Full days in London: 5
Hours of sleep on the way: 4
Hours of sleep on the way back: 0
Servings of lamb:
Servings of gazpacho: 4
Visits to the Barbican Conservatory: 1
Times an emergency announcement said we should leave the Tube station: 1
People other than Melissa and I who attempted to leave the station: 0
Steak and wine fancy lunches: 1 (for just twenty pounds!)
Museums / Galleries: 5 (British Museum, British Library, Wellcombe, Barbican, Tate Modern)
Plays: 4 (Dr. Semmelweis, A Strange Loop, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, Tambo and Bones)
Of the 4, plays about injustice: 4
Of the 4, plays about injustice regarding Black Americans: 2
Of the 4, plays without a curtain call: 1
Of the 4, plays with an actor who was playing a robot who could mime sitting at a desk, for a really long time, despite physics: 1
Of the plays with an actor who was playing a robot who could mime sitting at a desk, for a really long time, despite physics, who then crossed his legs: 1
Nando’s: 1
Pounds off our Nando’s dinner due to my points from Dublin: 3
Times we listened to a French server struggle to pronounce “ham” in a way that English speakers could understand: 1 (two groups, though)
Time I ordered the special, forgetting that “ham” means prosciutto in England: 1
Times I bought a bunch of souvenirs at the British Library, got absolutely soaked when leaving the library, and had all the souvenirs spill into the street as the paper bag they were in fell apart: 1
Time I was glad one of the souvenirs was a purse, because I was able to fit all of the other souvenirs inside it: 1
Times relearning that the Greeks thought Persian men were feminine for wearing eyeliner, jewelry, and pants and that while Alexander the Great adopted Persian horse-riding robes, he drew a line at the pants that surely would have made riding more comfortable: 1
Conferences attended: 1
Days Melissa made the mistake of having the conference coffee: 1
Days when I was about to give the first presentation of the day, but it had to be delayed because someone doing maintenance in the building got out the jackhammer: 1
Times I learned some people thought monk fish looked like monks: 1
Visits to the Coral Room: 1
Times realizing the food there is very expensive, but not very good: 1
Visits with Courtney and Liam: 1
Pubs with Courtney and Liam, including my old neighborhood pub in Bloomsbury: 2
New favorite historical paintings: 1
Times we discovered bank accounts had been opened in our names by a scammer: 1
Amazing Indian birthday dinners, including the best broccoli of our lives: 1
Pimms in a can: 1
Times we dropped in on some old friends before a play and they fed us pasta with homemade rocket walnut pesto: 1
Bottles of wine we demolished before heading to the play: 3
Night we got out of a play, and I marveled at the sky, and how, after all these years, I remembered how to get home from the drizzly London streets: 1
Times our Airbnb host sent someone to meet us with the keys at the wrong time, due to not reading our messages correctly: 1
Times our host was entirely unhelpful about the wifi: 2
Times we found syringes in the Airbnb: 1
Times we discovered our host had left the door from the bedroom to the apartment patio unlocked, after having slept there a few nights and left important things like our passport there during the day: 1
Times we realized, after getting back, that our host had overcharged us by about $500 dollars: 1
Times Airbnb tried to contact him: many
Times he took his whole listing down rather than answer us or Airbnb: 1
