Day 5: Road to India, arriving UK - Part 2

November 17, 2009


My days are no longer marked by a beginnings or endings. I’m a time traveler now, jetting over time zones as my internal GPS downloads new geo-data. MY flight to London left LaGuardia at 2130 EST and landed Heathrow at 4:40 GMT, more than an hour early, leapfrogging me over five hours.

As the pilots began the descent the flight attendant passed out the customs forms. Groggy passengers dropped their tray tables, wiping sleep from their eyes to focus on the task at hand. Flight attendants serving coffee, tea and water, while another collects trash to ready the cabin for the next group of excited and exhausted passengers, if they’re anything like us.

I removed the hard copy of my itinerary from my travel purse, which I created just days before leaving. It’s pretty exciting to look at with its list of flight numbers, departure and arrival times, public transportation directions and as more addresses than I’ve had in the last 10 years. Yet the most usual is the address to my ‘home base’ in, which is a numbered sector within Panchkula, a subsidiary of the city state of Chandijarh (pronounced chan-di-gar).

The pilots set the transatlantic ship down easy and before I knew it I was stepping on to British soil. I began to feel a surge of energy as I stepped onto the concourse. I believe the chromosomes that held my British DNA were happy to breathe in the jolly ol’ air from an ancient land that I haven’t visited in over ten years.

I cued up (stood in line) for customs with Mooshi and her mother. The cue was very long and the non-British citizens were kept organized by the Disneyland-style-ropes. Mooshi and I continued our pop culture banter about our favorite TV shows. Her pre-med education doesn’t allow her to follow shows like Lost and Survivor, bit luckily she has a close friend that can find pretty much anything on the web. That’s when I learned about freetv.com and missedashow.net. I was so happy there was a way I could follow season six of So You Think You Can Dance and season one of Flashforward, a new program I discovered while surfing iTunes. Each episode is about $2.99 to download and since I’m being very frugal with my current funds, which are only meant to support me on this journey, I will refrain from incurring further download fees.

I handed Mooshi a small slip of paper with my name, URL to my Blog and my Skype name. I’m so grateful to Jim, a member of Riverside Community Center for Spiritual Living (RCCSL), who produced about a hundred of these little slips for the attendees of my farewell party. The rest I have been using to stay in touch with the amazing people I meet along my Road to India.

I was first to a customs counter and noticed Mooshi and her mother stepping to desks at opposite sides of me. I agent began to ask me a litany of questions, similar to those I answered to post my eHarmony profile. Is he hitting on me or does this country really need to know how I met (or in this case, not met yet), the people I’ll be staying with in London? “It’s a vicarage, not a terrorist cell, for All Saints’ sake!” I remember Pat Spencer, one of my mentors, working on her Ph.D. telling me that her dissertation was finished, not when she completed it, but when one of her advisors says, “Okay, you’re done.” Now, I know what she was referring to, because I had no idea how long the essay questions would last and if I was providing adequate answers. There I was in mid-answer to about the twentieth question and the agent’s stamped my passport and dismissed me.

I put my passport in my travel bag for safekeeping and turned around expecting to see Mooshi and her mother, but they vanished into one of the many corridors. Surely they had to make their way to the next gate for the continuation of their long journey to India for her sister’s wedding. I think she said they have four connections before reaching their home state in India, and I thought I had an intense itinerary. Their hectic journey is exactly what I believed I was avoiding by stopping in New York and London.

It’s obvious that I’m no longer in Kansas by the signage. “Water closet” is not where one fills an empty water bottle. That closest is more for making deposits than withdrawals. I followed the “Baggage Re-Claim” signs and when I reached the turn-style for my flight I saw only passengers with terribly wrinkled clothes impatiently peering down the beltway. As the silver slats expanded and retracted to make the continuous circle, I took the opportunity to chat up any human beings that are in earshot. After all there weren’t any trees around. Toria, my longtime friend and college roommate in San Francisco, would describe me as someone who, “Would talk to a tree, if it would only talk back.”

A lovely British couple who have been “on holiday” in Newport Beach, California, were my choice de jour. Americans go “on vacation” and the English go “on holiday”. I love the concept of taking a vacation from work and calling it a ‘holiday’. I wonder what they call an American legal holiday that gives us a single day off of work, a “vacation”?

The luggage eventually came and we said our farewells. I was off to follow to get a train to Victoria Station and they had a car service waiting for them. I silently hoped they would offer me a ride into London, yet had they; my first day in the U.K. might have been just okay.