This June, I’ll be in France, a country I’ve been to many times, though most often, Paris was my destination. On my very first visit to Europe as a young woman, I was wide-eyed and wide open to new experiences. Once there, I wrote my impressions of the places I visited. But we were decades away from cellphone selfies, and all I have to show for those trips are a few photographs, now nearly-faded, snapped with a relatively bulky analog camera.

Part 1

I’m on a three-week break from my first job after graduate school, and my friend Sonia and I spent it on our first trip to Europe. On a packaged budget tour.

London

Aug 30

We left LA at 6:35 pm and flew for nine hours and forty minutes. When we were not eating or drinking, we were either bored or asleep. We got to London at 12:15 pm England time the following day, and waited in the airport almost two hours for our luggage, the tour director, and the tour bus.

Aug. 31

There’s a reassuring sameness to big-city airports. But the afternoon is shot because we are pooped and it’s Sunday. Nobody does anything on Sundays in this city, it seems. The irritability of fatigue and hunger is aggravated by a strange place, strange food, and high prices that must be translated into strange money.

Sept. 1st

Our first sightseeing day in London. Continental breakfast in our room has to be considered adequate, especially to Sonia, my traveling companion, who is used to more. The butter is good and makes the breakfast worthwhile. The tea is strong. Milk is necessary to mellow it.

The day is full of “must-see” sights. Westminster Abbey is impressive and awesome. Several centuries old, it’s replete with the souls and bodies of the royal, the greats of science and art, the unknown rich who could buy the honor to mix with the rightly chosen, and the solitary unknown who must have been randomly chosen to satisfy the British sense of fairness and duty.

nave, Westminster Abbey:https://www.westminster-abbey.org/visit-us

The place makes me feel big somehow when I know it must make me feel small. Maybe, I’m both awed and proud of the affirmation of greatness of the humanity that built the Abbey so it could stand centuries for posterity.  Awed as well of the humanity that fills its tombs to show that man or his spirit could last for centuries.

Buckingham Palace and the changing of guards follow. The enthusiasm from being at the Abbey spreads over to the “must-witness” ceremony. But only for a short while. I did not feel like a tourist at the Abbey, but I feel like one here. And I feel foolish. The commoners climbing the fences for pictures of the red guards standing motionless for an hour with 40-pound shakos on their heads seem pointless to me. I walk back to the tour bus.

When my fellow tourists return, someone asks me if I saw the horse-mounted police parade by. Yes. So? But I don’t give voice to that question. She says that now I can say to others I’ve seen the palace, etc.

The tower of London fills our afternoon and Piccadilly Circus, our night. The tower fires my imagination and reawakens my childish delight about kings and queens, princes and princesses, knights and ladies. They actually lived. There are artifacts of their existence. Maybe, my incredulity arises from living in a country without the history and tradition of the English and being confronted by what I might have believed were fairy tales of my childhood.

Piccadilly Circus hints at a possible side to the British personality. Then again, that may just be my stereotype clashing with the reality before me. Glaring, vulgar neon lights against a backdrop of old, majestic edifices. Little porno shops and porno theaters that outnumber the numerous non-trashy theaters. At night, lights and activity in both types of theaters compete with each other and overshadow the historic buildings

We go to bed happily tired.

September 2

This is a slower day. It has to be. We devoured the plums first. Our feet ache, our joints are stiff. Our itinerary includes Harrods and the British Museum. The tour director tells us they have their own individual distinctions. My companions (Sonia and a couple we met earlier) are drained.

These two places aren’t equal to the sights we’ve already seen. Besides British prices are too much for us and culture does not interest us equally. So, Sonia and the husband sit and wait while the wife and I wonder the rooms and rooms of Harrod furniture and silk fabrics. At the museum, this pattern is repeated much of the time with ancient art and crafts.

By three in the afternoon, my companions decide to go back to the hotel. I go to experience London on my own. But there isn’t enough time. The mechanics of moving around London is a prerequisite skill that takes time to learn. I learn a little about the buses that would help us for a last look at London the following morning. And I get into a conversation with a Londoner and a Portuguese tourist and feel in touch again with the rest of humanity.

I go to Piccadilly Circus on my first venture alone. In the daytime, the place feels different. No glaring lights. I hardly notice the porno shops. The British are about their daily business. The left-handed traffic circle confuses me but it’s plain the Londoner has mastered it and accepted it. What would they think of our right-sided traffic?

At a theater, I notice the title of a play I didn’t see before: No Sex Please. We’re British. It claims to have run for some ten years. Going to a theater production is, for the moment, out of the question.

September 3

We get our last glimpse of London on an around-London bus tour. Some of what we see is a review of what we have already seen. The rest solidifies my resolve to come back and stay longer.

Modern buildings appear to be an oddity here. Most seem to have had some history no matter how insignificant some buildings look. It makes me wonder how much of a burden it is to the British to live with so much history and majesty. They do look as if they bear it with dignity.

In the afternoon, we fly to Athens—a smooth uneventful flight (see Part 2).