Returning from the theater to Rockmount was already bittersweet. Little by little, we began to lose time in our London hourglass. It was coming to an end and I was overcome with anxiety to return, because I had very beautiful feelings during these days. I've never lived in London and I don't think I ever will, but it's a city full of magical corners. For example, near here, in the neighborhood where we lived, there was a church on the corner of the street with a typical old cemetery, where during foggy mornings you might see wandering souls getting lost in the fog. I don't know because I didn't have time to examine it. I won't lie that I was so sorry to leave London that I cried. But it was always like that, even when I was returning home from my sister's. England has its charm. Historical architecture with unmistakable nature in gloomy weather, which gives space for imagination to fly. This is also why it is the birthplace of many incredible literary works.

When leaving Rockmount, we met Roya and her husband in the lobby, and this time all five dogs came to welcome us. Roya stood in the kitchen doorway with a mug of English tea with milk, her husband sat on the steps, their five dogs circled us with wagging tails and you could just palpably feel the warmth in the air. We found out that he works as an investment real estate broker and it was immediately clear to us how he envisioned this building, which is unique even in its surroundings. Maybe I lived here in a past life and maybe I will live here in a future one. Goodbye Rockmount. If only your walls could tell stories...

It was a few days to better explore the surroundings as well as the park at Crystal Palace. We only saw one entrance gate from it when we got off the bus and jumped on the other one, when we were already heading to Ellie's Victorian house with our suitcase and backpacks.

I noticed Ellie a few years ago thanks to Facebook, when her post was liked by writer Miloš Jesenský, with whom I corresponded for a while (and by the way, he led me to the book Women Who Ran with Wolves, which became my mantra for a long time). Sometimes I returned to her blog Girl in London and wandered with her into unknown alleys. When she was giving traveling lectures in Slovakia, I called her to give one in Kežmarok, but unfortunately it didn't work out then. Coincidentally, fate brought us together during the creation of her book, and I was able to become her proofreader, but what's more, I found a kindred spirit in her.

We were both a little afraid of how the members of her household would accept us - Fergus the dog, Kubík, her son and Romčík, her husband - but after the initial barking, Fergus fell in love with us and did crazy figure eights around the house, Kubík was only shy for a moment, and we bribed Romčík with an avocado sandwich, which Loro makes it for me for breakfast and we taught Ellie to make it as well.

It's very cozy at Ellie's place and we could have talked for hours, but another theater performance awaited us, this time in the open air in the historic Shakespeare's The Globe Theatre.

The weather was the coldest, gloomiest on this day, and the city was full of tourists, so we weren't in much of a mood to hang around the streets, but we still stopped for a jump at the Westminster Cathedral, which by its construction is strikingly reminiscent of the Evangelical church in Kežmarok. The unusual red and white striped church was built more than 100 years ago, when Catholicism began to be tolerated again, but the Anglican Church no longer wanted to return the nearby abbey. This unusual church is the center of Roman Catholicism in England, and despite being over 100 years old, they have not yet completed its full decoration, and perhaps never will. It is precisely because of this that it is clearly unique.

You will find a contrast between the detailed gold-colored mosaic and the unfinished ceiling made of burnt black bricks. The bare bricks without tinsel or painting give the Chapel of All Souls an impression of infinity.

Loro and I needed to see Big Ben without scaffolding, since we saw this landmark of London surrounded by metal bars up to the very top five years ago, so we headed to Westminster Abbey and across the bridge to the memorial to the victims of the pandemic. I have to admit that Big Ben is majestic and even though the whole of London looked gray on this day, Big Ben shone gold. We took a few photos, but we made our way through countless amounts of people, Saturday afternoon is simply not a good time for tourist photo spots. Along the Thames, we went under Waterloo Bridge, where Ellie showed us her favorite second-hand bookshop Southbank Book Market (and maybe she got poisoned with arsenic from the green cover of the book she was holding there - definitely follow her blog, she is preparing an article about poisonous books).

We walked past London Beach and to the man who makes faces out of the sand every weekend, we popped into Café Nero to warm up and have some refreshments and I got quite nervous in the queue at the theater building because I felt like I had turned back the clock and had the chance to go back a few centuries ago. Since the original theater burned down during the great fire of 1613 and it is only a replica of this Elizabethan theater, it was not quite true, but the feeling of a real historical experience from Shakespeare's time was enhanced by the stand tickets, historical costumes and music, as well as period a language of which we understood only fragments. Loro leaned against the extended part of the stage, which later turned out to be a pier for floating boats that we had to dodge and even though the weather was merciful and it didn't rain, we got a little wet from the saliva of the real articulate British actors. Standing for two and a half hours at a show where you understand about as much as an English toddler can understand a political leader's statement about a war conflict at the end of the world took guts and was a huge adventure in itself.

Elie put us up at her place for the last night, and since we had a flight to Košice instead of Poprad, we didn't have to travel an hour and a half through London to Luton airport at three in the morning. It was enough for us to be at the airport at noon, and although we could enjoy the morning with Ellie and her family, traveling to Košice took a little revenge. We brought the English weather with us, we got soaked, we missed the train in Košice and we arrived home incredibly tired late in the evening. It turned out that Košice is not as close to the Tatras as London.

Goodbye London . Day four and five

Return to the wild

London. Live magic. Day three