Calling London (The Street, vol. 2)

I absently gazed out over Trafalgar Square as the record breaking heat sapped my body of it's last remaining energy. I leaned my elbows on the cool stone barrier, laid down my head, and burned with jealousy of the multitudes below with their rolled-up jeans and bare feet, gently kicking their toes in the waters of the fountain.

It must be duly noted that, at this point in our second London excursion, I was tired, drained, it was blazing, and I'd just spent £20 to have the wrong dish served to me in an Italian restaurant, which provided no relief from the heat, as 93 degrees is enough of an anomaly in the U.K. that air conditioners are never provided. We had somewhat aimlessly meandered along the Wilde walk, but currently had no direction, which added to the mounting sense of frustration and acrimony.

People-watching, while innately very creepy, is nevertheless endlessly interesting. My eyes traced the population in the square, noticing a couple playfully splashing water on each other with their toes; a man in a red beret peacefully combing a novel; children chasing one another, their mother not far behind; suits discussing God-knows-what over coffee and cigarrettes. I just wanted to cast off my backpack and lose myself in that place. This was London. I was tired of tracing over maps, digging through my bag for my camera, debating what we should and should not do - what we MUST or MUSTN'T do - scanning the skyline for those must-sees, thinking about this assignment, and being part of the same group. Not that I disliked my group at all - but it's one experience to explore a foreign place with a group, and it's a completely different experience to do it alone. With a group, a sense of propriety and a working order develop, and there are clashes of personality and inclination. Should we visit the Portrait Gallery? Closed. Well Soho is a short distance from here, and it's part of the walk. Maybe we should stop for a pint. Is anyone else hungry? If we look to the right, we'll see suchandsuch attraction, sporting suchandsuch architecture, famous for thisandthat event. I was bored with all that. I felt as if I'd been trying to manifest some vague sense of touristic destiny, glancing and walking within the vicinity of eveything without really noticing anything. I wanted to stop looking at London and try to be part of London. Is this even possible for a tourist? I found myself wandering what it is to "experience" London, and it seemed to me that a city is really nowhere to be found. There is the vague, overarching term London, but in reality, how does it exist? Is it in the museums and the tourist attractions, held up as essential to the experience of London, yet largely contrived and static in nature? Or is it in the flow of people in and out of a place like Trafalgar Square, the experience therefore being rendered as nebulous, mercurial, and ultimately unnavigable? To me, tourist attractions are like a person's clothing, whereas the blood and water of a place is ultimately stripped of presentation, of seperation between I and The Other - so that the experience is one focused more on integrating (as much as possible) into it's unpredictable vibrancy, rather than beholding what the city itself holds up as representative.