Orienting myself to London with a group of the most promising young Americans and the most quaint of things: sparking water and sugar cubes. Tours of the Royal Society of the Arts and an honorary lecture at the British Museum. A boat cruise wound us up the Thames with a tour of warehouses-turned-penthouses before we docked into Greenwich and some stormed up a hill to stand on the Meridian line, but me, I just wandered around the Maritime Museum, lost at sea looking at cruiseship silverware and submarine seats. I'm feeling rather unfazed by these things. Big Ben lurked over my shoulder and I didn't even bother to get a picture with the old boy…I have been finding myself to just drift through it all with hardly a care for all the wonders that rise along the shore. I guess there will be time for those things too, for each of them, for longitudes and latitudes, and maybe it is that sense of space, or maybe it's that need to set up a home of my own instead of accept the transience of what is nothing more than a tourist trap.
But I have had fine times and met some fellow Fulbrighters who I hope will stay friends, each of them brimming with passion and potential--and that is something easy to say, but they speak slow and honest and have such ideas and I feel somehow better to know that someone on this island world of ours is thinking such things…
