A Lady in London

Last month I spent an afternoon in Dover, the English coastal city known for its white cliffs, wartime history and cheap ferries to France. The weather forecast–an increasingly important part of my expat life in London–called for blue skies over the white cliffs of Dover, so I set off from London hoping for a nice day by the sea.

The rain started five minutes after I got off the train.

Umbrella overhead, I trudged up the hill to Dover Castle feeling like I was climbing Kilimanjaro. When I got to the top I stopped for a minute to acclimatize to the high altitude and chastise myself for forgetting my oxygen tank.

Steadied, I walked to the ticket booth where the wizened old man at the counter told me that it would take at least two and a half hours to see the whole castle and booked me on a tour of the famous World War II caves in the late afternoon.

Forty five minutes later I had seen all there was to see.

I ran from the castle walls to the cafeteria, dodging raindrops like flaming arrows of enemy invaders. Fortified by a strong cup of English Breakfast tea, I walked down to the caves to try my luck at getting on an earlier tour.

It must have been the high altitude that made me forget that the English have an extra gene: the queuing chromosome. Combine that with an attitude toward ‘fairness’ that could stand strong in the face of the fiercest Scottish highlander, and I was in for a challenge.

After talking with three different people, all of whom weren’t sure what the protocol was when some [rude] American wanted to effectively jump the queue, I awoke from my altitude-induced stupor and remembered that the English weren’t the only ones with an extra gene. Somewhere along that Mayflower voyage we Americans developed a special chromosome of our own: the better-to-ask-forgiveness-than-permission one.

And just like that, I slipped past the legion of confused Guardians of the Queue and stepped into the very next tour. I had an informative viewing of the caves from which the Normandy invasion was directed, and enjoyed it even more as a result of the adrenaline rush that accompanies the daring feat of queue jumping.

But the real treat wasn’t in the caves, but outside of them. After repelling down Mount Kilimandover, I walked around the waterfront for awhile to get a look at the white cliffs for which Dover is so famous.

As if the weather gods knew how much I had suffered for the previous few hours, the clouds suddenly parted, leaving me with the beautiful blue skies that I had been promised by their Sisyphean mortals, the weather forecasters. The white cliffs shone in all their chalky splendor and sent me back to London in a state of ‘joy and laughter and peace ever after.’ Until the next rainy spell, that is.