NYE in London

December 31, 2012:
For our second stint in London, I decided to wear my poncho. A man in the London Eye couldn't get over it. I don't know where he was from, but he was North American and he and his wife had hired a tour guide to show them around London. I don't know if he thought I couldn't speak English or if he didn't realize how loud and obnoxious he was, but his wife commented on the rain and he chimed in:
"Well, you could always wear a poncho. That lady is." I think the constant rain must have been getting to me, but all I could think was, "Thank you, sir, for pointing that out! Nobody could tell that this giant blue bag I am wearing is a poncho to protect me from the constant rain in this country." People that talk about other people, in any language, annoy me as a general rule, but I was definitely crankier than usual and I was way more annoyed by this than I should have been.

We went to the Hyde Park Winter Wonderland, which I can see would have been really entertaining and beautiful if it had been snowing instead of raining. We were hunting for souvenirs for Talaira's friends, so we were disciplined enough to go down all of the alleyways until we finally gave up and went to Harrod's. I read "Confessions of a Shopaholic" when I was younger and remembered that the protagonist often went shopping at Harrod's, so I thought it was maybe a reasonably priced department store. Oops! I didn't realize it was a department store of every high-end brand ever. I  felt like I was getting daggers in the back of my head until I took my poncho off near the elevators. We went to a few different floors just to have a quick look and then gave up. We made the mistake of asking the man helping at the door where Primark was. He looked bewildered. Obviously it wouldn't be anywhere near such a fine establishment as Harrod's. Our morale was worn down, so we gave up and called it a day.

When we got back to Mortlake, we stopped for groceries and decided it was time to replace my boots. I told the girl in sales that my only criteria was that they were waterproof. She assured me that they were and I bought a pair (on sale) which still had quite the hefty pricetag. We dedicated the rest of our evening to getting ready for NYE. We met Flo at the Abbey Pub in Kentish Town, London.

After a great night involving misunderstandings with Cockney-accented men, great music, dancing on chairs and great friends.

Unfortunately, we were in for another adventure before we could peacefully fall asleep in the New Year. When we arrived at Waterloo underground station, there was an emergency evacuation. We were sent out into the pouring rain, unsure where exactly we were going, following directions from the police. We didn't know what to do, because the train we needed to get to Mortlake left from Waterloo station. We walked for about a half hour, through a really creepy tunnel that reeked of urine, avoiding an angry young white man shouting about racist oppression, and avoiding men in general (especially those who couldn't fathom that young girls, walking along in heels, would be made to feel uncomfortable at 3am by drunk men asking them how they're doing and then touching their arm to get attention since they've been blatantly ignored), just to end up back at the other side of the same station.

We crammed onto the train cars, sandwiched between people. Two men thought this would be a good time to get into an argument making everyone in the train car uneasy. Slowly, stop after stop, the train cars cleared out, but there was one other incident similar to the one described above, that put everyone on edge: a young woman was harrassed by a man who was clearly drunk. Another woman stood up for her by asking the man to leave her alone because he was making her uncomfortable. He could not handle this. His outrage at being found creepy was such that he and this other woman got into an argument about what kind of behaviour is acceptable and about how feeling uncomfortable is an unwarranted reaction because his intentions were not malicious. He was escorted off the train by another man who may or may not have been a police officer from another country. This, sadly, was not the end of it. The creepy man's friends, or worse, other random men who had been in the vicinity, defended the man's actions saying that because he hadn't intended harm, the woman had no right to feel uncomfortable. They didn't find this to be a sexist way of thinking. Telling women how they should or shouldn't feel about a situation is sexist. It's called "mansplaining".

Also, this:

"There’s a poisonous double standard in our society which says that it’s reverse-sexist and wrong for women to feel threatened by creepy-awkward male behaviour because our fear implies that we hold the negative, stereotypical view that All Men Are Predators, but that if we’re raped or sexually assaulted by any man with whom we’ve had prior social interaction – and particularly if he’s expressed some sexual or romantic interest in us during that time – it’s reasonable for observers to ask what precautions we took to prevent the assault from happening, or to suggest that we maybe led the guy on by not stating our feelings plainly. The result is a situation where women are punished if we reject, avoid or identify creepy men, and then told it’s our fault if we’re assaulted by someone we plainly ought to have rejected, avoided, identified." - http://ialreadysaidno.tumblr.com/ 

This delightful portion of our evening ended with those same mansplaining imbeciles trying to high five all of the girls they met on their way out of the train station saying "Happy New Year" as a way to make them feel better about how slimy and sexist they really are. Barf. Happy New Year! Looks like 2013 is going to be as great as the 1950s!

No, but really, apart from these few incidents, it was a good night. We made it home at 4:30am. ZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzz