After breakfast we waited for awhile in the lobby for our private coach to pick us up to take us to Canterbury. I love the sound of the words ‘private coach’. It’s like a fairy tale or something. While we waited I looked in the window of the jewelry shop in the hotel. They have some neat silver charms. I kind of like the one of the houses of parliament and Big Ben. But it’s a little pricey. I have to keep multiplying everything by two and half to get the price in dollars and I’ve always had difficulties with multiplication. I’ve already spent most of my allowance on clothes for the trip so I only have a bit of money that Granny gave me secretly. She said it was an advance on my 15th birthday present but I know she will forget that. I have to bring her something really cool from here too. Maybe I will wait until I have bought all my other presents and see how much I have left before buying something for myself. That's what Fakira the brave would do. After she took down some bad guys and rid the world of cancer or something.
Canterbury Cathedral was divine! And then we went to see St. Martin’s church, the oldest church in England according to the guide. I can’t believe how old everything here is. At home things are called ancient if they’ve been around for 100 years – here there are things 1000 years old! We had fish and chips at a famous place called the Mayflower. The fish was called plaice. I’ve never heard of it but every restaurant seemed to serve it: plaice and chips, plaice and peas, plaice and chips and peas. Eighteen different ways to serve the same food. Dad would love it here.
We went to Rochester later in the afternoon and saw the castle ruins. They were so romantic. I’d love it if we had ruins at home. And ancient Cathedrals. And places like the one we saw that Charles Dickens used as a model for Mr. Pumblechook’s house in ‘Great Expectations.’ I’ll have to read that book next. Our guide said Dickens once got thrown into the moat here. You never find out this kind of stuff in books or at school. I just love travelling!
At one point we all went into this cute little tea shop, full of lace curtains and old lady waitresses. The woman at the door looked at her watch when we came in and said we’d have to wait until the tea service started at 3:30. We had to stand outside the shop for four full minutes! I bet that if you wanted to have a cup of tea four minutes after tea service stopped you’d have to forget it. They really like schedules in England. And line ups. Or ‘queues’ as they say here. I always thought I knew how to speak English, but there are sure a lot of words that are different in England’s English. Everyone stands in ‘queues’ here for everything. I saw a bus stop with only one person waiting but I could tell just by the way he was standing that he was in a ‘queue’.
When we got back to the hotel, everyone else went to have a sleep before dinner. I can’t believe these people sleep in the daytime when there’s so much to see! It’s been two days. Surely their jet lag is gone by now. I went out walking in an area called Belgravia. The houses were elegant, with lovely black gates. Each place is attached to its neighbours’ place to make one long, tall row all the way down the road. All the house doors are different colours, but other than that they are identical. There are big parks out front, but they all have gates with locks so I don’t know how the people inside them got in. Maybe all these houses in a row get to go in them to help make up for the fact that they don’t have any front yards. No privacy though – you couldn’t lie on the grass in your bathing suit or anything like you can at home. Sam would have a tough time not being able to run around in the nude.
I must have wandered a bit too much, because I lost track of time. Normally I am always early for everything and checking my watch when I know I have someplace I have to be, but for some reason I didn’t this time, I guess because I’m in a new place and imagining what it must be to live in one of those Belgravia houses, or to leave one of them all dressed up for a ball or the opera or something fancy. Each turning led onto another street with fascinating houses and a little green square, and I just couldn’t resist exploring that one too, and then the next one. When I did get back to the hotel the rooms were locked and there was no one around – everyone had left for dinner and I don’t know where the restaurant they went to was so I just sat in the hallway and waited ‘til they got back. I guess I could have gone downstairs to the hotel restaurant to eat something, but I just couldn’t go down there and eat by myself. I’d just die of embarrassment.
Probably I’m not really important enough for Mr. Holmsmith to notice I wasn’t there with everyone but I thought maybe one of the others would notice. I guess I’m not really the noticeable kind. I wish I was. I wish I was tall and had curves and clear skin and wasn’t so skinny. I always used to think nothing was as bad as having freckles, but having zits is definitely worse. Last winter I went to the library to try to find a diet book for underweight people, but every thing was for overweight people. All the books talked about how tough it is to be overweight and how self-conscious you can get. Well, what about us skinny people? Don’t our feelings count too? Mom said I should be grateful not to be fat and Sidney said I should buy clothes with wide horizontal stripes and Sam said I should become a doctor and then I would know what to do. Those types of suggestions do not help much.
I sat on the floor in the hallway outside the room, with my knees pulled up to my chest, and let my hair swing across my face. I pretend it’s a curtain, like in the theatre, and when it’s closed I’m on my own private stage, able to see out with no one seeing in. Of course there was no one there anyway and all I could see were the shiny cream coloured walls of the hallway that go up so high. I leant my head back against the wall and considered the ceiling. People don't notice ceilings much I decided. Ceilings are really tall in London. The shiny paint was the same as on the walls but there were cracks that looked like what rivers would look like from space. There were three light fixtures, stretched along at intervals along the length of the hall, that hung down like pendulums. They gave a sort of greenish light and made one patch of the brown carpet look brighter than the rest. It was like three muddy pools of carpet that blended into each other as the hallway stretched out in front of me. When I looked closer, the carpet actually had a pattern. It wasn't brown at all, but little green and black and cream diamonds. The bit down the middle was worn where hundreds of people had walked along it over the years. I thought of all the people that must have been here and walking along that carpet and then I thought of the muddy pools again and imagined I was lost in a swampy forest under a full moon, with the scent of jasmine and the sound of nightingales wafting on the air instead of teh old food smells I could actually smeel. If I think I can smell something other than what I really smell I can often convince myself I really can smell something different.
Finally I heard noises and everyone was back from dinner, but still no one noticed I hadn’t been there. I guess I don’t mind. It would be worse if they made a huge fuss about it.
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