Leaving LasNashvegas

Hello all! here's a quick message to let you know that i'm alright and london is going great. There's a lot to catch up on with past entries, but I'll save those retrospectives for another time.

After the two flights on thursday, we landed in heathrow at 6:52am london time, which was somewhere around 2am nashville. But then there was a 2 hour immigration line. It was awful. i was so tired and everyone just shuffled forward about four feet every few minutes. If it's like this all the time, I'll be glad when they finally institute some sort of behavioural terrorist identification scheme. [edit: I will not be glad when they institute a behavioural terrorist identification scheme. That was the jet lag talking.]

So, we finally made it through the passport line and then we had to get on the tube and make it out the Kew. The tube itself was easy, but getting the ticket was a small difficulty, as neither my nor Joren's credit card worked in the machine. After 24 hours of awake, including the nasty transatlantic screaming baby, I was not in the mood to mess with a machine. But we finally got a single pass ticket and boarded the Tube and made it to Kew in about 40 minutes. Easy traveling.

Then a short walk to Gillian's house, the home I'm living for the next few weeks. She greeted us at the door and then showed us the rooms and keys and that was that. I fell asleep for 4 hours, woke around 2pm London (8am Nashville?) and then spent the next 8 hours trying to stay awake so that I wouldn't be jet lagged.

Jor and I walked over to the Archives, first off, and signed up for IDs and toured the building a bit. I ordered my documents for the next day and then we looked around the town. It's very small, but incredibly quaint. Everything you think of when you think small London village. There's a little common area right off the Tube stop with a few grocery stores, a pub and an outdoor bread shop and plant market. (I ate at an Italian cafe today, while reading about the French Revolution, while in England. It was very funny to me.)

About 7pm we wandered back to the house and then watched Netflix. I was very smart and signed up for Vanderbilt's remote network which allows me to watch US websites while abroad. It's come in very handy.

Today I spent most of the morning just playing, not doing much, and then went to the archives around 11am. Joren headed off into the city to visit the British Museum. (Somewhere along the way I've mixed up the British Museum with another museum in my head. I thought I'd spent time there, but I am remembering a different place. Here's a picture from later in the week when I did visit).

We met again around 6:30 tonight and had dinner and a pint at the pub, which is called The Railway.

And here's a picture for you Chip!

Railway is populated by historians, because I recognized quite a few people there from the archives.

Work goes well. The first day was fine, and I'm trying desperately to fit everything in. I'll have quite a bit to work on I believe. The British National Archives are incredible and it'll be hard to go back to something less. For instance, here the archive staff issues you a seat number which corresponds to a locker number. Everytime you order a document bundle, they put it in your locker and then you just go pick it up and take it back to your seat. They keep a record of what you've ordered. The whole thing is incredibly organized, and I feel very confident looking up things. It could also probably be the language.

So! That's how it's going for now! No jet lag, probably because of my first two days of death, but that's good. I am happy to just jump right into london.