Today I took a walk around my neighborhood. Exams are over, and so I am a normal person again. Normal, I mean, in my sense: that is, a person without nothing to do but walking around his or her neighborhood. People should be allowed to be like that, I mean everybody should have the chance to walk around a nice neighborhood once in their lives, for at least one year. Until then, every social democracy is but an utopia.

Anyway, judging from what I saw, there is quite a lot of normal people in my neighborhood. I live in Southwark, south of the river Thames, London. I took some streets leading to Tate Modern, can’t say which ones, because in London there are signs everywhere telling you where to go. That’s one of the reasons why I started loving London, being as I am quite a disaster with directions. And the funny thing is that as a child I was a sort of living map, I could spot the way to any place within a glimpse at the map. Now it’s all the opposite.

My purpose was clear: go to the Tate Modern, and have an ice tea in the balcony in the fourth floor, facing the river and the weird disposition of buildings along Bankside. And read, the breeze and the voices of tourists and locals the only elements of distraction. Before getting into the Tate, however, I spotted the Globe Shakespeare theatre. A friend of mine had told me about it, so I was curious to see what was it. And it’s that: a theatre just like the ones in the time of Shakespeare, where for 5 quid you can watch a play by Shakespeare standing. As one of my flatmates put it, it’s worth it just to see whether you can stand the whole Richard III. Stand, in the literal sense ;-)

I was tempted to buy a postcard and send it to my father, with the text “see dad, maybe we were wrong about London, maybe London is actually nice. Can you imagine something like that back home, a theatre build just to play Shakespeare?”. That’s the good thing about big cities: there’s public for everything, and so you can find everything. Anyway, I didn’t buy the postcard finally. Instead, I went upstairs, ending in a room where supposedly there had been a sort of private reception not so long ago. There was a balcony, and so I went there, quite afraid that somebody would tell me soon that I could not stay there. But it didn’t happen, and so I found myself right in the balcony of the Globe’s façade, I think some tourists captured me in their pictures in front of the building. Somewhere, someday, somebody will ask somebody else why didn’t they go up to the balcony and take a picture there, like the guy standing there, that is, myself.

After leaving the room, I spotted what looked like a bottle of some kind of alcohol. The thought passed through my mind of getting hold of it. Even while I was walking downstairs I thought of going back and taking it home. But finally I didn’t, you know, this ridiculous conscience made me think that it was actually nice that you could go all around the Globe, and nobody would tell you anything, and bottles of alcohol would stay there for me to grab them. English civilization, and after all I don’t want to change it.