A Trip to London Part 2: Scary Horse Statues, Men with Guns and the Artful Dodger.

In my last post I told you all about the seemingly endless process of applying for my J-1 Visa. The paperwork, the bizarre questions, the ordeal of finding the US Embassy for my interview and, of course, the queues, queues as far as the eye could see!

But, once my interview was over and done with and I'd bravely made my way back through the gates of the Embassy, past the guards with giant guns ("you'd better get used to guns if you're going to America. I've seen the ID channel. Guns everywhere!" as my mother helpfully added), my mother and I had the rest of the day to spend wandering around London. And here's how that panned out...

I wanted to go to the Dickens Museum. I mean, they have costumed tours and a gift shop. What's not to love? But my mother isn't a big fan of Dickens...or museums. She wanted to have a wander around Debenhams instead. In the end we compromised ended up in the Disney Store.

Needless to say I got in Cinderella's carriage

From there we went and had a quick nose around Selfridges. I'm not entirely sure my mother understood just how very out of place we were. She kept looking at me and asking if I'd seen anything I wanted to try on. When I told her I definitely couldn't afford anything in the shop she seemed to think that I was just being a bit of a miser until she spotted a dress she fancied and took a look at the price tag.
"I don't have my glasses on. What does that say? £19.50?"
"No...that's £1950."
We quickly vacated Selfridges after that.

At the start of the day it was a struggle to get my mother on the tube. Yes, it’s dank and scary and squashed full of people who shoulder you out of the way and push past you on the station. Yes, it smells and yes it is totally unnatural for human beings to be propelled from one end of the city to the other underneath the ground at hurtling speeds. But, for all its unhygienic and terrifying qualities, the tube really is the best way to get around.

And, once my mother got over her initial fear that we were all certainly going to die and saw how quickly we could hop on at one station and pop up somewhere entirely new, she really began to enjoy it. In fact, when we got home that night, she and my dad discussed the wonders of the tube in depth for half an hour or more. As if it was some kind of miraculous new invention.

Next ventured over to Camden Market on a whim. It was awesome! You could spend days wandering through the little stalls, peering at all the weird and wonderful curiosities on display. There were clothes, jewellery, ornaments, books, food, artwork…pretty much everything you can imagine, only quirkier and more bizarre. There were little winding alleyways, cobbled tunnels and shops that were tucked up and hidden out of the way, a barrage of different sights and sounds and a new smell every time we turned a corner (some good and some…not so good).

The Stables Market was my favourite (despite the fact that the horse statues made me very uneasy) because its nineteenth century stonework, worn floorboards and general hustle and bustle made it feel almost as though the Artful Dodger could pop up at any moment. I guess it was the next best thing to the Dickens museum.
  

Next we headed to Covent Garden. Yes, I know it’s one of the most famous places in London and yes I know it has a Chanel and a Burberry and it’s very fancy and all that, but I preferred the randomness and weirdly endearing griminess of Camden Market. Besides, I am in no way posh enough to go wandering around Dior so it’s just as well that I stick with the little stalls in Camden where a pair of earrings is £4. 

When the time came for us to get our train, neither of us were ready to head home, partly because we were having such a lovely time nosing around London and partly because we had foolishly left it until rush hour to catch the tube. Commuters are hostile at the best of times, but in the city centre at 5:30pm a tourist could potentially lose a limb.

Spending the day in London made us realise that we really don’t take advantage of the interesting places we have on our doorstep. Here I am jetting off to explore America and I still haven’t even begun to explore to UK. So I’m going to make an effort to travel more within the country. Top of the list? The Dickens Museum!

A Trip to London Part 1: I Take on the US Embassy

In the midst of my stress-ridden daily routine of filling in online paperwork, making my endless way through lists that never seem to get any shorter, staring into my wardrobe for hours on end without ever coming to any kind of conclusion on what needs to be stuffed into the case that I have yet to purchase, and countless other anxiety-inducing preparations for my trip next month, let me tell you about my trip to the US Embassy in London.

Perhaps it will distract me from the cruel blow of waking up this morning to find we were out of Nutella.

In a world where tourists need to be screened by the DHS before they can hop on a plane to Disneyworld, it probably goes without saying that I needed a visa for my trip to the USA next month. Applying for a J-1 visa was (in my case at least) a long, convoluted and slightly terrifying experience. It involved excessive amounts of paperwork, bizarre security questions (“Are you planning on entering the country to become a prostitute?” “Are you a drug smuggler?” “Do you plan on becoming a drug smuggler in the near future?” and so on), an array of important reference numbers, passwords and memorable information (all of which seemed to disappear as soon as I needed them) and, of course, a hugely unflattering visa photograph that makes me look like I actually could be a prostitute and/or drug smuggler. And, when all of that was done, I still had to head up to London for a face to face interview.

Naturally my mother wouldn't hear of her fully-grown adult daughter heading into the city alone so she tagged along too.

Our first issue was trying to find the embassy. As if I wasn't already hampered enough by my non-existent sense of direction and complete inability to read street maps, my phone died as soon as we stepped off the tube so Google wasn't around to save us. As it happens, there’s a big square where all the embassies are and, once we found the square, it was simply a case of working out which one was the American embassy.

“Do you think they’ll have a flag outside?” My mother asked as we aimlessly wandered around the square.

“There’s a star spangled banner on the moon. I’m pretty sure there’ll be one outside the US embassy.”

Looking back, I’m still not entirely sure how it took so long to work out which one was the right building. The US embassy was about the size of four or five of the others, with an enormous eagle on top along with what was probably the most gigantic flag I've ever seen in my life. 

There was a lot of queueing involved to get into the embassy. Queueing to get my forms checked, queuing to have my bags searched, queueing to explain to the security guy that the suspicious electronic device in my bag was my rape alarm (“because a girl can’t be too careful”), queueing to get my fingerprints taken, and, finally, queueing for the actual interview.

The interview itself was actually the quickest part of the whole experience.

“What do you plan on doing in the USA?”

“I’m going to be teaching arts and crafts at a summer camp in Maine.”

“Ok. Well, I’m going to approve your visa!”

It was as simple as that.

Obviously it was a lot more upbeat and enjoyable because the interviewer was American and therefore wonderfully friendly and happy. In fact, I got so caught up in the moment that I told her to “have a nice day”. I hope she didn’t think I was being facetious…

And so trauma of my visa application was over (apart from the ordeal of trying to get hold of it a few weeks later when the embassy released it to a mystical courier service whose location is so well hidden it might as well be protected by a magic spell that makes it invisible to muggles. But that's a story for a different day). And so, with my appointment at the embassy behind me and a full day in London ahead of us, we set off to explore.

But first we had to deal with her crippling fear of the tube...