So last night, like I said I was going to, I enjoyed a
drink, some chocolate and a movie. Well, as it turned out, there was one factor
in that combination that I did not think of; caffeine in the Coke that I mixed with
whiskey. So I was awake ALL night. Good thing: I worked a great deal on my
short story and reached a point with it that I am fairly happy with. Bad thing:
I only slept two and a half hours. Even though I finally went to bed at six
(forcibly as I still wasn’t tired), I awoke an hour before my alarm went off
and tossed around for a bit trying to claim that extra hour, but which I was
ultimately unable to do. So a night of two and a half hours of sleep compounded
on the five hours of sleep I got the night before. Honestly, sleep has been hard
to come by. I am not on my sleeping pills at the moment, and have been using
the insomnia as a way to maximize my time while I am here – explore during the
day, homework at night. So far, it has worked pretty well – albeit coming down
with a cold as a result. But I have been getting only an average of five to six
hours of sleep a night, rarely over seven. So far though, it’s been
surprisingly alright, I think the lower stress level this semester has helped
with that. Still though, I admit that two and a half hours was not NEARLY
enough and I was quite tired today because of it.
One of the other good things about being up that late,
however, was the chance that I got to have a conversation with a dear friend
whom I haven’t seen in years. So that was very good and something I enjoyed
very much.
This morning, Alyssa, Abi, Hannah and I all met up and made
our way over to Harrod’s, where we spent quite a while looking around at the
ridiculously priced name-brand merchandise. When I left this morning, I got
ready just as usual, however, by the time we got to Harrod’s I had remembered
just how ritzy this place was, and remembered the kind of people that shop
there; high class, and loaded. So walking through the door in torn jeans,
Nirvana tank-top, coat, studded boots, and hat with the Pink Floyd buttons;
basically, I looked like a bum. Harrod’s is quite the marvel, and again, just as
the first time, I felt as though I were walking around with a constant
expression of disbelief on my face. A belt buckle that cost the equivalent of a
year’s worth of college tuition at UPS, real fur and leather coats, bottles of
whiskey upward of £13,000 (double that if you want the dollar amount) - I was
afraid that if I just so much as touched something, it’s value would decrease
by 10%. The funny thing though, was that whilst walking around, I kept getting
some pretty interesting looks. There were definitely one or two out-rightly disapproving
glares, but even more times getting looked up and down by other customers
shopping there. You could tell who was wealthy by how they examined you and how
they (generally) lifted their nose afterward in that “better than you” way.
Honestly, I wasn’t surprised, it was very obvious I didn’t belong to that
crowd, and also because there is a very strong sense of class division here in
England. Where many of those social divides occur in America along racial
borders, here, it is all about class – whether or not one comes from a family
of “old money,” basically, families with a long history of prestige and wealth
sit on the top of the food chain, just below royalty. So you can imagine all
those looks I was getting.
After a while, we took the Tube over to Tower Bridge which
we crossed over to the other side of the river. We had heard a rumor that a
chocolate company near there was handing out free chocolate in celebration of
Valentine’s Day, and so we thought we would try and snag some before checking
out Tower Bridge. Well, when we got over there, the wind along the river was
quite cold and the rain was getting more intense, so we opted not to go up to
the top of Tower Bridge today, but leave it for a nicer day. However, we still
wanted chocolate, so we began hunting around the pavilion where it was supposed
to be. Not finding it, we asked some security guys if they knew where it was, and
they uncertainly guessed that a nearby gym was passing it out, so we went in,
and sure enough they were handing out purple boxes with a red heart balloon
tied to them. We took our prize outside and opened up the box; face
moisturizer. It had been the wrong place, there was no chocolate at all. We
wandered around a bit more and took some pictures. I had to laugh because while
everyone else’s balloons were perfectly heart shaped as they should be, mine
was a deformed blob somewhere between a heart balloon and what a normal balloon
should look like. When I let it go, it kind of bounced along on the ground instead
of floating up as it should, eventually it did but we joked, “yeah, I’m sure
that’s not a metaphor at all.”
Because we had not gotten through nearly as much of Harrod’s
as we had wanted, we made the decision to return there and spent the next few
hours continuing to wander amidst the marvels. At one point there was a grubby
short ladder propped against a wall (probably someone fixing some lighting),
and I told Hannah, “Ha! Now that’s probably the one thing in this store I could
actually afford.” We also decided to get lunch in the grocery section, however,
the one thing Harrod’s doesn’t have is a casual sitting area where people can
sit down and eat lunch, so we wandered around and eventually came across a stairwell.
The stairwell was pretty vacant – not many people choose the stairs when they
have the option of escalators and elevators – so we sat down and enjoyed our
meal there. 
When our feet were too sore, a couple hours later, we left
and took the bus to a part of town where Abi said there was a great place to
get Bubble Tea and some good Philippian snacks. We spent a while there, eating
dinner, resting our feet and just talking before eventually heading back to
NIDO. Even though it was Valentine’s Day and none of us had dates (or whose boyfriend
was long distance), it was a really enjoyable day anyway. I felt certain today
that I had found a great group of people to hang out with because we had a good
time and no one was hung up on either the sardonic side or the extremely mushy
side of Valentine’s Day. We had a lot of laughs today and made the very best of
it, in the end, pulling off a successful and enjoyable Valentine’s Day.
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