS WHAT HAPPENED ON FRIDAY?? If you guessed that like an hour before I left for the airport, I totally the fuck got a PROMOTION, you'd be SO SO RIGHT because I totally did. Say hello to Biscuit, PROJECT MANAGER, and I can't even believe that I got an utter surprise of a promotion out of fucking nowhere, and it's been relegated to a P.P.S. status.
*Note: Dear Atmosphere: I love you. Please don't try to fog up my eyeballs. That sounds really unpleasant.