7-August-99 Coming home
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The dijournieh knocked on our door at 5 AM and I was up and getting ready right away.
Anne and Tom and I had a cup of Armenian coffee at the airport while waiting for time to board. You could see Mt. Ararat behind the runway, through the haze, but it didn't show up on the picture.
Airport coffee shop
The prettiest woman in all the Caucasus region might possibly be Irina Khatchturian of British Airways. What a smile as she checked me in for my flight!
The man in the aisle seat said yes, London was his home port. He thought I would have time to walk around a little if I took the underground to Picadilly, and not to worry about the weather. “After a week in Yerevan, walking around in the London drizzle for an hour will do you a world of good.”
I enjoyed the ride back and forth on the London Underground. For sure, it was more fun than sitting or walking around Heathrow for two hours would have been. The London suburbs looked just like themselves, with lots of chimney pots and red brick. I minded the gap between the train and the platform, as the recording (or was it really the driver?) said at every station. Someone in a panda costume was playing the trumpet at the bottom of an escalator at the Picadilly station, ignoring signs forbidding busking. None of the riders seemed to mind the least bit. I popped my head up out of the underground exit like a prarie dog, long enough to buy and eat a rum raisin ice cream cone and take four pictures with red London double-decker busses in them; then back along the underground to Heathrow.
Downtown London
How can the guy next to me take a Tom Clancy book seriously when he's sitting next to a gorgeous Kazakhstani woman who's reading The Thorn Birds in Russian?
Kazakhstani
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