Where Are Jack and Emily

by Emily

When I was a little kid, I kept all my spare change in a small glass jar and told people I was saving for a time machine. The process of saving for this trip seemed equally ham-fistedly hopeful and altogether unlikely until last July. Jack and I searched Google Flights just to see what we might be working with, and tilted our heads in synchronized confusion when we found a Norwegian Air flight from LAX to London for $298.

“I think we should just buy it,” Jack said, shrugging. “Yeah, I suppose,” I said. And just like that, this trip was really on.

The only downside to this flight was that it flew into Gatwick, Heathrow’s smaller and less romantic cousin, but our convenience was for sale and by god, the price was right. I wouldn’t have been shocked to discover upon boarding that we’d be required to help pass out juice or that the plane was made of, say, paper, but it turned out fine. We had a window and middle seat to sling our bodies across as imaginatively as possible for nine hours, during which we pretended to watch the first twenty minutes of Creed before looking at each other, nodding knowingly, and switching it to Miss Congeniality.

I’d spent most of our time through security and at the gate placidly crying. Our best friends Sheri, Sean, and Jack H. had dropped Jack and me off at LAX and left us with friendship bracelets, a nice letter, and teary goodbyes. I’m an easy crier—I cry when I’m sad, when I’m happy, when I’m in pain, when something is even medium levels of funny, when I see an animal I like—and this time I was crying partially because I wouldn’t see my friends for a long time, but mostly because I was blissfully confused at the statistical implausibility of having found myself in a city where I’m surrounded by so many people whom I love like crazy. The world has always been kind enough to usher me gently towards people I love ferociously…but never, like, twenty-five of them in one place. That was what compelled me to sniffle cheerfully as I removed my shoes for a very bored TSA man.

But I didn’t cry on the flight. When the plane took off from the tarmac and we watched the twinkle lights of Los Angeles disappear, the only feeling I could have was a sentimental desire to bask in the surrealism of something so seemingly outlandish—something that required us to quit our jobs and sell our cars and sublet our apartment—actually happening. “We’re really doing this.”

*****

We both slept on the plane, but it was that terrible kind of airplane sleep where even your subconscious mind conspires to ensure that you won’t get any rest by filling your dream theater with variations of frustrating and stressful attempts at a task. In my case, it was trying to lift a box that was both very slippery and very heavy. Upon landing in Gatwick, we grabbed the express train that would take us to Victoria Station in London’s underground, the tube. From Victoria we could take the tube to a station slightly less than a mile from our Airbnb.

And so it was that we landed in Victoria on Wednesday afternoon, exhausted and covered in the dirt of two nations. Both Jack and I have plenty of experience with subway systems, but the tube is slightly off-putting at first because a single line can fork, meaning you can be on the correct line and going in the correct navigational direction and still end up at the wrong station. Onboard the tube, Jack studied the maps on the wall and tried to figure this out. I wanted to help, but I was distracted by the train’s signage. One particular sign offered instructions to follow in an emergency, and in my loopy state I found it absolutely hilarious:
In an emergency

• Use the red emergency alarm to alert the driver
• It is safer to stay on the train than attempting to get off
• Follow instructions from staff or emergency services
• Do not take any risks

The sheer volume of text occupying this tiny sign was enough to make it remarkable to this American, who suspects that in her home country the same message would have been conveyed in about a tenth as many words and at least three illustrations of a stick man doing something wrong inside of a red circle with a slash condemning his actions. In the U.S., this sign would just say, “Do not exit the train,” and the fact that it was printed on an official-looking sign would be enough to inspire you to obey. But in London, the signs reason with you. They don’t just tell you to stay on the train, they explain to you why you should. Then they end their note on, “Do not take any risks,” which delightfully implies that all civilized people should reasonably agree on what constitutes a risk.

London, man. I was loving it already, and then we arrived at our stop and a disembodied British voice cautioned us over a loudspeaker to “mind the gap between the train and the platform.” I was sold. Who needs the rugged cowboy individualism of “watch your step” when we could instead exhibit the collectivist courtesy of avoiding offending the gap by stepping sure-footedly over it?

Plus, the woman at Immigration had asked me, “Where are you staying, love?” One hour in and they already loved me. London.

Eventually we found our stop and walked the mile to our Airbnb. Once again, Jack took on the majority of the navigational burden. This didn’t surprise me. Jack is a fantastic person to travel with for a whole host of reasons, and one of them is that you could blindfold him and spin him around three times in the dressing room of a pitch-black Hollister and he could still tell you immediately which direction is north. Meanwhile, I am the kind of person who spends so much mental energy gleefully appreciating the whimsy of London location names (Bakerloo! Picadilly! Charing’s Cross!) that I regularly need to be grabbed at crosswalks and physically stopped from walking into traffic.

Our Airbnb, which was the second room in an apartment belonging to a nice man named Andy, was little more than a mattress on the floor. I loved it immediately. Upon arrival, we alerted all interested parties that we’d survived our flight and then zonked out. We rose like zombies at around 7 that night in an attempt to nip our jetlag in the bud. A quick discussion about whether going to the nearby highly rated vegan spot with two dollar signs on Yelp was a bad financial decision or an amazing life decision ensued. We settled on the latter and helped ourselves to vegan risotto and our first cultural mishap.

In my exhaustion, I’d forgotten to look up tipping practices in the UK before leaving wifi. Our server ran our card for the bill, then had us sign a receipt that contained no hopeful little line where you’d add 20% in the U.S, but which did contain the polite hint that “gratuity is not included.” After carefully plotting out all of our options (“leave at some point,” “stay here indefinitely”), Jack and I summoned the nerve to just ask her straight out: “How does tipping work here?”

“We always prefer cash,” she replied. Fresh out of nerve that I would otherwise use to clarify, “Yes, but how much do we tip you?” and also completely devoid of the cash that mattered, we asked her to run our card again to tip. “How much?” she asked. Our bill was about twenty pounds. “Five?” we suggested. “Five pounds?” was her reply.

Later, a nice bartender from Nova Scotia would explain to me over a beer that tipping in the UK is a customary 10-15% and not actually required at all, in contrast to the U.S., where not tipping a server quite literally means you have prioritized your principles over a fellow human’s ability to pay their rent that month. The three often brutal years I worked full time in the service industry while putting myself through college have ingrained reckless tipping deeply within my lifeblood, so on the whole I would say I feel rather good about the unnecessary 25% we left her. I hope it gives her a good story to tell of the Americans she had the other night who were, in true American form, tipping wildly and constantly high-fiving each other (it’s true).

After dinner, Jack and I walked until we found a supermarket. It was nearly closed, so we skipped down empty half-lit aisles gathering supplies for the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches we’d pack the next few days, necessitated by the $50 a day budget that needs to sustain us for the next six months, including transportation, food, activities, etc. But we also picked up the second cheapest bottle of red wine. We drank it that night out of cups in our bedroom, rolling around and laughing in whispers so we wouldn’t wake up Andy. We fell asleep talking, lying sideways on the bed. And that was our first night on our trip around the world.

*****

The next day we packed up our lunches and marched more confidently toward the tube, ready to explore Westminster. Our dear friend and coworker Rachel had sent us a very helpful guide to the city, and we followed her advice like a crème brulee recipe, which is to say carefully and reverently. We spent the afternoon trotting around Trafalgar Square, in and out of the National Gallery, walking down to Buckingham Palace (I was determined to babysit Prince George and still have not surrendered), through King James’ Gardens, up to Big Ben and Parliament and Westminster Abbey. We headed over to the London Eye and South Bank and crossed the Jubilee Bridge, then over to the Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert’s, and then we headed home, the London rain spitting at us occasionally in a genial way.

It was fun. Hanging out with Jack is always fun. About ten minutes into the National Gallery we’d devolved into creatively captioning the the seemingly hundreds of paintings of adult-proportioned baby Jesus cryptically throwing up the Girl Scouts peace sign from his perch on Mary’s lap.

Any time we weren’t sure how something worked, Jack’s first suggestion was always, “Five pounds?” We continued to high-five at a rate much more frequent than is really acceptable. At one point I passed an actual, working cop wearing a hat that delighted me. Jack saw this and stopped and asked him if I could take a picture with him. Despite the fact that he was directing traffic, he smiled very Britishly and said, “Just a quick one, then,” posed, and then asked us where we were from. “California! Fantastic!”

I continued to be absolutely enamored of British English, where clipped vowels and gentle slang like “loo” rule the day. At one point I saw a store that was literally called “Snappy Snap,” and while I didn’t get close enough to find out for sure, my first impression of London leads me to believe it could have been a camera store, a store where things are done very quickly, or both.

*****

The next morning, we set out to meet my old friend Emily, who happened to be visiting London at the same time as we were entirely by coincidence. Emily and I knew each other as kids but didn’t become really close until our senior year of high school, where I spent most of my time doodling darkly in the corners of our AP study guides while she was president of everything and raised money to fight social ills and did morning announcements on the loudspeaker. She now works at an NGO near where we grew up in Washington, D.C., organizing to fundraise for neglected tropical diseases. If that makes her sound like someone you want to iron your t-shirt before you meet next to the Thames, just know that she laughs louder than anyone I have ever met and quite literally jumps up and down whenever she is excited, which is most of the time.

Emily lived in London for a semester in college, so she took us on a tour of her old hangouts. We wove in and out of the impressive throngs of crowds that had congregated to celebrate the rare London sunshine, watching street performers and a little English boy who sprinted across our path whispering that he was time traveling (after all this, I have no reason to doubt that he was). I continued to fall in love with London, this incredibly old and impossibly clean city full of polite people and towering things and regular reminders to mind the gap.

On our way across the Millennium Bridge, I heard Jack yell and I turned around, and suddenly I was staring at Pablo and Jonathan, two of our old coworkers. We’d known they were abroad for a video shoot and had made plans to meet up eventually, but instead we crashed into each other in a city of 8.5 million people. I wanted to say, “Unlikely!” but I also wanted to say, “Of course.”

Emily’s mom very kindly treated us remotely to afternoon tea. The whole thing was delicious and once again delightful because it was explained to me that the English created afternoon tea as a means of bridging the gap between lunch and dinner, and of course they did, why wouldn’t you spend three hours munching on hundreds of tiny cakes if you had the chance? London.

The night took us to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, a basically ancient pub that was rebuilt in 1667 and has famously been the haunt of Mark Twain, Voltaire, Charles Dickens, and a whole host of other writers. The whole charmingly gloomy stone interior and tiny staircases winding downwards (Mind your heads!) had me star struck, imagining Dickens jotting down notes in the midst of writing some of the books I love most in the world. We sat in the cellar and drank pints and discussed Emily’s love life with increasingly rosy cheeks, which is, I think, what Dickens would have wanted.

*****

On our final day in London, Jack and I met Emily at Portobello Road in Notting Hill. It’s a trendy little area apparently made extra famous by a Hugh Grant film I have not seen, and on Saturdays all sorts of vendors set up to sell antiques. I’m sure I’ve seen more people packed into one place before, but right now I can’t remember when. We walked through for a little while and then headed to Brick Lane for lunch.

Brick Lane is famous for the street stalls that crowd it on both sides selling delicious Indian food, so that was our first stop. From there we explored the hip storefronts selling kitschy Barbie head earrings and colorful street art covering just about every stationary flat surface. In a brick alleyway, an old man who introduced himself to Jack and me as Lenny the Sheriff told us his annotated life story and then asked, “And will you two be going under the bridge today?” “The bridge?” we asked, and he disappeared, not unlike a Christmas elf.

The bridge was an overpass surrounded by scraggly weeds, and behind it there was a lot surrounded by a chain link fence that held a hand painted sign: “Nomadic Community Garden. All are welcome!” We walked through the open gate hesitantly. There was nobody there except for a woman in a little makeshift outdoor café. She welcomed us inside and explained that the land developers who own the property had given her and a group of people permission to squat on it while it’s still vacant, and they’d created a funky little conscious community. Lumber piles bordered by signs encouraging people to take what they needed filled the lot, flowery street art once again covered every flat surface, giant lizard sculptures made out of tires dotting the space between circles of chairs where campfires had taken place. A corner was dedicated to a community garden where vegetables were sprouting. It was like an apocalyptic hippie wasteland. We loved it.

“Sign an Act of Kindness on your way out,” the woman told me. There was a wall dotted with birdhouses where you were supposed to write some encouragement for a stranger. It felt like the kind of discovery you imagine you’ll make while traveling, something cool and local and free, and there it was, thrust upon us entirely by dumb luck on our third day out of the country.

Jack and I spent the next hour swinging around on the playground in the nearby garden, which is the more-lovely name the British use for parks. That night, we went out to a few other several-hundred-year-old pubs with Emily and her friends, Jonathan, and Pablo. It was wildly fun. We took the tube home right before it shut down, one last gentle reminder to mind the gap ushering us onto the dark, quiet streets. That was our last night in London.

*****

Jack and I spent Sunday and Monday in Liverpool, home of the Beatles and cheap-ish drinks. After the approximately twenty-five miles we walked in London, it was nice to nap on a five-hour Megabus ride and then just relax in a smaller square-mile area and spend time with each other. We explored a bunch of really cool modern art and science museums in between day drinking and debriefing London.

On Monday night we brought our groceries down to our hostel’s basement kitchen, and upon inquiring to the room if anybody had seen a can opener, a stoic Brazilian guy named Leo immediately took our canned ravioli out of our hands and knifed the top off with near-surgical precision.

“What are you guys up to tonight?” he asked. We told him we wanted to check out the Cavern Club, the self-proclaimed cradle of British pop music and home to the formation of the Beatles’ musical identity.

“You’re going to have a blast,” he promised, and then showed us videos on his phone of himself jamming out with wild abandon to “Hey Jude” in the middle of a rowdy crowd.

And so with high expectations, we arrived at the Cavern Club prepared for the kind of night that could impress a stoic Brazilian. I think Leo would have been proud of us. A singer-songwriter named Callum Mac was performing, and he expertly carried the crowd from gentle head-bopping while early adopters dance in their own stage-side circle all the way to that special point where we’re all red-cheeked children gleefully screaming song requests up at the stage as though he’s our patient schoolteacher. Nothing bonds you so immediately with a group of strangers quite like fist-pumping together to The Proclaimers’ “Five Hundred Miles” and then giving your all to the call-and-response chorus of “ba-da-da-da-da.”

*****

As I write this, we’re on a bus to Glasgow, Scotland. I’m exhausted and a little carsick and very happy. England was beautiful and fun in every moment, but it also held it in a certain unspoken nervous energy, like the whole time Jack and I were fully aware that this was Week One in what we’ve planned to be six months of full-time tourism. We have no obligations, no requirements, nothing we must do that hasn’t been dictated by us, and while it’s incredibly freeing, it’s also a little bit overwhelming.

Back home, Jack often remarks on how driven I am by fear of missing out. It’s the thing that drives me to research concerts and organize weekend trips and call in dinners with friends we haven’t seen in awhile, and while it’s not a good thing if it tips into real, actual fear, I think in doses, it’s healthy. It gets us out of the house and on adventures. But away from home and out in the world, unchecked by logistics and most responsibilities, given full freedom to expand and exist, it’s blinding, almost.

It’s like this: You expect that during the almost year-long preproduction of a trip like this, at some point you will have sufficiently researched destinations and tactics and customs, and when that scale tips, you will evolve like a Pokemon into a Good Traveler. But then that point never comes, and suddenly you find yourself out in the world with a map in your hands and an iPhone on airplane mode and an overwhelming sense that you are not ready, that you are doing this thing wrong. But you pack a lunch and grab your best friend’s hand and go out and do it anyway, and even if you both feel a little like frauds, at least you’re frauds together. At least it doesn’t actually matter.

Humility is what I’m holding close to my heart. If we’re chasing something at all out here, it’s the chance to learn. We’re figuring out how to travel and expecting to make mistakes, and so long as we mind the gap between what we think we know and what we don’t yet know, I think we’ll be alright. I do.

*****