Let the adventures begin

So Wednesday I had to go the Apple Store in Oxford Circus to buy the new power adapter. It was my first time out in London completely on my own. Oxford Circus is on the completely other side of town, on the west side, but luckily the 25 bus runs from Queen Mary's door step and terminates there, so I thought I would take it, save 60p on the tube, and enjoy the scenery on the ride over.
Bad idea.
The traffic was awful, and after 45 minutes on the bus, we'd barely gotten halfway there. Looking out the window after yet another stop, I saw the Bank tube station, and hopped off the bus to take the tube the rest of the way. Already rather upset at wasting 90p on the bus without having taken it all the way, I was further traumatized when I swiped my card to get out at Oxford Circus, and, distracted by a sign pointing towards the street I wanted to get out on, forgot to go through the turnstile, wasting that pound 50. So after putting more money on my Oyster (the name of the card for buses and tubes - don't ask me why it's called Oyster), which required the assistance of a tube employee, I swipe my card again, only I swipe it to get in. So I had to walk all the way down and around the tracks to try to come back out again.
After getting the power adapter from Apple, I just wandered around in a bit of a funk. Wednesday was my first "bad" day here. I've been feeling like I stuck out like a sore thumb since I got here, with my American accent and my too-casual, not trendy clothes, and wasting the equivalent of $6 on tube fare because of silly mistakes only made me feel stupider. I'm so accustomed to being able to navigate my way around DC and NYC comfortably, but here, even with a map, I don't really feel like I have a sense of where I am because there's really no grid to the streets, they just meander around and end abruptly and quickly, and then I go and mess up on the tube, which isn't even that different from the NYC subway.
However, my wanderings around brought me through Carnaby Street (synonymous with London's fashion in the '60s if you didn't know). For all of you Bend It Like Beckham mavens, the Soccer Scene store where Jess and Juliet buy Jess a new pair of football boots when they're supposed to be buying her shoes for her sister's wedding is on the corner of Carnaby Street.
They brought me down to Piccadilly Circus and over to Leicester Square, and brought me to a map that pointed me towards the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery. The National Gallery didn't hold much interest for me - I only visited the 19th century wing to see the Impressionist pieces, but I really liked the National Portrait Gallery, particularly its Tudor section!
So if on my worst day I manage to stumble upon Carnaby St. and see two famous museums, I wouldn't have any right to complain. However, at the end of the day as I swiped my card to leave Mile End Station, I was very grateful and relieved that they cap charges to your Oyster card in one day at 4 pounds 80.
Thursday was a great day, particularly for following Wednesday. I went to Roman Road Market, which is about a 15 minute walk to the northeast of Queen Mary with three other American girls I've become friends with. Roman Road had the diverse mix of people that is normal around this part of London, but with many more working class white Britons than can be seen on Whitechapel St. Like I think I said in an earlier post, the markets here are so great because people do normal shopping there. Roman Road's market was not as bustling as Whitechapel's, but that meant I got to take pictures, which I'll post on a separate entry because I can't figure out how to do it all in the same post. But here's what the pictures will be of: I got some delicious looking strawberries for a pound 95, and we admired some very chic looking coats, but they were 45 pounds, and I'd seen ones that looked almost exactly the same at the Whitechapel High Street Market for only 30 pounds, so we didn't get any. Also, there were a couple of stores with beautiful, colorful saris in the windows that I stared at openly and enviously.
After Roman Road Market, we went on a bus tour of central London that Queen Mary organized for the international students. It was fantastic, much better than the interminable boat trip, and our tour guide was really knowledgeable and funny. We got to see a lot - the Bank of England, St. Paul's Cathedral, Buckingham Palace, Big Ben and Parliament, and the Tower. The only downside was that we were in a regular bus (or coach, as they call it here), not a double-decker with an open top, so many of my pictures were less than spectacular, cut off as they are by the top of the windows and curtains on the side, but I'll post the best ones in the same post as the ones with Roman Road Market.
Today was a blessedly less busy and harried day than yesterday, and I went to see The Duchess with my American girlfriends at a theater up the road towards Whitechapel in the afternoon. Afterwards we went to a real pub for dinner (or pub grub, as it were). I got a Hammond Steak, which sounded really fancy and good for only three pounds, but turned out to be a big slab of ham, and it came with a fried egg and chips (fries). It was very British looking (read: not very appetizing looking) but turned out to be pretty good, and I liked the very odd and British fried egg with dinner aspect of it. I got one of the girls to take a picture of it, so I'll get that from her soon and post it just so you can appreciate how very...unusual looking it is.
A brief word to help you try to get an appreciation for direction in London: in a manner that drives Americans' sense of order crazy, Mile End Road, which is the street that Queen Mary is on, is the same road as Whitechapel. At some indeterminate point, Whitechapel Road becomes Mile End Road. London is actually comprised of a bunch of small cities, and the two that contain the most famous sites are the City and Westminster. "The City" refers to the oldest part of London which has the craziest, least straightforward street plan because there was no actual street plan, they just grew up where they did back in, oh, you know, the 1000s or whatever. The City is where all the finance in London has traditionally and still predominately is located, and when you're in it during the day you will never see more people in black suits per square foot anywhere else in the world, and it's pretty much empty by 9 at night when everyone's cleared out of the pubs there and headed home. Westminster is home to the political side of things, and you can find Parliament and Buckingham Palace there.
Sigh. All right, I think that's all caught up now, look for the pictures from Roman Road Market and the bus tour soon!