October 20. Flying over Europe.

Up Early. The bus to Heathrow operates timely, in the huge terminal five there are no complications. The flight is comfortable and comes with a lot of smiles and a 187,5 ml bottle of Ceyraz. I read the in-flight magazine, the featured article about a Brit riding his bike across the Netherlands and reporting his adventures in a smooth and eloquent word soup, the vermicelli of which I have to look up in a dictionary. I gaze out of the window (there is no child this time whom I can offer my window seat to) my head pressed against the warm plastic and recorded a moment of happiness as French pastures, winding rivers, a soft blanket of clouds and Swiss Alpine peaks pass underneath me.
The steel bird lands, an hour later I walk out of the airport with a visa and a stamp, take a commuter train into the city and find my way to the internet, that digital nipple I so insatiably and incessantly suck. The sky is already dark when I finally find a nice café with a friendly staff and a wireless connection. The Istanbul night begins and my most important life lesson is to take. An emergency couch request works out and Mehmet comes to pick me up. He is one of the friendliest guys I've ever met.

October 18. National Gallery

Trafalgar Square

Today, I rush to the National Gallery and I like what I see there. Trafalgar Square itself, Nelson's Needle, the crowds populating this famous public space, it's all the more enjoyable because I am able to hide from it in the great fantasies of Monet, Van Gogh, and Degas soon.

Van Gogh's sunflowers is a picture that naturally disappoints me (since it had been the very reason to visit London), but I like the the chair right beside it, the one on the painting I mean, not the one seating the bored museum guard. For the record, I make a list of paintings that I really enjoy:

1. Caravaggio - Head of John the Baptist
2. Turner - Temeraize
3. le Brun - Mme. Brongart
4. Pisarro - Portrait of Félix Pisarro
5. Renoir - Umbrellas
6. Manet - Execution of Maximillian
7. Monet - St. Lazare and Grenouillière
8. van Gogh - Chair and Cypress wheatfield
9. Picasso - Child with a dove
10. Degas - Combing  the hair
11. Cézanne - Grandes baigneuses
12. Dürer - Painter's father (1497)
13. Hobbema - Avenue of Middelharnis
14. Rembrandt - Hendrikje Stoffels

The National Gallery is huge. Soon, I find myself cannonballing along endless galleries, and the paintings blend together into a colorful stream of figures with their religious or mundane attributes, like they had some ten years ago, when I flew through the galleries of the Prado in Madrid.

I walk toward Piccadilly Circus because, well, it is a famous place and I like the sound of its name. Chillies, Dill, Pickles, Lelies, Picasso, Cadillac, there is a cloud of very tasty and lofty associations in my mind. I buy bread 'n cheese, sit down with it at the statue, watching a child playing with the attention he gets.

Next is Covent Garden, a lively market. My Turkish friend will later tell me she had worked just here. There are street shows (a knight offering his sword to the youngest children, a headless man beckoning, a plant man who stood apart sadly and didn't get much attention, and a bald entertainer forming a 'boyband' which was of course the most popular event). I hear German and Dutch on every corner and realize how close I am to Germanic mainland as a result of irresponsibly dirt cheap airfares. There we go! A sneer at the polluter.
This is a beautiful city, described surely in much more eloquent terms than mine, but let me mention at least the small cobblestone streets coming together at little squares with classic pubs, and their larger counterparts the large boulevards touching each other in the large Circuses.

October 16.

The feeling of being on the road again! Today Charity Travel starts officially. It feels very good.

Then I listen to an audiobook by Bill Bryson on the quirks of the English language, that will probably always remain a strange tool in my hands. I have to find the right pace and power of hammering the words together to seem at least a little bit natural. As long as you understand me and I don't bore nor annoy you, there don't seem to be a problem. Yes, I will make heavy use of English since I have to document every project. I hope this will work out just fine. Now that I'm writing this on a waiting bench in Frankfurt/Hahn airport, the lowcost carrier airport about 100 kilometers away from the city somewhere on a high plain, I feel I miss the level of sensitivity to write down just what I want. But there are greater concerns. It's not my mother tongue and more importantly, it has not been my mother's tongue. Consider me a guest en anglais and I promise to take off my shoes. Bash me and you might feel them intruding your chubby behind. That was fun, huh?

Now I just got through customs. And YES I can bring my medicine, neatly packed in a transparent back, no more then 100ml fluids, and metal needles. Needles! Needles! Needless to say, I could do terrible things, like threaten the crew with allegedly infected blood, fire a pile of newspapers drenched in alcohol and make use of the consternation to make my way into the cabin and kiss a highrise with the nose of the 747. Those fantasies of childs that watch too much tv and play too many video games are horrendous. The fact that they do exist, even inside my academically trained mind, is very worrying. Perhaps it's the sexiness of the near impossible, peccable, yes morally disastrous deed, a sexiness as seen on tv in a milder form that arouses a forbidden desire in all of us. Is there such a thing as a genetic inclination to destroy, held back only by social bonds?