I’ve gone from loving the quaint British accent to wanting to throttle anyone who calls shrimp prawns, strollers prams, policemen bobbies, or cookies biscuits. I’ve grown tired of the endless mobile phones that don’t ring, but rather play portions of an endless variety of inane songs. I’ve gotten sick of having to walk halfway to Czechoslovakia to go the bathroom, of living in a space smaller than the inside of a fortune cookie, and of having to subsist solely on microwave meals or overpriced fast food. I’ve developed a firm distaste for people telling me to mind the gap and for packed subway cars, and I swear I’ll kill the next person who adds a u to color or a y to pajamas.
This is the land of the glorious contradiction – they’re supposed to be so proper and refined, so hesitant to discuss anything marginally offensive or lewd, yet their papers have naked girls daily on page three and their phone booths are filled with naked women hawking prostitutional services. This is the land of blissful naivete – they wouldn’t know a handgun from a hand job; of the strange fascination with the excretory system – their most popular foods often contain livers, kidneys, and other delectable cuts of meat; of endless Angus Steak Houses, bums, and Smart cars.
It’s definitely been a strange time in a strange place – where else can you be pissed but not mad, and mad but not pissed – but for the most part it’s been great. Like I said, it hasn’t quite hit me yet, but I know in my heart it shall never forget this place and the people who shared it with me. The chill and almost stifling silence of St. Paul’s, the sight of Big Ben rising in front of you the minute you leave the Westminster Tube station, the giant Jenga games at O’Neill’s, the nights of drunken debauchery, and endless pints of my good friend John Smith’s or Caffrey’s (the latter having a bit to do with the former)– they’re encounters I hope to revisit in the future.
But for now, after my last few days here (we have our big farewell party (where I proceed to get insanely drunk) and I go to the disappointing Clink prison museum during this span) it’s time to return to the land of the loud and uneducated. To the land where pickup trucks and garbage cans aren’t harder to find than a willing date. I need to get back to the unspoken joys of ignorance and road kill, of unbridled materialism and ethnocentrism, of shopping malls and superstores. It's time to say goodbye to those with red coats and hello to those with red necks. In short, it’s time to go home.