This is my life

Her whole request, for posterity: Tell me about London, England. Any interpretation that means to you - when you were here, it's place in history, how you'd use it as a fic setting....anything!

Oh, man. I looooooooooooooooooove London. Remember on the flight up to Seattle, we broke out how aging works in my vampire universe and we talked about where in London James would live? I have those notes, still. I may never finish VG, but man, I had a hell of a lot of fun with it.

So I've been to London three times so far in my life. The first was in college, and it was the end of a six week tour of Europe, and I was dead broke and living on jam and bread. What had started out as three of us, two friends, a girl and a guy, was down to two of us (the dude went his own way after the 'band tour chaperoning' part of the trip was over (at our suggestion - he was impossible to live with, honestly)). We spent a week wandering around London with no money, and I just loved everything about it, ever. Our last night there, I was sick of living on no money, so I bought tickets to the Royal Ballet for us on my mom's "emergencies only" credit card. She didn't even yell at me for it, and it was soooooooooo worth it.

The second time I went was for the ROTK premiere. I was only there for a weekend and I spent most of it waiting outside the Odeon theater in Leicester square. That was BRILLIANT, if exhausting, even though I had the tiniest hotel room in all of London (didn't really matter because I spent NO time there).

The third time was with my ex-girlfriend. (And she was recently my ex-girlfriend at the time... apparently I'm more of a masochist than I thought.) It was awesome and awful in about equal measure. We both had people to see and plans to do things in London, so basically even though we had planned the trip while we were together, it wasn't too much of a hardship to shift the trip after we broke up (and were staying on... relatively friendly terms). Then she pulled some manipulative bullshit and there was weirdness, so the first part of the trip was emotionally awful. Then I had a date to meet fyrefly101! So we did a bunch of cool things, walked halfway around London, if I remember correctly, did some shopping (I want to say Camden (spelled completely wrong, I think)) and had lunch and saw St. uh... Peter's? Paul's? You know, the famous one! And had beer at a very crowded pub somewhere. It was a brilliant, brilliant day, probably my favorite ever in London.

Unfortunately, prior to starting that day, when I told Finn I was meeting a friend of mine, she asked who. And I said fyrefly101! :D! And she was like... but she's an internet person. That's not a real friend. And I argued with her until I cried and then stormed out of the room, because omg what the fucking fuck, that is complete bullshit. Not to mention, if her argument was that I'd never met her before, that was patently wrong, as I'd met her several years back. So after that I spent no more time with the ex-girlfriend. I got up and out before she did, wandering around, taking the tube, just exploring London on my own. Most days I went to Leicester square, bought tickets to whatever show I wanted to see, and spent the day wandering around until it was time to see the show. I saw Les Mis, Billy Elliot (my favorite - and I ran into a fave actor of mine, too, James D'Arcy), The Woman in White (I think that's what it was called), Ian McKellen's panto performance in Aladdin, and Patrick Stewart's one-man Christmas Carol.

It was brilliant, and way better than dealing with the ex.

It's about time for another trip to London - it's been nearly ten years, my goodness! And I've been talking through things with my wife, so we'll be planning a trip soonish, I hope.