This past weekend Jen and I decided to do some touristy stuff. It seemed like a good idea to get out and get acquainted with the city we now call home and see what all the buzz was about. We started big. We decided not to go to the obscure stuff that may be of personal interest, we went to the icons. Big Ben, Westminster Abby, 10 Downing St. and the London Eye. We saw them all. As someone who has been a tourist abroad before, I can say that it felt completely different. We’ve always visited during off or late shoulder seasons, so while we have run into crowds before (re: Shinjuku Station), being in a crowd of tourists is a completely different, and worse, experience. We weren’t able to really enjoy the monuments because we were either getting out of someone’s way, or had someone moving into ours. This brings me to a theory of sorts that Jen and I discussed for a bit. We couldn’t help but feel that it was always us deferring to others and moving out of the way of oncoming pedestrians. There is no rhyme or reason, no favored side or any discernible pattern of how to walk the streets efficiently. Anyway, that brings us to our theory, well more of a proposed experiment really. What if we stopped deferring? What if we just walked in a straight line, consequences be damned. If you get in my way, you get run into. What would happen? Would we just run into person after person, or would we find out that in the game of pedestrian chicken, we are just the ones that are always bailing first? We said we were going to do it, but it is hard to overcome all the years of being polite and minding your step. We didn’t have the heart to really commit to the exercise. So if you are in a crowded city, and have the discipline to try it, let us know, are people really that self involved and oblivious, or are we just terrible at chicken.

Fighting the throngs of shopping crowds up and down Oxford and Regent on the way home made me realize, that while I really enjoy London, that I will leave the really popular attractions for less popular days from now on.