15 September: Manchester to London.

It' s my birthday. I'm really confused about when it started being my birthday, because I'm on an airplane. The airplane arrives in Manchester at 8am. Mitchey and I know we're in England because, first thing off the plane, we find ourselves in a queue.

It's only the queue where they check your passport and ask you questions about what you're doing there. You may argue that the same thing would happen if we were flying into the US. But no, if we were in the US, we'd be standing in a line.

I am always paranoid about this part, when they ask you point-blank why you're here and where you're going, but they don't lock us up for further interrogation, just say "Cheers" and wave us on. We get ourselves some pounds sterling and go looking for a way into town. There's an airport bus to the bus stop, and then it takes us a long time to figure out which bus to take, and how to get on it, to get to the town center where our third bus will be. Fortunately, we have planned our schedule to allow for this. We elicit help from a couple of police officers who are loitering around the bus terminal. One of them stares at the departures screen for a while, then grabs an employee who has walked past us several times, blind to our confused and helpless expressions. Information is exchanged, and we finally get on the bus to the town center.

The route winds through picturesque residential neighborhoods, tidy little streets and brick row houses and big old trees. I sort of thought Manchester would be grubbier, but I'm not sorry. The bus drops us in the general vicinity of our next connection, and we go in search of food.

The pub we settle on is shiny-new, spacious, and mostly empty. We're confused about how the ordering works here, and we sit in our window booth for quite a while before Mitchey goes up to the counter. That, it turns out, is how ordering works here: you go to the counter. At least we don't need to leave a tip when we order that way. We know this because we just looked it up in Mitchey's travel book.

I order a Traditional English Breakfast. I'd hate to eat it first thing on waking up, but it is pretty much the best lunch ever: fried egg, sausage, "bacon" (prepared like a slice of ham in the US), mushrooms, baked beans, toast, and a grilled or stewed toe-mah-toe. So basically what you have here is some protein with protein and a side of protein. And a couple of really happy Americans.

We kill the rest of the time waiting for the bus by people-watching. We observe that a neo-'80s look is the fashion here right now; that various kinds of dressy boots are the footwear of choice for women; that English people of African descent dress and behave nothing at all like African-Americans. Mitchey thinks we kind of blend in here because we're white (most of her overseas travel has been in Asia). I think we stand out because a) she's wearing a very colorful outfit, and people here all wear neutrals with maybe one color if they're feeling adventurous, and b) I'm wearing hiking boots, and no one else here is wearing any kind of outdoor adventure-type shoes. Also, we have bulky backpacks and fresh-off-the-plane expressions.

Our bus driver to London is in a foul mood. He storms out of the bus and opens the luggage compartments, yelling something we don't understand in an accent we don't recognize. People stand around looking confused. Some of them put their luggage into the compartments. He yells some more, takes them back out and shakes his head. One guy who sounds like he's from India mutters, "Well what the **** am I supposed to do then?" The driver overhears this and gets in a shouting match with the guy. Nobody is happy about it. Two guys behind me are muttering about racism.

Finally the driver gets over himself and lets us all board. The bus is full and quiet. I prop my head against my inflatable neck pillow and sleep most of the way to London. I know you're not supposed to do that, take naps while jetlagged, but I'm just too darn tired to care.

I'll never be a huge fan of London, but I find on this second visit that I don't hate it anymore. Perhaps that's because my luggage doesn't get rifled through, nor my camera stolen, nor am I locked out of a hotel room with no one to let me in. Perhaps it's because I'm not there with a group of college students from Oklahoma. Still, this city stresses me out. It's full of people who are in a hurry to get to someplace they don't look at all happy about reaching.

Mitch and I agree that our wisest course for this first day would be to just find our way to our host's neighborhood, so we can meet him there when he gets off work. He lives a good distance southwest of London. We take the underground and the train to his station, then call him, and after a little while he pops up smiling. He smiles a lot. At first we think he's really happy to see us. While that may well be the case, we realize later that it's his reflexive response to everything.

Our host's home is a tiny one-bedroom flat, which we will share with a fourth person that night, a Canuck who's in town for a conference in French Literature. He arrives shortly after we do. We three travelers are very hungry, but our host is recovering from a bout of food poisoning. He tells us where to find restaurants and we leave him in peace.

It's my birthday, so I get to pick. Unfortunately, the options we're aware of are all in a shopping center. We were hoping for a quaint little pub or something, but the closest analogue seems to be... Tony Roma's? Oh, no no no. I pick sushi.

The sushi wasn't bad, I insist as we leave the restaurant; bad sushi is sushi that leaves you spending quality time with a toilet. It just wasn't good sushi. Nor was it cheap sushi. But hey, it's okay. We're in London, and we have a place to stay and a couple of new friends, sort of, maybe.

The Canuck is a cutie; we're both a little crestfallen when he mentions his girlfriend. (Not like anything would happen; it just, you know, removes a variable from the equation, so that you can't pretend you don't know what the answer is anymore.) When pressed, he tells us about the presentation he is making for the conference, which I think has something to do with narrators who refuse to narrate, or who say things by not saying them. He is extremely polite and a little tense. We like him, but we don't really click with him. At the time I think it's culture clash (we're doing it all wrong, we're too American); looking back later, it seems to me it has more to do with travel fatigue than anything.

Our host is happy to sit and talk with us when we return. He has hosted over 200 people in the past three years. I press him for stories about terrible guests. His best one involves a huge Icelander who sat around watching TV all day, and was grumpy because the host didn't have time to show him around the city. The host loaned him keys to the house and flat, which the Icelander put in the wrong lock and broke off, so that the main entry door to the house couldn't be opened at all. Then he banged on the window of the neighboring flat (in the same house). The neighbor lady opened it, and he tried to climb through. He got stuck. The fire department was called to extricate him. In the UK, you pay out of pocket for a visit from the fire department, so after that and the locksmith, this guy was quite a costly guest.

Then he went home and wrote a bad review for his host on the Couchsurfing site.

Mitchey and I are trying really really hard to be good guests. We are in kind of a spot, though. We had planned to stay somewhere else tomorrow night, then come back and stay with this host again. But our in-between host got confused and gave our spot away to someone else. We ask our present host if we can stay the following night as well. He won't answer directly. This obviously means "no," even though he's smiling for all he's worth. Okay, we say, we'll find ourselves a hostel, no problem, don't worry about it.

Later, we overhear him invite the Canuck to stay tomorrow night. We spend the rest of the evening trying to convince ourselves not to take it personally, while wondering what we did wrong. To be fair: three guests are obviously more stressful than one, and we have no right to expect more than the original hosting arrangement. But. It's all just very weird and uncomfortable. Or is it we who are weird and uncomfortable? We're probably making too big a deal out of this. Or aren't we? Are we? Aren't we?

We can't get to sleep. We toss and turn on the sofa cushions laid out on the floor, and they slide out from under us. The night drags on and on, but at some point I find myself blinking at my watch in a sunlit room, and it's not my birthday anymore, not anywhere in the world.