Unfortunately, I wrote very little on this trip, since it was both busy and brief. However, I do have the following musing written somewhere between jet lags:

I swear I saw a man dressed as a giant bear walking past my window today. Perhaps the English air does this to you. Gives you just this sort of hallucination and then makes you write Beowulf. The landlord has lingered outside my window for a good ten minutes, pulling up twigs and plants from along the riverbank. Some he leaves and others go straight away. Not sure if it’s method and calculation or bored British passion that periodically seizes him and forces him to suddenly yank. Perhaps he’s searching among those brambles for a reason not to go home.
Big orange tankers go by, clearly fighter jets make sky scraping sounds overhead, and I’m reminded of the carrot trucks Sam mentioned you could get stuck behind. Sometimes potato trucks, too. Giant loads of uncovered root vegetables being shipped out to giant British and Irish and Scottish and Welsh stew pots where they’ll be boiled and peppered with any meat but beef. This is, after all, Mad Cow Country.
The trees here are bizarre. Pseudo-deciduous and –coniferous and –Serengeti. Tall, thin scrubby branches. Sherwood Forest isn’t too terribly far from here, but I hear it’s kind of a disgrace, as forests go. Like the way the Black Forest was so neatly kept in Germany, this one is meekly British, humbly put upon. Tired. So I’ve heard. And, if it is the case, then there’s no wonder America could scare. Its forests know what they are, and they have no intention of hiding or apologizing for it. They are wild and brambly, ill-tempered and lovely.
The ducks here, along this riverbank, are sweet, though. Are what ducks should be – how they appear in childhood, Mallard-species-only styled drawings – and travel in cute twos. The brightly colored male, his subtler companion and their florescent orange-crayoned webbed feet. Bottoming up, making concentric circles, seeking detritus for dinner below.
I could tell you about the rabbits, too; how I expect they belong in the same afore mentioned stewpots. Could describe the sky with its moody, larger than life clouds – always tinted with grey – but it wouldn't move or shake you or even necessarily make you smile. It’s just what’s left outside my window, and I can’t stop staring, like a mental hospital ward, drooling from a convalescing bed, watching wind on unfamiliar leaves.
I am surviving being abroad in a tentative, childlike way. Stepping one foot out in front of the other cautiously, delicately. Breathing shallowly. As if every moment I am waiting for Grendel to come and rip me, rend me in two. Make the blood gush out, violet and sticky, angry and lonely, futile on the floor.
In America, I feel like the end will never come. In America, I am exhausted, immortal. Abroad, Transatlanticism robs me, frees me, leaves me lost and bewildered. A baby in exposure, playing in the cold.