#london19

[louistomlinsoncouk]

London, 25/04

[liljaysmom-blog]

Who are you, London?

The image I have of London is similar to those I have of other places with which I have yet to become acquainted: a glorious promised land.  

Right now, London is beautiful, full of knowledge I am dying to devour, and all of the other blissful things I imagine her to be.  I tend to do this with most of what is unknown to me, especially a city I dream of meeting one day.  I romanticize it. Watching Downton Abbey and reading Sherlock Holmes novels have given me high hopes.  I blame BBC and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

In the five or six stages of traveling abroad, I tend to park in the second: the honeymoon phase.  I prefer the happy-ending of Jane Eyre to the melancholy Wuthering Heights every single time.  I see her unique birthmarks and think, “How beautiful!”  I hear the accents of her people and think, “How interesting!”  

I believe that most people tend to fear the unknown and become frustrated by drastic differences between their home and a foreign country.  However, I feed off the changes and look forward to getting to know London personally. I am not interested in deciding which nation does it correctly; I simply look forward to experiencing the differences and accepting them for what they are, whether or not they end up being as glamorous as I naively anticipate.  

Regardless of how these images have affected me up to this point, I am certain that London (whoever she is) will not disappoint.