A Lady in London

The other day I had another photo shoot for the Face of Ascot.  This shoot was unexpected, as it came in the wake of an exciting new sponsorship from Karen Millen, a UK fashion retailer that I love.  Part of the sponsorship involves the retailer publicizing the racecourse’s biggest event of the year in its shops throughout the UK.  Being the Face of Ascot, Models 1 organized a shoot to get a photo of me for the posters and promotional materials for the sponsorship.

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I was sitting in the lounge in LAX on my way home from San Francisco two Thursdays ago when I got an unexpected email from my boyfriend asking if I wanted to travel to Cairo the following weekend with two of our friends.  It took me about two seconds to respond.  Yes!  Of course.

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Ever since I moved to London I have heard about the movie premieres that take place regularly in Leicester Square.  All the daily papers have pictures of celebrities from the prior evening’s premieres, whether from Mamma Mia, the latest Keira Knightley film (there are too many to keep track of these days), or Harry Potter.  Never did I think I would be on the other side of the firm-but-fair guard rail that keeps the commoners from overrunning the smart set on the red carpet.

Until last weekend, that is.  On Sunday I was having tea with a friend of mine at the National Portrait Gallery, which is just around the corner from movie premiere central.  As we enjoyed our cuppa, she invited me to attend the UK premiere of Valkyrie, the new Tom Cruise movie, on Wednesday night.  I said yes.  Of course.  Who turns down Hollywood?

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It’s been nine months since I was last in San Francisco. That’s the longest I’ve ever been away from the City by the Bay.

While I’ve done my fair share of traveling in the interim, there’s nothing quite like landing at SFO. That’s not least because the runway goes right out into the water and I always feel like the 747 is going to magically grow pontoons and glide right into the bay. But more than that, I love landing at SFO because it’s home. The golden hills in the distance, the beautiful and highly underrated Bay Bridge to the east, and the city skyline all start to pull at my heart, reminding me that all this time I had left it in San Francisco.

As the plane descends, I realize that I even miss the ugly “South San Francisco the Industrial City” sign that’s so big it can be seen from ten thousand feet up. And the B of A building, where I spent two long years chained to a desk on the 44th floor. And the Port of Oakland, that ugly mass of buildings on the other side of the bay that makes driving across the Bay Bridge less inspiring than driving across its International Orange rival to the north. It’s good to be home.

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Last week I took the train to Stratford-upon-Avon with two of my friends from London. The purpose of my journey was to see a performance of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of the old favorite, Romeo and Juliet. But it wasn’t just any performance. And it wasn’t just any cast. It was an understudy performance in which the cast featured a friend of mine from Hampstead. He was playing Romeo.

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I thought that five days would be more than enough to see Cape Town. I was wrong. There was so much to do and see in the city and along the cape that my boyfriend and I easily filled five days and could have spent another five.

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After my harrowing bush plane journey from Windhoek to Sossusvlei, I was relieved to be greeted on the ground by the driver from Little Kulala, our safari lodge in the great Namib-Naukluft desert.

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A week before we left for Namibia I asked my boyfriend to remind me of our itinerary. He rattled off the locations of our safari camps, talked about driving from Etosha back to Windhoek, then casually mentioned the bush plane that would fly us to Sossusvlei—

“Wait. Bush plane?” I asked.

“Yeah. I asked you about it months ago. You were fine with it.”

“Um, no. I’m petrified of heights. There’s no way I would have ever agreed to fly in a bush plane,” I told him. “Ever.”

“Oh, hmmm. I thought we talked about it.”

“Well it’s already booked so there’s nothing I can do about it now, but if I die it’s all your fault,” I said. He wasn’t too worried. I was.

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I spent the last two weeks of December traveling to countries 49 and 50: Namibia and South Africa. Warm weather, safaris, sand dunes, and good wine; what better way to spend the last two weeks of the year?

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I spent a lot of time in London airports in 2008. From Stansted’s old, cramped Ryanair terminal to Heathrow’s debacle-turned-flagship Terminal 5, I saw the best and worst that BAA has to offer.

My favorite experience at the airports in London is the lounges. Most people don’t know that there are various tiers when it comes to lounges in London. But this is the UK, after all. They have class distinctions to reinforce.

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