London, 2006: The Trip That Started It All

Posted By Laryssa on Oct 8, 2013

You don’t just wake up one morning and decide you’re going to travel the world on your own; something or somewhere has to ignite the spark. It was the summer of 2006. I had been living in Nashville and attending Belmont University for just over a year, and was finally starting to gain confidence as an independent adult away from the nest. A friend of mine, Marion, decided to study abroad in London for the fall semester. If it was OK, I said, I’d like to come visit. She enthusiastically agreed, and I’m not sure if either one of us believed I would actually follow through. But thanks to incredibly affordable airfare and a little movie called loveactually, I booked a roundtrip ticket from Nashville to London for a quick 5-day jaunt in October that coincided with my university’s fall break. It would be the trip that would start it all. For some reason, my flight to London–even at the bargain bin price of $450– had about 5 people on it. (I’ve yet to go on another transcontinental flight that is anything less than stuffed to the brim!). One of the other four people on the plane was a guy in graduate school sitting in the row behind me. I think he correctly pegged me as the frightened, inexperienced child that I was, and  took me under his wing. Frazzled by the magnitude of everything and bleary-eyed by lack of sleep, I had no idea how to get to the Central Station from Gatwick. A veteran of travel, he led me to the ticket machine, helped me buy the ticket, and we took the tube together. The train rolled through the outer rim of London, past countryside and neighborhoods. As I stole my first glances of the United Kingdom, he told me about his travels, and showed me the well-decorated pages of his thick American passport. He pointed at a particularly ornate stamp. “This is my favorite,” he told me, “this is Egypt’s stamp.” I was in awe. He asked me where else I’d traveled, and I found myself embarrassed to admit, “just the US.” Desperate to contribute something worldly to the conversation, I told him of my desire to go to Greece. “Here’s something interesting,” he said, “there are pieces of the Parthenon, the Parthenon Marbles, that at the British Museum that they took from Greece a few centuries ago. So, if you go to both the Acropolis and the British Museum, you will have seen the Parthenon in it’s entirety.” I’m not sure if it’s because I live in Nashville that has its own full-sized Parthenon replica, but that fascinated me. In...