Eyjafjallajokull

Under other circumstances, I might go on a bit about Friday having been our last “real” class with Professor Fosdal –who is now my facebook friend!- because we’re meeting at a pirate-themed pub next week, and how class was conducted partially in the park and partially in the Goat Tavern (right by the Milestone Hotel of Milavec fame). Were things different I might discuss excursions to Camden Market, Portobello Road Market, Covent Garden, and Piccadilly nightclub Tiger Tiger.

But no, things are the way they are, and what was at first a distant and unlikely joke of a travel disruption is now a very real threat. Iceland’s unprecedented geographic activity may well stop me from getting home in anything like a reasonable manner. Because this isn’t like a flight being canceled or delayed, this is like there are no more flights for the foreseeable future. The media is recommending alternative forms of transportation, with the consequent that the Eurostar is sold out for weeks and ferries and trains are seeing huge boosts in ticket sales, but you know what? There is no train to Philadelphia from Paddington! Or King’s Cross or even St Pancreas! None at all! That is not a viable route!

And transatlantic ships have been out of vogue pretty much since the Titanic, making them all but impossible to find let alone book.

The wind might shift on Wednesday enough to clear up flights for Saturday, but if not my future is exceptionally uncertain. Anyone who knows me even marginally probably knows I am not someone who thrives on uncertainty. Some of you may be familiar with the Excel spreadsheets I keep to monitor my degree progression or my extensively detailed calendars, or what I total drag I am to take to a party what with my excessive questions about where we’re going and how we’ll get there and how we’ll get back and if John McKay will be there. So it is not a happy camper who is blogging this.

Of course there’s nothing to be done other than anxiously investigate how on this godforsaken ash-covered earth one goes about finding a ship that isn’t an outrageously expensive cruise liner or getting to New York by way of Panama and Beijing… and walk.

The count on Times I Have Walked To Buckingham Palace for the Sheer, Unadulterated Hell of It is now at three. Although this time I finally managed to see the changing of the guards with the silly hats and the mobs of foreign tourists. So I walked in that direction until my iPod died, came back to make lunch and recharge the iPod, and then walked in the other direction to Primrose Hill. Walking alone in London after dark is inadvisable so after dinner I may have to be content with pacing my building’s staircase, but this is no occasion on which to sit still.

So as not to leave off on such a pensive angsty note I will briefly regale you with the details of my flatmate Bridget’s 21st birthday at Tiger Tiger, which involved no less than fifteen rowdy drunken Americans horrifying other would-be travelers into changing tube cars, some members of our party being kicked out of the club for sloppy inebriation before a fifth grader’s bedtime, me dancing with a boy who didn’t seem to know the words to the American songs and didn’t seem to know the words to the British songs and was really only just smiling in response to anything I said and turned out to be from the Czech Republic and not know any English at all (but was a decent dancer nevertheless), and Chloe and I getting kicked out of Tesco not for any semblance of disorderliness but merely just because it was closing.

And all that’s great but… I want to go home.