London Blog, Part 2: The Nightmare

As they say, every dream has to end and my London dream, when I woke up, was terrifying. It's one of those things that you laugh at in hindsight, and even in the moment KNOW you will laugh at in hindsight, but you just can't bring yourself to stop panicking. In short, as I stood waiting under the dark sky and bright lights at midnight, amidst the bustling nightlife of Picadilly Circus I had a very frightening realization. I had missed my bus home.

I would like to say that it was not my fault--that the bus driver didn't see me and kept going, or the tour bus left with an impostor in my seat--but in truth it was at least 95% my own damn fault.

The realization dawned rather slowly. First I stood at the corner alone, thinking the bus was merely a few minutes late coming to get me. After fifteen minutes I started to pace. After twenty, I started wringing my hands while I paced (seriously wringing my hands, and who DOES that?) My backpack was on the bus; all I had were the contents of my pockets: my passport, a map of London, 20 English pounds, and my American debit card. At twenty-five minutes after I thought the bus should have arrived, I was frantic. A man who looked to be in his early 20's with toasted-marshmallow skin crossed the square, stopped in front of me, cocked his head and said, "Mah seester, wat iz wrong?" I came out of my pacing trance, quit staring at the road where the bus should be coming from and stared at the man instead. He repeated himself and held out a hand. I took an instinctive step forward, a calculated step backward, and said, "I think my bus left me."

"Wheah ah you trying to go?" he asked, and his eyes widened a little when I replied, "Germany!"

"No problem, mah leetle seester," he reassured me. "Iz no problem."

"Feels like a problem" I stuttered.

He motioned to another dusky-skinned boy across the square. When he reached us, the second boy cooed, "Aw, leetle one, what iz wrong?" I repeated myself, half for his benefit and half to snap myself out of my anxiety induced stupor, "My bus left me. I need to get to Germany."

He answered calmly, "Iz okay, Seester. You will be okay. We will help. Are you cold? You shake from cold? No, from the fear? Aw...come here leetle one."

Part of me could not grasp that I was stuck in London with only twenty pounds and a map of the city, and I stupidly kept refusing to leave the corner with the boys because I thought the bus might be looking for me and they wouldn't find me if I left. The French boys humo(u)red me in this and one of them (Braim or Briar?) stayed with me while the other (Sami?) searched for the bus for a while. Because it was now the middle of the night, and I had no one and nothing, just the presence of the French boys was very comforting. They each offered their "flats" and even offered to drive me to the Dover ferry if I thought I could catch the bus there. I knew the chances of being stranded in London for eternity, or dying on the streets were slim to none, but under the circumstances, it was still hard to relax at all, even with all the reassurance that it "iz no problem, Seester." I wanted to cry.

At this point what I should have done was pull out the itinerary with the tour guide's number on it and use Briam's phone to call him. Unfortunately I could not do this because the paper remained "safely" tucked in the pocket of the pants I wore the previous day. These pants were in my backpack. On the bus. On the way to Germany without me. My pants reached Germany way before I did.

Leaving the paper on the bus seems like an impossible oversight, but at the time I left it there, I was getting off the bus to go WITH the tour guide to Greenwich. I thought about the paper and decided I did not need to make everyone wait while I dug it out of the backpack, at least not if the guide was going to be within earshot at all times. But since my German isn't that good, I had missed the part of the information about going back to London via boat rather than via our bus. I would like to place the other 5% of the onus on the tour guide. Twice previously I had needed to ask for clarification about ongoings because I was unable to follow his German instructions. I also overheard a conversation where a French couple on our tour (the only non-Germans besides me) asked him to please speak more slowly because they had trouble understanding. After the Greenwich excursion, I thought we were heading back to the bus, but instead we took the boat, and the tour guide spoke with me in his rapid German while we blocked the aisle of tourists exiting. That was when he told me I could stay on the boat and meet them later. Between my rush to get out of the aisle and my tendancy to lag a step behind when conversing in German, it did not occur to me that the paper was on the bus, nor did it cross my mind ask him to repeat the meeting time or place. I can't place much blame on him for this, but I'm a proud person, so I choose to believe it was at least a little his fault for leaving me on the boat without ensuring I understood. I never saw him again.

I realized leaving the paper was a mistake a little later in the day, but was not overly concerned because I (idiotically) trusted my memory. But as Briar and Sami discovered along with me, my memory did not serve me well in this instance. Finally at 1am, amongst the London party scene with two French boys I didn't know, I tried to make my exhausted and now petrified brain do something useful. For a brief moment I considered going to one of their apartments, just to get off of the street corner to sit and think, but even my stupified brain was a little wiser than that. "Can you take me to a police station please?" I asked. They didn't know where a police station was (it was only later it struck me that that was probably a good sign of their moral character), but they took me to a tiny outbuilding that was really just a box with a police officer sitting behind a window in it.

This police box was intended as a method of keeping peace in around the bar scene, so people could alert the officers to fights, or muggings, or just ask for directions to the underground stations. The French boys left me with a hug at the police box, giving me directions for how to find them if the police couldn't help me. I was too engrossed in my predicament to thank them properly for their kindness.

I came to the plexi-glass window with tears in my eyes, still wringing my hands a little. The officer let me into the tiny box which held two desk chairs, a desk, a radio, and a hot pot for tea. I perched apprehensively on one of the chairs while Officer Jim, who had a better head on his shoulders than I did, called the hotel our group had stayed at the night before. Then Jim valiantly tried everything else he could think of, including calling the tour company, the parent company, and the Dover ferry system to try to track down my bus.

At 1:30 we gave up. "There's nothing else I can do for you except give you a safe place to sit and a little company," he apologized. If I wanted any help getting home from the tour company I would have to wait until 8am to get it. If I wanted to get home without them, I needed to get to a train station or the airport, but the underground stations were closed by this time. So I sat in the police box. I put my head down on the desk and tried to sleep, but the uncomfortable office furniture coupled with the radio Officer Jim had to play to keep himself from sleeping on duty made it impossible. I pretended to sleep a little anyway, to relieve Jim of the burden of entertaining me, and to stew in self-pity for a bit. This was when I realized how I had missed the bus. When I had written down the meeting time on my itinerary, I had transposed two numbers. Just after writing it, I figured out I had transposed the numbers, scratched it out and rewrote the correct time. However, when asked to access the information about when and where to meet my group, my brain presented me with only the memory of the first time I had written and no recollection of scratching it out. At 3:30am in a police box in Picadilly Circus--THAT was when I remembered what I had done.

I think the worst part of being stuck in a foreign city was the fact that the destination I was desperately trying to reach wasn't home either. Not only was I in an unfamiliar place where I didn't know anyone, but the place I was heading back to wasn't a huge step up from that. The people I really wanted to be with after an ordeal like this were all in America. Officer Jim tried to distract me from my own nervous, unhelpful thoughts by chatting. I discovered that his son won a silver medal in diving at the Athens Olympics, and that he was going fishing in the morning when his shift was over.

I considered my options. If I waited for the tour company to help me, I might be able to catch the next bus out of London and, assuming it had a seat for me, get back to Magdeburg an entire day late. And since I was to blame for missing the bus, I would likely have to pay for the ride. I would have to find a way to contact the zoo and kindergarten to explain why I was coming in 24 hours late for work. If I could get to a train station I could take the train to Paris and likely take a train from there to somewhere in Germany, but the idea of navigating a journey like this without any more information (and without speaking any French) was unappealing at best. The last alternative was to make my way to Heathrow and book a last minute flight to Berlin. None of these options reunited me with my luggage, but at least they would get me into the right country.

The sun was up by 6am when Jim left for his fishing trip and had to kick me out of the police box. The next officer on duty wouldn't arrive for another two hours, but Jim plastered the wall of the box with instructions to please let this American girl named Suzanne use the phone and help her get to Germany. Further, since I had two hours to kill and he apparently didn't trust the characters who populate London in the early mornings, Jim took me to an open-air fast food/cafe and told the two men working there (who were acquaintences of his) to get me some hot chocolate and make sure no one bothered me. I was extremely grateful, but there was no way to repay him except profuse thank yous.

I pulled my knees to my chin and tried to be inconspicuous while I waited. The options for reaching Germany all seemed like too much effort and money for a person who had only a London map, twenty pounds, and an American debit card (this account is essentially empty because I use almost exclusively a German account). By this time I had also been up for over twenty-four hours, which was not conducive to clear thought. I also had to pee. There are no public toilets open at 6am in London.

At 6:15 a tall plain man with a Bible in his hand ordered coffee and a croissant with an unmistakeably American accent. He sat at the table next to me and started to read. When I had convinced myself that guys who get up at 6am to pore over scripture are probably safe, I leaned over and said, "Excuse me, do you know how to get to the airport?"

Daryl was a banker returning to his home in Iowa from a trip to Greece and Turkey. He wound up drinking coffee next to me in London because he had a 20 hour layover and insomnia. I tried not to play the damsel in distress. I looked like I hadn't showered in a day (true) and was on the brink of tears (also true). And it was a little suspicious that I was flying to Germany and yet did not know how to get to the airport, or have a ticket. So eventually it came out that I was actually quite distressed, if not a damsel. I refused offers for coffee and breakfast, but almost took Daryl up on an offer to ride the bus to the airport with him. The only problem was that his bus did not leave until noon, and by then I would not only be insane from anxiety but I would also be risking getting into Germany too late to make it to work. When he left, Daryl insisted I take twenty pounds from him. When I refused he told me to consider it as a help to HIM because if I took it he would feel like he'd done everything he could. I took it.

The McDonald's nearby had opened by 7:30 and I tried to use their bathroom but discovered you have to actually buy food to do that, so I used 99cents of my precious pounds to buy porridge (yes, they have that at McDonald's in the UK). Back at the police box at 8, I found that it was still empty. Jim had warned me that this might happen because the officers are allowed to choose whether they sit in the police box or patrol on foot. Apparently his replacement and my possible knight in shining armor was somewhere walking his beat. This meant I could not use the phone and therefore contacting the tour company was out of the question. I took a deep breath and decided to hightail it for Heathrow.

Taking the underground to the airport was as easy as Daryl had made it sound, but it was only one leg of a very uncertain journey. I read a newspaper someone had discarded; the main article was about the Britain's Got Talent winners I had eaten breakfast next to. That seemed like a world away. By a little after 9am I arrived at Heathrow; I chose a terminal at random and approached the first desk I saw that said "last minute tickets." I didn't like the offer, but in the end, after getting quotes from two other carriers and sprinting to another terminal, I went back to the first desk and bought that ticket anyway. It's not too expensive to fly from London to Berlin, and I had just enough on my American debit card.

What made this flight initially unappealing was that it had a layover in Paris, which would extend my already rather prolonged trip to London. But it was the best deal for getting me back that same day. It was also leaving in fifteen minutes. Luckily I had no baggage, or even anything to carry on, so my sprint to the terminal was unencumbered, and I didn't even trip on those strange flat escalators (they can't be escalators if they're flat, can they?) that shoot you across the long stretches of airport hallway. I made it to the gate with time left to use the last of my (English pound) coins to buy an energy bar from a vending machine before I boarded.

The flight from London to Paris is really just a jump across a puddle, about 50 minutes in duration. For the first time ever, I slept on a plane. The jostling of the landing gear hitting the runway woke me with a start. Once on the ground I had another dash through an airport, due to a very quick layover. The flight attendant who sold me the ticket explained I had to get from terminal 2D to terminal 2E, which didn't sound so far, but I realized why she bothered to explain to me so carefully how to get there. Any navigational errors or dawdling and I'd be stuck in Paris. The flight was leaving from one of those gates where you have to take the bus to even get to the plane, and I raced through the terminals (seriously, how many different terminals and gates should there BE between 2D and 2E?) and just caught the third and final bus taking passengers to my plane.

I breathed a sigh of relief once I was seated. I'm sure the man next to me did not, since I had by this time been up for about 32 hours and hadn't taken a shower during that time. And of course I had left all of my personal hygene products in my backpack on the bus. But I was feeling better. Each successful leg of the trip eased the anxiety a little, and knowing that now I would make it back to Berlin (I knew exactly how to get to Magdeburg from Berlin) was comforting, even if I still had another five hours until I would reach the apartment.

Once I'd landed in Germany at 3:25, I hurried through my third airport of the day. If I didn't catch the last train to Magdeburg, I would have to stay overnight in Berlin and take a 5am train to get to work on time. I did not want to do that. I was pretty sure the next train left at 4:17 (but why could I remember that useless piece of information and NOT remember what time my bus left London?) I did however, have to stop at the currency exchange booth to switch my (and Daryl's) pounds to euros because I would need almost all of it for the train ticket to Magdeburg. I got to the platform at the train station with four minutes to spare and used the last two euros that I hadn't spent on the ticket to buy "food" from the vending machine before boarding the train.

At 6:30pm Monday evening, I burst into my apartment and announced, "Sophie, I made it!"
"Meow!" said Sophie.

Things could certainly have turned out worse. I met genuinely helpful people and (after the initial blunder of missing the bus) my timing was perfect. Whenever anyone asks me how London was, I will say it was absolutely fabulous.