London, Day 2.

We visited the Regions Park, which was just gorgeous. A Parsee named Jehangir from India had a statue there since he had contributed money to the park in appreciation of what British community did for Parsee community in India (which I am not sure what it was other than colonizing them)! My camera of 4.5 years decided to break on the second day of my trip. We continued getting photos with Laleh's iPhone. I will have to borrow her camera for the rest of my trip. Then we took the train to Soho, a nice looking area with restaurants and coffee shops, fancy department stores, but mainly famous for its exotic sex shops. As we were coming out of the train station, I see a couple lifting their child's stroller to go up the stairs. I look around. There is no escalator, no elevator, no flat section with a slope for carrying wheelchairs and strollers. "How are handicaps supposed to come out of the station?", I asked. "They cannot", Laleh responded.

Laleh was trying to impress me with so many designer and fashion stores. There was a scarf with skulls printed on it for only 265 GBP. "What is this? It is not even beautiful! They are out of their minds!", I said angrily. Jesse, Laleh's boyfriend, made a comment about another expensive item. "Ok, if this store is disturbing people's mental health we should leave", Laleh said jokingly. It was nice being exposed to different aspects of London, but I was not enjoying visiting these shops as much as she did. Well, we have all these expensive designer stores in the States too. Just because I do not live like characters of the Sex and the City, I should not have thought of these stores to be a London phenomenon. It was just depressing seeing all those ridiculously expensive items, maybe because they were a reminder of how hard I had to work to afford an ugly scarf.

A nice lunch and later a very nice cappuccino and baghlava in a coffee shop perfected my Soho experience. As we were sipping our coffees and chatting, we heard a loud noise. A painting behind a customer had dropped! He was so lucky it did not hit his head. Suddenly, everyone in the coffee shop looked back to see if there were a painting behind them. This event started a conversation by Jesse on how nothing works perfectly well here. Windows in Laleh's place drift air so much that the first night it felt like we were just sleeping outside. Jesse also mentioned how he had noticed a hole in size of a Frisbee, where his apartment's fan was in the middle of the windows. He initially had thought they forgot to cover the fan. Later, he was informed it was their solution to the possible hazard of having gas leaks in his place. I regretted the fact that I had just replaced my windows in the U.S. to make them energy efficient and to take advantage of president Obama's tax credit towards their cost. My old windows were like the king of windows compared to these British ones. I wondered how long they run their heaters in their cold winters and how much they are contributing to the global warming because of their bad windows. Not that people in the U.S. do not waste energy in so many other ways.

We took one of those famous red buses towards Chelsea. "Where do you want to visit during your stay?", Jesse asked. "Greenwich!", I said immediately. "She is obsessed with Greenwich. Ever since she has arrived she is asking me how she can get there, how far it is,..., I tell her it is ok, but Soho and other areas are as important to see if not more, there is not much there", Laleh said in an attempt to enlighten me. "I want to go to the Greenwich observatory!", I replied wondering how on earth she does not consider it the place to visit.

We arrived at Chelsea with its million GBP real estates. "You almost have to be embarrassed to drive a Porch here", Jesse said, indicating that would be the cheapest car residents of this region would have. "Arab princes live here, maybe we can find you a prince", Laleh joked. I enjoyed the gorgeous architecture of the buildings with beautiful flowers decorating them.

After a long day, we arrived home. We chatted with Alison, Laleh's flatmate, and Stephan, Alison's boyfriend. Alison is originally from Vancouver, her boyfriend from Switzerland. It is just wonderful meeting young people from all over the world and learning from their experiences.