In which I copy and paste the notes I took about my days in London with Julian (my senior thesis), unedited and mostly uncensored:

Day One
[Roommate J] drives me. We leave the room at 5:47. Use the extra three minutes to get the cold key to turn in the cold ignition. I make my train. I watch The Social Network and Best In Show on the plane. I love Continental. We get in early. No lines. I tell the lady at Passport Control that I'm there for pleasure. "It's usually business, on that flight." I get money. It only takes me two hours from touchdown to knocking on the door.

Day Two

Tired, tired 7:30 alarm. Breakfast with the grossest jam known to man. Neil's accent even better than remembered. Comments about Colin Firth's wife's Golden Globes dress. We all agree it's not that great. Jenny helps me with letter, key, we leave together but I stop to buy my 7-day travel card. No trouble at Reader Registration, although I manage to get in a conversation with even the ticket lady about my future. I'm starting to think I bring it on myself. Up to the manuscript room where they tell me I only have it for today. I LEAP IN! It's awesome. Return. Bath. Dinner with Jenny. Bed.

Day Three
Back to library for internet usage and article-writing. Also registering for final courses. Wrote two pages, and then came back. Jenny and I decide to go see The Big Sleep at BFI. Walk across the river from Embankment. The lights are beautiful.

Day Four
Get up and head out for first tourism day. Walk across Heath to Spaniard's Inn, then bus back to Hampstead and Tube over to Oxford Circus. Get super lost looking for Anthony's house, but find lots of other cool things instead. Have Pret a Manger lunch in St. James's Park while watching pinstripe walk by. Get more lost, find BBC by accident, walk to Regent's Park, finally consult map. Didn't overshoot by too much this time. Find bust of JFK as I realign myself. Random. Find it. There's no "Anthony Blunt, British Spy, and Guy Burgess, British Spy lived here by recommendation of Victor Rothschild." Figures. Also it's vacant. And/or refurbishing?
Back to the Tube and over to Sloane Square. I walk through Chelsea and easily find Smiley's house on Bywater Street. No sign of Peter Guillam.
Get super touristy. Bus it over to Westminster. Walk from there to Trafalgar Square. Tube home from Charing Cross. Eat babybel and entire box of dark chocolate Fingers for dinner.
Bringing The Little Stranger to read in this creaking house was the worst idea ever.

Day Five
Leicester Square Billy Elliot tickets. The library. Lots of logistics, and picture tagging, not much writing. Strangely fine with that. Leftover beef stew for dinner. Feel like I'm H.G. Wells' maid. Off to Victoria to see Billy Elliot. First number is totally lame and I am not impressed. Then I am TOTALLY impressed and beside myself and! and! Michael! Swan Lake! MRS. EFFING WILKINSON! That amazing angry dance with the police. The Solidarity dance. The little ballerinas!
Tube delays on the way back. Have to re-route twice. Germans next to me talking about The Social Network and how they're not 24 and thus don't get it. I don't have enough German left to point out that Aaron Sorkin was born fifty and is pretty much down in stone as hating the internet. Oh well. Maybe next time. Also there are hot gay guys all over the tube. Or my dar may need re-calibration.
Still only get back an hour after I said/thought I would. Jenny is asleep. I bolt the door. Again, feel like H.G. Wells' maid.

Day Six
I finally am able to give Jenny the rent, because the gardener's going to America. I breakfast on pains aux chocolat and Orangina while wandering around Hampstead. My feet really hurt and I've lost something like five pounds since arriving. But it's all good 'cause I've got food and I'm headed to the National Portrait Gallery! Tudors. Victorians. The butchers no longer ogling the naked lady, although she is in the same room. John Donne still a fox, Duke of Buckingham still ridiculous and noodly of leg. Know all about the Romantics now thanks to my least favorite class ever. Two Winston portraits. Cannot BELIEVE no one told me about Peter Pearse and Benjamin Britten and now they keep popping up everywhere (by coincidence, this is the day I buy The Habit of Art). Bust of Ralph Vaughn Williams. Lots of hot Edwardians. Vanessa Bell looks like she shops at the [Damn Big Midwestern University Town] Farmer's Market.
Book sale near the skateboarders under the bridge. Nothing. National Theater Bookshop. See above. Toilets. Overpriced sandwich. Yum!
Bus to Camden Town. Tube to Hampstead from there. Meet up with Jenny and Neil. Bath and then off to see Of Gods and Men which is AWESOME. That song from Swan Lake also features here. I sense a theme.
Dinner at Indian restaurant in Hampstead. Is great fun. Neil tells about how he visited Anthony before he died. I tell him about acknowledgments section. He is pleased.

Day Seven
E-mail housekeeping/panicking about forthcoming trek to Hoxton. Over-think it, as per. A Morning With Guy Burgess, which I found out about via Wikipedia. One of seven plus author in audience. After the interval one of four plus author. High school production values. Super funky theater. Soviet chic? Jim Prideaux could have changed coats six times in various rooms between the theater and the broken toilets. Only the ending was surprising or added anything to the canon I'm assembling. Tom Hollander still wins the Guy Burgess award. ANOTHER MENTION OF SWAN LAKE. At the interval the playwright bought me a drink and we talked about my thesis and his research. Did the--I am starting to suspect--British thing of completely talking over me whenever he felt like it. Still, nice guy. Not killed to or fro. A good night, all told, with Princeton footing the bill.

Day Eight
Lunch with Jenny at the library. Evolving English exhibit. Meet her at Waitrose Russell Square supermarket after work and carry the bags back. Very nice dinner with Jenny and Neil. Neil does an American accent at one point, and Jenny does a kind of exaggerated British accent. My life is made.


Day Nine
Get a ticket to A Flea in Her Ear. St. Paul's. Courtauld. Cambridge Circus. Battersea. Royal Chelsea Hospital. British Library. Really tired bus rides. I'm ready to go home.
But then! A Flea in Her Ear! Tom Hollander is the best! And I get back and Jenny comes up and brings me down to eat cake with her guests. They're all really nice and I help clean up afterward and feel useful and completely at home.

Day Ten
Back to library. Memoir day two. Shockingly, my notes from before were quite good. There were only one or two lines I missed. Back to the house, finish A Little Stranger. Whew boy. Are we thinking unreliable narrator? I like its open-endedness but kind of wish I have read it in sterile New Jersey with my roommates through the wall. Dinner with Jenny and friend of the family Chris who fixes her internet connection. We talk politics and giggle. I help clean up and figure out the DVD player.

Day Eleven
St. John's Wood. Baker St. The bus game. Packing.

(Anthony doesn't get one of these.)

Day Twelve
Up at 5:30. Out the door, after saying a quick goodbye to Jenny. Smooth sailing on the Tube, and I am on one of the only flights from Heathrow to Newark to take off, due to snow at the other end. Huzzah! I watch Little Miss Sunshine and Waiting For Superman on the plane and actually cry over the latter. Not tearing up, but almost-sobbing and constantly wiping my face. The British guy sitting beside me and reading a Costa Rica travel guide studiously ignores me. I also watch Cash Cab. It does not make me cry.
Mocked at customs for traveling alone. Screw you, Tony Soprano Jr., I have far-flung friends and a hot thesis named Julian. And I just had a great two weeks.