I was curious...wanted to approach him...decided I shouldn't bother him...and then the next day was kicking myself even more for not doing it, because he turned up on the front page of a newspaper at my hostel! Turns out he's this guy, who goes around collecting poems people write for him on the go and making them into self-published books.
My hostel was in Camden Town (home of the fun Camden Lock Market and lovely Regent's Canal), an exciting destination for me for personal reasons: I've been teaching about these places in a children's English textbook here in Berlin for at least two years, without ever having been there myself!
The next day, on a friend's recommendation, I wandered the Brick Lane area, a place of much-layered history, once mostly Jewish immigrants, now mostly Bangladeshi. There's a building that (if I remember right) was first Huguenot, then Methodist, then a synagogue, now a mosque.
In the evening I did something new: met up with someone I'd never met before, but whose world-traveling blog I've been reading and enjoying for well over a year. She now lives in London, so I wrote her and we met for a beer - sorry, a "pint" - in a pub.
Pam traveled all over the world for a year (which she found, in retrospect, too long for one single, uninterrupted trip) and I tend to take trips of just a week or so (too short to really get into the swing of things). We concurred that, well, this means there must be a sweet spot somewhere between a week and a year...
Here we are, terribly blurry, in front of a Tube stop (i.e. proof that we were in London!)
On the Tube home, a group of young men was letting everyone take pictures of their life-sized cardboard cut-out of William and Kate (to be married the next morning!) When a woman indicated the cut-out and asked one of the guys, "Are they yours?" he replied, deadpan, "They're the nation's."
Up next: Part Three, the royal wedding!
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