flight, landing & customs

I’m writing this post into a pages document approximately 4 hours after landing at London Heathrow airport. It seems like I have a whole week’s worth of information to relay, and I’m going to try hard to make sense of it, as I’m currently being bullied by jet lag.

I should start off with my flight over. No, I should really start off with the stuff I didn’t tell you about the day before I left. Nothing really happened that was exciting except for Dad and I drove in circle after circle to the same places trying to figure out how to load money onto my isic card and open up new accounts with another nameless, but more worthy-of-a-name, bank. It was only 100 degrees out so it wasn’t a big deal or anything and I definitely didn’t sprout up a new batch of nose freckles from the sunlight that came through the windows. Nope.

Dad works on Sunday mornings and leaves really early, but somehow, on four hours of sleep, I managed to get up at 5:45 and sit around waiting for him to emerge from the back of the house, which he did around 6:25. It was the thing, saying goodbye to him, that made everything real--there is probably a quote or maybe I am making it up or maybe it’s one of those truisms that nobody needs to quote because everyone knows it or has heard it because someone else knows it--and it is, it ain’t real until it’s real, yo.

Up until that point--yes, what was only actually 24 hours ago for my body but what feels like a lot longer ago--and is, according to London’s time zone--I had planned, and I had expected to feel like I had more things under control and no matter how many times I told myself I had everything I needed, and no matter if I did have everything I needed, I didn’t believe it was happening. I am sitting in a room seven floors up (so it’s the eighth floor, for y’all Americans) in central London and I’m still not sure it’s real life. I sat through a 9.5 hour plane ride and braved the tube alone with a giant obnoxious piece of pink luggage, I walked down the wrong street for probably half a mile and turned around and sweated a lot and carried things heavy enough to make my hands fall asleep once I let go of them...and it still almost feels too distant from me, and my real life, and whatever routines or understandings I’ve ever had.

Part of it I can pinpoint as one of the pitfalls of being a writer. And--this is a quote--the poet’s life is the least poetic of all. I think of all the stories I’ve written set in London, after hours of research and many nights hovering in front of the Wikipedia page, and then I think about how when writing them, I did the research because I wasn’t there. I made it real to the characters and to myself for a time but it wasn’t actually real. People will argue about this, but as Stephen Hawking has written--philosophy is dead. (I know this two ways: one, there was a question about this on my honors biology final last winter quarter and two, I listened to part one of the audio book for some book of Stephen Hawking’s in which he said this. I will not admit that it was because I was hoping to fall asleep and The Emperor's New Groove, while as fantastic as ever, wasn’t making me sleepy.)

I guess I brought up the idea of people arguing is because I myself have stood with one foot on each side of the border--jet lag, so forgive atrocious metaphors. On the one hand, a writer who believes that what her stories say is true takes writing seriously and wants to believe in the power of a constructed reality. In terms of how this reality can affect the moods, emotions, motivations, and reactions of the writer, there’s no question of the power of this “construction.” But on the other hand, that writer insisting that the London of her stories is every bit as real to her as real London would be if she ever stepped foot in it has never been to London. Now I have been both people, and I believe both of me, but at the moment, as overwhelmed as I am and as strange and wonderful my four hours here have been already, I’m inclined to lean towards the problem I’ve set up in the latter example.

The airport was large, white, and clean, and everyone was moving fast. I mastered the art of tripping every time I got off the conveyor belts. The lady at customs gave me sass when I said my program started on “the 24th.” She said, “would you like to choose a specific month for that date?” and stared at me over her glasses. In the baggage claim area, there are yellow boxes hovering above each turnstile with the terminal numbers--but if you don’t happen to know this or guess it right, like I managed to, you will wander forever because half of the people there don’t speak English and your voice probably isn’t loud enough to attract the attention of someone who looks like s/he could help you.

Getting to the tube, you have to know what “tube” means--which is “underground,” and this is pretty much the most difficult thing to find out online in the history of finding out what “tube” means. Which is just to say it’s really hard and it took me several tries and creative rearranging of words. But if you happen to know it’s underground and you happen to know you need to take the Picadilly line from terminal three and you happen to figure out what kind of ticket you want to buy to go on the tube one time, and then you happen to find a spot on the next train, then you--well, you get onto the train. There was a nice old man standing around answering people’s questions so I joined the queue and, while staring at the sign that told me exactly where to go, I asked him where to go to get to the Picadilly line into Holborn. And he told me and was very nice.

I managed to lug my suitcase up into the mostly-empty car. Being completely brain-wiped and already-clueless-on-a-good-day as I was/am, I decided to shimmy it down to the middle of a row,  not understanding that this line serves central London and the fact that the car was mostly empty was because my stop was the second on the lineup. For a while, I sat and stared, fascinated, disbelieving, and nearly exhilarated all at once. Plus I am severely jet lagged and that can’t help.

From the tube, London is unforgiving, a mishmash of sour grunge and flying buttresses, neat vertical houses with window boxes and the pervasive trunk of underground wire underscoring brick and marble, grasses and forests of weeds. Glass on concrete on steel, white paint on brown borders on french windows, construction crane on steel monolith, green mesh on cinderblock. The light shining into the car from the sun outside is too warm. I caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of the window opposite me when we went through a black tunnel, and I horrified myself.

OK I am going to stop to take a nap and will probably finish this after orientation begins tonight!

And now that I’ve gotten about 30 minutes of sleep and had day one of London orientation down (which I will write about in its own post, coming soon!), I can continue.

To make the picture clearer to you: the night before I left, I got about 4 hours of sleep. On the plane, we went east, and swallowed up eight hours of nighttime. On the plane I slept on and off, and I think I was really, really asleep for probably three whole hours, and dozed for another couple. The main problem wasn’t that I wasn’t tired--because I think if I’d been more comfortable in my seat I could have slept the whole nine hours. I didn’t want to put my backpack up in overhead storage since I knew I’d be getting into it quite often, so I had it under the seat in front of me, which meant less legroom.

Continuing writing after the end of day two in London:

To make it clearer yet: I looked like the undead. And even then, not so nice. After moving into the hostel, I showered and then rubbed my face clean of what vestiges of makeup still clung to it and spent a good amount of time trying to get the rest of the mascara off the bottom of my eyes--which, I suddenly thought, was strange because I wore waterproof and I didn’t put any on the bottom. And--the lighting is not too strong here--I moved closer, squinted, and realized that I had never before known what a true dark circle was. And let me say--the smooth patches of slightly discoloured skin under the eyes of women in makeup commercials are as white as snow compared.

Typed “discouloured” without thinking about it. Transforming!

Okay, so some other things about the flight. My friend Chris (who is at Brunel!) had told me that I needed to let the airlines know ahead of time that I was a vegetarian, and that they’d serve me vegan food. But if you book with STA travel, as I had, you can’t contact the airlines directly with queries about your ticket as it’s not made out to you--it’s made out to STA travel, who makes it out to you. In other words, I had to go in to see someone at STA travel about the vegetarian ~alert~ and she said she’d sent it in, but this was me having complete faith that something very important would work out without my having had any hand in it directly. In light of everything I’ve done to prepare for this trip by myself, that was very stressful, so when I was boarding the plane, I asked every person I saw if they could check whether or not I was set up for vegetarian food. And since they served dinner very soon after takeoff, nobody came to tell me directly, but vegetarian and kosher meals are served first, and so I could see clearly mine was a vegan meal. I had a brown-rice and various vegetable patty with vegetables, a small side salad and fruit for dessert. Others got raspberry cheesecake, but it’s cool. Who even likes cheesecake, anyway?

I don’t mind flying--I don’t get claustrophobic and I don’t get anxious--but I become extremely nervous during takeoff. It’s not the feeling itself--that you’ve left your stomach behind, or that it’s floating up your throat, or that you don’t have a body at all--but I think it’s that that seems the time something horrible would happen if it could. This time I was hardly thinking of that. What was I doing? How’d I know this was a good idea? What if England was too different to my expectations, and what if I didn’t get along with the others? What if I missed home too much? For someone who lives with her family rather than apart from them at school, it was very hard to say goodbye. I still become overwhelmed with brief flashes of homesickness in inopportune places--the stairs, the three-story escalators at tube stations, in the middle of a crosswalk. I had an especially hard time when I got lost after exiting the tube station. After walking into “the city of Westminster,” I realized I was far off-track. I pulled out of the way--the London pavement is consistently full of an erratic stream of fast-walking traffic--took a good while to consult the map, and figured out I’d walked down a cross-street. But I’d probably walked half a mile with my luggage. My arms were falling asleep. I was hot, sweating, and could hardly enjoy the fact that it was a beautiful day. People were looking at me, and in that moment, if I could have--I don’t know--Apparated home--I should have. I felt miserable. I wondered why I thought I could ever do this--travel to a city nearly 10000 kilometers away by myself, and find my way around alone, with probably a collective 60 pounds of luggage, in a bustling, ruthless city?

On the plane, I ended up in a row seat. Looking back, I’m glad about that, because though I’d requested a window-seat at the same time I requested vegetarian meals, it wouldn’t have been worth the trouble it’d have been to get out to use the restroom or walk around. The window shutters had to be closed for probably seven hours of the 9.5-hour flight. When they were open, I could only see land for about half an hour, and I just leaned past the two others on my left and stared relentlessly. England is immediately distinguishable from the U.S. by nothing else if not the remnants of the common field system--the puzzle-like patches of yellow, green, brown land, with uprisings of fluffy trees at the peripheries of random fields. I remember once flying over--perhaps Kansas? and looking down into neat, square, patches of land. Also of flying over rice patties, which were somewhere in California, which were also neat and clean-lined.

And then there was London--the immense, unimaginable web of roofs, of tiny, stump-like streets, and then the glitter trail of the Thames in the early morning. I was stunned. Wow, London! I thought, over and over. Wow, wow, that’s London!

After we took off, I put on Brave, as I hadn’t seen it before. Seeing as this is a story about how a princess and her mother the queen first hate each other and then reconcile after the queen is turned into a bear with human consciousness, this was completely cathartic. I might have even sobbed. Maybe. Well I didn’t say that, but it’s just a possibility. And when that was done, I looked through the other movies, and tried to watch The Avengers--which I also hadn’t previously seen--and I am not too big on action movies, so I got bored after a helicopter crashed and Loki made 2849584758345767 evil faces. I proceeded to listen through the entirety of Feist’s newest album--Metals--which I never have purchased but plan to do after getting to Norwich, depending on how much albums in the UK cost. There’s a song called “Graveyard,” I think, which was so--well, haunting, and there’s a refrain in it that’s so surprising and chilling--bring them all back to life--and I’m working on writing a story that has something to do with whatever theme that is, and it just felt like a little moment in which I was myself. I think you really need those, at times that you’re in a completely new situation, something so big. Bringing things from home, beforehand, might seem like cheating--might seem like a hindrance to integration. And I think, perhaps, if you fixate on home, and you don’t go out, and you don’t try new things, that can happen, but more than that, I think that bringing things from home is a way to remind yourself that this is still you, and that you have the same person in your body, and that you are the same body, you’re the same cells, you’ve still got your super-unique genetic code in these cells. And to remember this is more important than you’d realize before leaving.

There were times in the plane that I became numb from sitting so long and couldn’t discern whether or not I was in my body. I burnt my tongue on my breakfast tea--and for a moment was completely guttered, and then felt a rising gratefulness, because it put me back into my body. I became, again, very aware of myself. It was the only thing I knew for certain on the plane, in that moment, and it was good.

If you’re not from the UK nor the EU, you have to fill out “landing cards” on the plane. I filled mine out in pencil and then had doubts. I asked a stewardess if she thought it was okay that I used pencil, because it didn’t say anywhere on the form to use BLUE OR BLACK INK; just to write in capital letters. And she said she didn’t know, and her accent was slightly troubling to my very tired translation skills--I do like the New Zealand accent, but when it’s strong I’m a bit lost on certain words--but I did hear, “well, usually you use ink,” and I immediately felt dumb for saying “pen” instead of ink, but she leant me a new form and a pen to fill out another card, just to be safe. This was about twenty minutes before we landed at Heathrow.

After she’d given it to me and I’d thanked her an annoying amount of times, a boy a row in front of me and on the other side of the aisle to my right--that is, on the end seat closest to mine--turned around and asked if he could use the pen when I was done. I saw his passport earlier and so had known he was American, but I think he was surprised to find out I was. I actually know this because he told me later he thought I was British at first, at which I nearly choked on my apple-cinnamon soda. But that’s for the next post. Now, I’d seen this boy dancing to his iPod at all hours and being very--erm, lively? animated?--with his finger on the touch screen. You know how some people will wave a finger around while trying to choose something to point to, or touch on a touch-screen? He did this every time he touched the screen, which is more than I care to remember. In fact, before I fell asleep the first time, I remember my last thought to be: okay, sassy finger.

After we had landed, while we were waiting for the scuffle to end for overhead baggage, and to get the okay to alight from the plane, this boy turns to me and asks if I’m a UC student. I admit part of me groaned inwardly, but I tried to smile and say yes. I mean, I did say yes. I probably smiled. Then he asks if I’m going to Norwich (pronouncing it incorrectly, as I’d done forever--phonetically, when in fact, the “w” is silent!) and I say yes, trying to squash any apprehension that might flicker around my face, and I ask him some things, and figure out he’s from UCSB studying environmental studies. It wasn’t until we were at the airport waiting in line at customs that I realized it was a total, unrealistic coincidence that we’d been seated so close to each other on the plane. (Later, I found out he’d also used STA travel to book his ticket, so that’s probably why. But still!) We got separated there, but I caught him walking right past baggage claim after I’d retrieved my bright pink luggage from the belt. I directed him to the right place and we walked out into--whatever is on the other side of the lines that divide you into “nothing to declare” and “materials to declare.” After assuming incorrectly that he’d be taking the tube, too, I found the tube entrance and then Matt--his name--tells me he’s taking a shuttle, so from this point on, I was on my own.

However, this is where I’m going to end my post, because now it’s 1 AM and I really need to wake up on time tomorrow--at customs, the little immigration officer asked me why I was coming to the UK, and I told her I was studying, and she asked me what I was studying, so I said, “English and Creative Writing.” And she looks up from my passport and sort of scoffs at me and says “English?” when I am clearly American. “Literature,” I clarified after a moment of thought. Then, “well, they just call it ‘English’ at my school...” And she laughed and asked for papers. What I was a bit--er--upset about, was that my admissions letter didn’t say the ending date of my program. Luckily, because I brought a lot more papers and copies than I could ever need, I’d printed out my student profile from the UEA website, which nobody told me I’d need!, because I had noticed, too, at home, that the admissions letter didn’t give an end date, and I knew from what I’d read about customs that they’d need to see when the program ended to give me my student visa. So it was basically just by the grace of God that I had that paper with me. And that was enough. She didn’t want to see anything else. But I’ve noted her sass above--and then when I asked if I needed to pay her there, she looked at me and said, “you don’t have to pay me anything,” and then after I’d expressed first disbelief and then awe and relief, she laughed, and as she was stamping the visa page, said, “is that how they do things in America?”

The irony is that here there are fees for many more services that we typically receive for free in California. I didn’t argue, though, because I was just relieved to have gotten through problem-free. And because I am not the arguing type. Probably, mostly this.

The airport was very hot. And I was very tired. And had been on a plane for 9.5 hours. I will, in my next post, describe more about the tube than I have here, as well as the first day of orientation in London. And then, in another couple posts, I will describe the second day in town, and then, after we’ve moved into Norwich and explored/napped/gotten ethernet, also a post about this.

I apologize for having taken so long to update in detail. This post is probably unintelligible anyway, because I know I did strange things with the progression of time, but I’ve gotten into the bad habit of, because of writing short stories, writing in theme-based order rather than chronological. If y’all need clarification or have other questions, please ask! But, for now, HELLO FROM LONDON.

(P.S. I woke up this morning to Big Ben and sirens ringing in the seven o’clock hour. It was magical.)