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Mapless in London
Mar. 7th, 2016 07:10 pmYou'd think I'd have learnt by now.
Since I'm an infrequent visitor to London, and not someone who needs to traverse it daily, I always opt to walk across it rather than descend into the abyssmal depths of the underground. I check on walkit.com to glance at a recommended route, and then... entirely fail to follow it. The trouble is, I get bored with main roads, and especially bored with returning from anywhere by the same route by which I came. Plus, main roads are big, roary things, quite overwhelming to poor provincials like me. Towering buses conceal any interesting buildings that might be lurking on the far side of the road, and there are far too many side streets, where the pedestrian crossings sternly display a red man, even as all the traffic appears to be halted and all the locals are flooding across the road. I end up hovering nervously, torn between the belief that if I step out, the roaring traffic of That London is suddenly going to descend on me from a hitherto unseen direction, and the fear that if I stand there despite the total emptiness of the road, all the locals are laughing at me for being a law-abiding provincial who Doesn't Understand How We Do Things Here.
( Adventures in that London )
Since I'm an infrequent visitor to London, and not someone who needs to traverse it daily, I always opt to walk across it rather than descend into the abyssmal depths of the underground. I check on walkit.com to glance at a recommended route, and then... entirely fail to follow it. The trouble is, I get bored with main roads, and especially bored with returning from anywhere by the same route by which I came. Plus, main roads are big, roary things, quite overwhelming to poor provincials like me. Towering buses conceal any interesting buildings that might be lurking on the far side of the road, and there are far too many side streets, where the pedestrian crossings sternly display a red man, even as all the traffic appears to be halted and all the locals are flooding across the road. I end up hovering nervously, torn between the belief that if I step out, the roaring traffic of That London is suddenly going to descend on me from a hitherto unseen direction, and the fear that if I stand there despite the total emptiness of the road, all the locals are laughing at me for being a law-abiding provincial who Doesn't Understand How We Do Things Here.
( Adventures in that London )
