Escape from the Soul

According to a (baseless?) rumour, some Indians believed that one´s soul can travel no faster than one can walk himself. For example: if one travels by a horse, one has to wait for the soul to follow the same time than it would have taken to walk the distance. Those Indians had no idea of airplanes...

I don´t particularly like the flying. It´s not only that the soul is too slow to keep up with the pace, but also the superficial feeling of traveling. Breaking mindless distances, flying over thousands of places worth of seeing, just in few hours. Windows closed that the sun is not dimming the TV screen. Airports are portals to other worlds, where one should not get so easily, because the soul is not ready for it. They are also temples of capitalism. Products only the posh better people can afford are sold in shiny glass cabinets. Adds where those products are looking cool on some trendy Hollywood or sports star. Meaningless high-price shopping just to kill time between flights. Tax-free shops, selling stuff with only slightly cheaper prices, where you have to buy 10 packages of chewing gum to get the only one you need. Water sold in plastic bottles more expensive than beer outside the airport.

When I set my feet on KLIA LCCT airport, I expect a killing boring time. I walk around, give my luggage to a safe-keeping, find a food stall, which is selling reasonably priced tom-yam clay-pot noodles with seafood. I don´t want to sleep. Why should I? I will get jet-lagged anyway and I can save my tiredness to the plane. There´s a free internet and Seven-Eleven to buy beer. After half a bottle of Guinness, I feel drunk. After two bottles I am wasted for ten minutes. I meet an Australian older couple. We´re talking for an hour about the lust which is driving us traveling again and again. They buy me a coffee, which tastes like it was from the Heaven in my mouth. They advertise that KLIA is "world´s best airport". I don´t know about that, but at least it´s not the worst. I am having fun. 

I decide to go to the check-in, buy a book, and finally, step into the plane. There´s no food served for me in the plane, but I´ve brought my own noodles. A good book, skipped night of sleep and the girl sitting next to me makes the time to run by. Ling is from KL and on the way to Spain to meet her friend. After that she´s probably going to backpack in Europe for some time, as long as she can afford it, which is probably much shorter than I could afford her country.

It´s one of the smoothest flights seeing the length of it - but the soul. It´s still somewhere on the way from Asia. When I step out from London-Stansted airport, everything appears so organized, clean and strictly ruled. There are no hello-misters to bother me, no chaos, no animals stalking everywhere. People are walking fast without looking around, without smiling, without taking any contact to other people. Everything looks so very...British. It´s called the reverse culture shock. It feels much worse than the culture shock I experienced in the City of Angels.

I walk to the coach stand, buy an expensive ticket to Birmingham, order my first cafe Americano for a long time and start waiting for the coach. It arrives after ten minutes. The driver is black. First one in the country, who doesn´t seem to be withdrawn in his shell. He´s talking clear, but cool English, just like the black people tend to do in the movies. We´re talking while waiting for people to crawl into the coach. I like him. He seems like a hearty man.

When watching the landscape to whistle by my nose, I realize that I have been in England only once and that time was a visit to London. I haven´t really seen the countryside, but I´ve seen many English TV shows. Small towns full of low two-floor red-brick or grey-stone houses. Wild-haired teenagers sitting and smoking close to a bus stand. Old English couples dressed neat and always having a hat. Small patches of green peaceful deciduous forests in between of yellow turnip fields in flower. Everything looks exactly like what I´ve seen from TV.

I arrive to Brom´s central bus station around 10pm local time after 43 hours and 12 000 km of traveling. The sun has set for some time ago, but there is still some light left. I´d expected something more fancy. Birmingham is Britain´s second most populous city with more than a million inhabitants, but it looks very small to me. Low industrial houses. Badly illuminated streets. Just very few people anywhere. It´s just far from KL.

Marco is waiting at the bus station. It´s good to meet old friends again. It reminds me of the good times (not that these times would be bad). It reminds me of the spring 2007, maybe the best spring in my life so far, the spirit of Svalbard, the summer and the mid-summer partey with my parents and brother, the fall of the hope and finally the great success. Life´s a journey, where one must learn something every day, but without friends it would be like a candle without a flame, as Buddha used to say. Good friends are those you´ve experienced something similar with, gone through tougher times, learned from those times and shared it. Marco, indeed, is a good friend.

Marco is living in a nice English style stone house with some of his theatre-school mates. People in the house are practicing 24/7, which feels slightly weird at the beginning. But you´ll never become an actor, if you´re not ready to give everything for it, I guess. Everything here is just so English, which shouldn´t be a surprise. This is England anyway. Everything just feels unreal after four months in South-East Asia. I really hope my soul is faster than my legs would be. I can´t wait to have it back.

I am too tired to go out to explore the town. Tomorrow must be the day. On Saturday morning we´re heading to London, where´s a nationwide theatre-school gathering and a partey. My strong guess is that we´re gonna visit a theatre while in London. Hopefully they play Shakespeare. I want to listen to that fancy English...