Bruneaus at Barbican

Meeting up with your travelling buddy abroad can be tricky business.

When going to an entirely different country you are up against a whole lot of variables that you cannot forecast.

Take the trip to the UK where my sis and I met up for example, it provided common obstacles in this matter:

1. You won't know what the space will look like. You can buy maps, you can call ahead and ask a local, but the only way to know how the rendezvous place will appear is to physically see it. The particular place sis and met up had winding passages and it would have been easy to miss each other without even knowing.
2. You don't know how busy it will be. Rush hour tends to rotate around the locals' work hours, but you never know when a sports game or student rally will fill a subway terminal, creating an zoo of bodies to get lost in (and again perhaps miss the person you are meeting). Barbican was quite bustling on the day we met up.
3. Time. Flights are scheduled for certain hours, but once you land and get your luggage and figure out where to take the taxi/train, you can easily run behind. Then there is time zones and figuring out 'local time'. (not sure why those are in quote)
4. Your sister may slice her leg while cutting up guidebooks (to save packing space) with a dull pocketknife and spend hours in emergency getting stitches in the middle of the night. Which will result in her getting a total of three hours of sleep, arriving the next day in the UK like a walking zombie with a passport. Which in turn results in her arriving at the station where I waited for her, and studying a map over my shoulder... so close I can hear her breathing. Not recognising her only sister and sibling. I stare at her, thinking shes just playing with me, and she says 'just trying to figure out where I am, don't mind me'. I stare at her some more... and only after saying her name does it register that we have successfully met up. Yes, slicing your leg open can definitely prove an obstacle.

So many variable that cannot be controlled, indeed!

Then we went on to travel the UK as best we could in a few short days.

I will continue our UK adventure story in the next blog entry (complete with an overview with Jen's packing fetish/obsession, 'the big fight', the knight bus, Crierland -Ireland-, driving on the wrong side of the road -to us', and more)