A nocturnal adventure.

We'd been cheering for people as they only barely made their way onto buses, the tube, and trains all day. Agreeing that watching people run only to fail was awful, we offered sincere, unseen support for every sprinter to bravely fight through the cruelly closing doors of departing vehicles we saw. Some of them were truly magnificent displays of athleticism, too. Londoners are capable of impressive manoeuvres when threatened with the possibility of having to navigate the night buses, or even just waiting an extra seven minutes for the next prospect to arrive.

So perhaps she and I shouldn't have been too surprised that we barely made the last train leaving that night despite its best attempts to throw us off. Having claimed for over an hour to be arriving on the platform on which we'd deposited ourselves, the information screen changed its mind only once the train had already stopped on the opposite side of the station four tracks over, or up a fight of stairs, down a hallway, down a flight of stairs, and a ways across the appropriate platform. Corinne screamed, "Oh, you have got to be kidding me."

I shouted behind me, already halfway up the stairs, "Don't read the screen, run!" Unfortunately I'm a well-kept and bookish young thing, and she overtook me almost instantly.

We fell onto the train, barely missing the pool of vomit awaiting us inside the door, and laughing hysterically. Our dash had to have looked absurd. Those other desperate creatures moved like tigers on Vaseline. We were stunned porcupines slipping on something lumpy and far less pleasant.

While waiting on the platform, still ignorant of our fate, Corinne had asked nervously, "Do you think the tube is still running?"

"I'm sure it is. It keeps running, doesn't it?" Dear readers, at some point in the course of my eight or so years as a blogger, you may have noticed a faint, wafting underscore of hubris. Alright, listen. I'd not been in London for years. I'd really only been to London twice before this. Stop laughing at me.

Thus began a series of misadventures involving several more or less randomly chosen night buses, my insisting a great many times that the tube map really doesn't bear much resemblance to the actual shape of the city, and a great deal of wandering. We got to know one another very well.

One of the best things about our improbable meeting was that we could admit to one another the completely embarrassing things that we would never say to anyone save another American with whom we were travelling. The coins still remind us of Harry Potter money. I've spent months riding the buses that are significantly taller than the sort to which I am accustomed, taking at least two every day when I lived in Dublin. I confessed while sharing the top front seat with her for the half-dozenth time that riding on the top is no less exciting now than it was the first time. She taught me that French toast is called eggy toast in the UK, which I hadn't known, and is completely adorable.

We saw a drunk tourist get hit by a taxi, and tried to help lift her out of the street while cars piled up behind her and their drivers shouted. I was appalled. Who yells at an injured and crying girl for blocking traffic? I busied myself with assisting in useful ways rather than offering poetic and devastating admonishments, and I only regret my inability to have done both at once a little. We met two unpleasant and drunk Polish men, and a very nice stripper with an outrageously thick London accent who claimed to have only arrived in the city a month earlier. Together, using our superpowers of rage, feminism, and the stripper's impressive footwear, we chased the drunks away. By that time morning bus service had resumed, and we got back to Gareth's house just after five in the morning.