From NAIA to Heathrow: At the Cusp of My Happy Travels Through the Land of Cream Tea, Scones and Tom Hiddleston

     Sixteen years ago, as a sophomore in high school, way before my friend Sue earned her M.D., we were partners in a project for Ma’am Yz’s English class which saw us writing about an imaginary trip to any country or city of our choice in the world.  If I remember right, it was one classmate who got the teacher’s special citation for being appropriately and absolutely hilarious (after all, if my memory serves me right, I think it wittily and tastefully talked about the perils of hanging underwear in a foreign land) but Sue and I got a not-so-shabby grade for our effort.  

      So where did we go exactly?

     Most of our classmates “went” to the US, specifically Disneyland in California.  Who can blame a bunch of fourteen-year-olds who were overexposed to the entire Mickey Mouse machinery?  

     After very little thought, Sue and I, opted to ditch the Americas and decided to “go” to the one place we both really wanted to visit for what seemed like forever to two adolescent girls - we were going to visit the city of London.  Or, at least, pretend to visit.

     Honestly, I do not remember when my fascination with the nation of cream tea and scones began.  It was probably due to the fact that the one of the earliest reads I was exposed to were Puffin Books from England which, in turn, were sold on Doulos, a ship-slash-floating bookstore that found its way into our coastal city once a year back in the 1980s.  As a child, it was difficult to get decent reading material, the usual fare being school textbooks and the ubiquitous Horoscope comics that flooded our streets and did wonders for my struggling Tagalog vocabulary.  Thus, when Doulos, and later Logos, came to call on our city’s port, I would gleefully dash aboard its decks and lose myself in the sight of shelves upon shelves of books.  Since most of the books were written by English children's book authors, there were a number of words in its pages which were not usually part of my American English vocabulary and, thus, naturally piqued my curiosity as a child - words such as “satchel,” “till,” “lorry” and “scones.”  Eventually, I fell in love with works from other English writers such as Emily Brontë, Jane Austen, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, as well as a lot of Blake and Yeats.

One of the Puffin Books I remember buying from M/V Doulos.

     Perhaps, I should also blame repetitive viewings of "Bedknobs and Broomsticks" and being completely fascinated with the dancing on Portobello Road.  It did not help that Sue, who I became friends with at age seven, also had a similar affinity for "Peter Pan" and perhaps was the only other person I knew who would look up at the night sky to look for "the second star to the right" where we could head "straight on till morning."  We've both graduated to BBC period productions and have admittedly list sleep over repeats of Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" and Elizabeth Gaskell's "North and South."  Last Christmas, I gave her DVDs of "Cranford" and "Return to Cranford" and we tried to do synchronized viewing - meaning, we tried to press "play" at the same time as she watched the episodes in Iloilo while I did my viewing in Manila.  As of the moment, my hard drive is still crammed with unwatched episodes of "The Hollow Crown," "Sherlock" and, most recently, "Doctor Who."  

     Sue would eventually grow up to be completely enamored with Queen Victoria and it was frustrating to find anything interesting about a dead monarch in the days when there was no internet and the thick encyclopedias offered nothing but cold, dispassionate information.  She also became completely obsessed with the Beatles and would continuously chastise me for my apparent lack of musical taste as I preferred the more contemporary Take That and Oasis.  In high school, we both read, grew angry at, cried over yet still re-read "Wuthering Heights" so many times our copies of the book looked almost pitiful.  We also shared a fascination for Shakespeare.  She was so fixated with his work that she would sometimes sneak into the library’s literary section, while we were in the middle of writing equations for Physics, just so she could read aloud passages from “Romeo and Juliet," or quote lines from Shylock and Portia in "The Merchant Venice" while we were bowling and trying to hit duckpins for PE class.  In the course of studying world history, we took a particular interest in England's formation as a nation, particularly in its monarchs - from the conquests of William of Normandy to the War of the Roses, and, naturally, the juicier bits, such as Henry VIII's countless matrimonial pursuits and the real score between Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley. 

     Of course, there was the unfailing allure of the British actor, who always seemed to come across as intelligent and insightful.  It was perhaps due to their outstanding voice placement which was particularly a standout and did not make them sound squeaky.  Thus, I have often viewed Julie Andrews, Maggie Smith, Anthony Hopkins, Kenneth Branagh, Judi Dench, Emma Thompson, Tom Hardy and Jude Law in a notch above every one else and cannot be blamed for nursing crushes on dreamy Colin Firth, intense Ralph Fiennes, charming James MacAvoy, and, most recently, the only two men in the world I will absolutely marry with eyes closed: handsome Richard Armitage and rakish Tom Hiddleston.

     So what exactly is a girl to do on the eve of a trip sixteen years in the making?  Actually, I wasn’t sure, except the fact that I wanted to get off the plane in Heathrow without looking bedraggled or cold after a fifteen-hour journey.  Thus, I had to make sure I had my Wet Ones in the bag, a thick pashmina and a charged iPod, all ready to play something steaming from Freddie Mercury as I stepped out of the airline tube.

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     On the morning of the day that we were scheduled to fly to the country which would see me scratching off about a dozen items from my bucket list, I was surprised that I was pleasantly relaxed.  There was none of the palpable excitement that I felt the first time we went to the US back in 1996 or the irrational hallyu-instigated giddiness I fought off when I headed for Seoul seven years ago.  I was not even bothered that the very stormy weather courtesy of an exiting typhoon insured a practically turbulent flight.  Instead, I had calmly tucked a week's worth of clothes in Ziploc bags inside my luggage, along with my journal, bags of Nestea for Manang Apple and about three weeks’ supply of tabagak (tuyo) smothered in newspaper for my lola.  In fact, that morning, the only thing which sent my pulse racing - and my muscles throbbing - was when the security guard of the building I lived in told me that a front tire of my car was flat.  

     By late afternoon, my dad, lola and I were in the airport, all checked-in and comfortably seated in the pre-departure area, the Smart Gilas basketball game blaring loudly behind me.  I made sure to carry three Starstudio magazines for my lola, her reading fare of choice.

Lola shows off her nail polish while catching some zzzzs in Hong Kong International Airport.

     Our Cathay Pacific flight left as scheduled and by a little after 10 P.M., we were in Hong Kong for a two-hour layover.  By that time, my lola had stopped telling me about Daniel Padilla’s life before and after stardom and had fallen asleep, like my dad, on the airport benches.  I entertained myself by taking photographs of different departure gates, checking out the airport shops and eventually had to restrain myself from buying a Luke Skywalker mug.

   
     The minute our plane took off from Hong Kong just after midnight, I decided I was going to force myself to adjust to the seven-hour time difference between England and the Philippines by sleeping at 3 A.M., Philippine time.  My weapons of choice included Carrot Fantasy on the iPad and Iron Man 3 on the in-flight TV.  No can do, though.  Just after dinner at around 1 a.m., I was snoring away like a baby, unmindful of the bumps in the middle of the night and the occasional invitation from the flight attendants to perhaps have a break and have a Kitkat.

     By 6:30 A.M., London time, our plane touched down smoothly on Heathrow airport's runway and my mother texted me that she was all too glad to know we had landed safely that she was now fighting back tears.  One of the things about Heathrow that I first noticed was how busy it was.  A flurry of people were literally zipping ahead, past, behind and around me and we were too preoccupied in catching up with my lola’s Sri Lankan wheelchair attendee that all thoughts of walking down the tube to the sounds of Queen vanished.

    The wheelchair attendant looked at me and asked if I was from the US or Canada.  I flashed my passport with the vintage Pinoy cover.  “Oh, because you don't sound Filipino.”  I smiled and shrugged while genuinely wondering how Pinoys ought to sound.  “On a break from college?” he asked me again.  “How old are you, seventeen?”  Hmmm, I was liking Britain already.  “Yep, seventeen...thirteen years ago.”  He asked me what I did for a living and as we walked en route to the baggage carousel, he was now talking  about human rights abuses and encouraging me to take up my LLM in Britain.  “I am not sure if courts in your country take you seriously but when you’re young, that’s the time to fight for ideals,” he said to me. 

     After collecting our luggage, it was time to see for myself whether Hugh Grant’s British prime minister character in the movie “Love Actually” was right.  After perhaps countless rewatches of that movie, I could replay in my head how he he appropriately opens the movie by saying, “Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think of the arrivals gate at Heathrow airport.”

     When we walked out of the airport doors and into the sight of a face I knew so well in the middle of a sea of people, I realized Hugh Grant could not have been more right.

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     “Whew, it’s cold.”

     That was the first thing I said to Manang Apple the minute we stepped out of the confines of the airport and headed for the parking area.  I had the urge to call my friend Halee (who studied in London for a year and told me before I left that I could live with a thick vest layered over a shirt) and tell her, “Wow ha, hindi malamig talaga!”  We piled into a cozy Vauxhall and began our two-hour drive to the town of Taunton in the county of Somerset.  But this was not before we stopped by Services, an area near the motorway which has clean johns, steaming baked beans and was the clearest confirmation of the renowned truth that Marks and Spencer in Britain was in the same league as SM to us.

     On the motorway en route to Taunton, I saw for myself the English countryside described in the books I had read - rolling hills, watering holes which would provide a respite from the occasional greenery, fields golden with wheat, sheep dotting the verdant land and hedgerows occasionally stretching out to border the motorway.  There were townhouses with their red tile roofs standing in the middle of the fields, much like silent stone sentries keeping watch.  I could not get enough of the sight that I almost did not hear my lola say out loud, “Why don’t they have mountains here?  Or goats?  Or houses made of nipa?”  I told her, in between giggles, that no one was risking hypothermia here.

     The two hours on the road sped by like less than half the time.  Manong Mitchell told me to take note of the city of Bristol when we sped past its exit as it was to be marker that we were nearing Taunton.  True enough, he exited the motorway a little while later and we found ourselves in the quaint town I had pored over a number of times in Google Earth.  After about two or three stoplights and a couple of turns here and there, the car turned left to a small street lined with townhouses on both sides.  I stepped out of the car and saw a sign: “Mews.”  Across the street, there was a black cat which sat unmoving on the window of its owner.  Then came three girls of different sizes and heights, bounding out the door of one of the houses, tumbling right into our outstretched hands.  Aidagere had grown bigger in the span of one year whereas Bea was more spindly than she was before she left Iloilo.  It was my youngest niece, Pau-pau, who had grown the most and was now almost the same height as I was.

Almost on the street where they live.

     Bea and Pau-pau vacated the room they shared on the second floor for my dad, lola and me to occupy while we were there.  My lola and I were to share Bea’s huge bed whereas Dad was assigned Pau-pau’s sleeping space - complete with the fuchsia-and-aqua colored comforter and FIFA-commemorative Beanie Babies.  Pau-pau’s headboard was filled with family pictures which were most likely taken from old photo albums back home.  I saw a lot of familiar faces in the photographs: Lola was there, Lolo Deting on his last birthday, Auntie Aida and Lola Pa-ul, Jeff and Aimee, Manang Maya, Inday, my mom.

     Bea’s side of the room, on the other hand, was decorated with her oil paintings, which included my favorite, a picture of a gnarly brown tree with the sun setting in the background, and a montage of Justin Bieber posters.

   I went up to Aidagere’s room in the attic which was festooned with twinkly Christmas lights.  There were a bunch of small, plastic versions of the Union Jack hung like banners on the beams.  A collage of her favorite celebrities was in the works on her ceiling and a mini organ was shoved on one corner, next to her growing collection of books.  The best part of her room was the window which opened to a beautiful view of tiled rooftops shining in the afternoon sky.

     Lunch was amazing.  It was amusing how Manang Apple had evolved into such an excellent kitchen magician when the only thing I remember her "cooking" was a pack of Safari (Cornick equivalent for us 80s kids) which she stirred in my toy clay frying pan whenever we play house.  After stuffing themselves, my dad and lola were slowly succumbing to jet lag.  Bea and Pau-pau brought down pillows and a thick comforter for lola to use in their comfy couch, along with a book on Prince William and Kate Middleton for her to read.  Manang Apple bundled her up pretty well and tucked her in as she started leafing through the book’s pages.  Manong Mitchell decided to keep her company in the living room and had already settled himself to sleep on the other couch.   My dad, on the other hand, was snoring away happily upstairs.

     On the other hand, I was determined not to yield to my drooping eyelids.  I went with Manang Apple and the girls to town to buy groceries.  Bea left the house in a hoodie and a cap drawn closely towards her face since she did not have any mascara on.  I was not quite sure how much change mascara could do for one's face but my niece is apparently a firm believer.  Manang Apple was visibly excited to show me what Taunton’s town proper had to offer.  We took a right from their street, crossed at the junction near a Chinese restaurant, cut through the lawns of an office building, passed another row of townhouses, entered Tesco and emerged right into Taunton’s High Street.

     Now this, to me, was exactly what a high street was supposed to look like.  I have no complaints about Taguig’s BGC High Street, except the fact that it looked so artificial, as if it was made to look exactly that way.  Taunton’s High Street, on the other hand, brought back the real meaning of the street shopping exercise I had grown so accustomed to as a child in our own Calle Real.  Instead of malls, there were shops and restaurants lining the entire length of the cobblestoned path.  There was a cobbler on one side, a store selling ribbons and cloth on another and another shop selling handmade jewelry.  We walked past a tea shop where Taunton's older population sat on blue cushions, partaking of cream tea on a white teapot and a saucer full of scones.  On a rather conspicuous side of the street was a Marks and Spencer, a WH Smith and a Starbucks.  We walked further and entered Poundland, a store much like Saizen and Daiso which sold anything from candy to flower pots at only a pound.  I could not resist buying a whole bag of strawberry-flavored licorice which my nieces and I started eating the minute I paid for them.  We dropped by the post office so that I could have some money changed when Manang Apple remembered we had to buy fruits.  We went to a little shop by the sidewalk which sold fruits in wicker baskets with the flannel plaid cloths for lining.  The mangoes there looked different - something like a hybrid between my Lolo’s indian mangoes and the popular Guimaras mango.  The persimmons, pears, tomatoes and apples looked absolutely fresh and plump.  There were smaller streets cris-crossing High Street that were strewn with shops selling antiques and other knick-knacks, leading me to swear to myself I was not leaving Taunton until I checked every store window.  All in all, I felt like I was walking straight out of “The Sound of Music” sans the apron and the petticoat.

     Manang Apple then brought me to the town library where residents could borrow books for free.  We crossed an old stone bridge to get to a grocery store so we could buy some bread and wine.  We headed home from the grocery and took another short cut through a park which was built by the banks of the river.  Seagulls and pigeons swooped around me whereas ducks where happily floating away on the river as little children threw pieces of bread at them.  There were people sitting on the grass on picnic mats, either sleeping or sunning themselves. 

     When we got home, we were pleasantly surprised to find that Lola had fallen asleep on the sofa in her bundle of fleece and pillows.  Manang Apple sallied forth to the kitchen to prepare dinner.  I went for another walk alone, just so I could watch the sky turn from yellow to purple.  It was the end of another day in the middle of summer solstice.  My happy travels, however, were just about to begin.