Sunday Night.

So I have successfully completed my first week in London. I've eaten fried food, drank thick beer, made new friends, took small but eventual dives into the waters of public transport, rode the Hogwarts Express, and hey, I even managed to meet up with an old friend. I can't really complain.
This week was beyond excellent in so many ways. It seems a bit stale to say, "I <3 lONDON OMG", maybe even a bit premature... I know the homesick bug bites slowly over time, but I find myself in love with this city, admiring of the culture, and in good company everywhere I go, or at least, feeling like I am.

What I like the most about London is it seems impossible to feel alone here. This place pulsates and vibrates, it moves royally during the day and slickly at night, the nights in London make you feel like they are sneaking something from your day that the sun blinds you from seeing everywhere else. From friendly bartenders to curious natives, to life-giving views, it's so comforting being here for some reason. I feel like you can never get lost in such an unfamiliar place. The feeling of being somewhere is something I'm not used to, this feeling of having somewhere to go.

But I'm not writing a travel brochure. I'm writing my experience. My experience has been good, but it's also been spiritually very strange.

Once you decide to live in another world besides the U.S.A, you start to feel like the values of the U.S.A might not necessarily be, as we are taught, the best values in the world. They are just our values. They are great values, but who says they are the best values besides other Americans? Sure we value freedom and our right to vote, and that is important,but so do the British. Their government practically works just as our does. What I've noticed is that America promises us life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but all those things are already guaranteed to us by simply existing. Individuals will always have those rights...it's the society that takes it away. It's how people physically cooperate within themselves that makes a country truly a country, it's how their leaders lead within that construct, and I think the English have that figured out better than everyone else...the art of pursuing happiness by not getting in anyone's way...because we all have the same unalienable rights, but the British don't walk on anyone to get where they're going because of those rights.

What I mean by that is, all the stuff we idolatrously bow to, our constitutional rights, our waving flag, our right to mouth off to a McDonald's employee if we need to, seem irrelevant when living outside of the states. Like you start to feel like, "everyone should just relax" back home.These people here are not Americans, and shockingly, they are happy, maybe even happier then we are. Everyone seems less concerned with their identity as it compares to how someone else perceives it, and more concerned with what they see when they look at themselves. New York City has a pulse too, but it definitely beats to a different time than London. Londoners aren't trying to change the world, they just seem to be living in it...and happily. I don't really know how to explain this but thats the main difference I've noticed here. I haven't met too many people that say, "I moved to London because that's where the money is, that's where my , "happiness" is", they move here because it's alive. I mean really, truly alive. Like a bunch of human beings with the hospitality of a small farm boy, built a big city and got along all sharing in the same effort to be...well alive.

It's weird how young America is too. Yesterday, I took a tour of Buckingham palace and thought about how old it is. As I walked through state rooms with magnificent artwork I was baffled, just thinking about how all this precious stuff has existed for so long and it's all compacted into one tangible environment.

Today we took a tour around Oxford, and it really got me thinking. I spent the whole day looking at old church after old church. Churches that are hundreds of years old. So many geniuses were taught at Oxford, so many thoughts were created here. The blackboard Einstein wrote the theory of relativity on still sits in the basement. The place is magical, it's like the CPU of the world. People lived and died in Oxford, and they are buried within it's churches and schools, leaving their entire fortunes to the school.There is a feeling there that an old man probably feels as he takes his last breath, a feeling America is still too young and fit to understand. England has a real feeling of...slow, gradual, but beautiful aging....like wine. America is still too wide eyed and young to understand the wisdom of an aging empire, but it's a beautiful observation I've made indeed.

We walked into this Church today called Christ Church, Oxford. It has beautiful art, arched ceilings, Victorian design, stain glass windows, and tombs where people are actually buried on the floor underneath the church. It is literally hundreds of years old...there is too much history, to many politics, to ever understand it. For some reason I was standing looking around at all the art, standing on someones grave actually, having a beautiful time, and I start feeling really weird. I felt anxious at first, like I was really nervous, then I wanted to be sick, followed by a feeling of "I want to leave". Not just the church, but I want to leave, go home, back to Old Bridge, and go crawl up on the dirt road and forget this whole thing. Then, I felt so sad, and I noticed my eyes were tearing a bit. I started to walk away and I felt better as I neared the gift shop. As I sat there alone, a girl here named Tori who I've found to be really strange, but nice came up to me. She is definitely out there in alot of ways but metaphysically she is on point. She stared at me and was like "Did you feel it to?" (I swear). She continued "I have to get out of here. This place is making me feel sick, it's making me feel awful and sad for some reason". She felt the same thing in the same spot! We talked about it and laughed for ten minutes, and deducted, uh I guess there's a ghost in there or something?

As I started to feel better I realized that spiritually I'm not ready to embrace hundreds of years of life and death, depicted in art, castles, and shrines by humans, immortal monuments to the temporary specs of dust in time that sadly we all are. It's like trying to take in everything all at once when you see these masterpieces...the only way to play chess is to move each piece one at a time...the same with solving a puzzle. Too much will make you quit, not enough will leave you with not enough spaces filled in. A perfect picture doesn't happen by throwing the pieces up in the air and watching them land in perfect symmetry.

But then again, life sometimes is perfect symmetry. As I think about my life at home, my temporal life in London, and my return, I think about how symmetrical things seem, how for whatever reason I'm learning something now, and I'll take it back to whatever is waiting for me at home. Everything has been so symmetrical, so purposeful, and so obvious this year all at once.

Ok so this is a deep post, but I need a few of these to remember my trip. Everyone I've met here is really great, each contributing their own personalities to making my experience even better. I do miss my friends at home though, and I wonder if there's ever a time when me Nick Dan and Jeff are all jamming in our separate rooms at different times, unknowingly playing a song together, or something romantic and impossible like that. It's all symmetry. I think about every single person from home before I go to sleep, and it helps me drift off and continue facing this new, strange stuff with confidence, knowing that somewhere out there nicks porch is rootin for me.

Oh yeah, and I saw harry potter stuff today, like where they shot the movie and shit, it ruled.

Cheers-
Andrew