A Magical City

Every place you visit has a certain quality. You may not put your finger on it right away, but give it some time and thought and eventually something will jump out at you like whack-a-gopher creatures. For me, Los Angeles is a city that begs for exploration. Switzerland is my epitome of raw beauty: alpine-climbing, family-loving, champagne-drinking, landscape-photographing beauty. Orlando is a city of a charm that never fails to make me look inside myself. Two weeks into my stay here, I can say that without a doubt, London is a city of magic.

Two days ago, I went to Covent Gardens to meet a good friend who shared two years at USC with me. Standing beside her was a girl I never met before. When she introduced herself to me, her last name caught my attention. It was the same last name as a family that my dad's co-worker had told me to look for in London. The co-worker had lived in Swaziland for 30 years, and the family she referred had spent a large portion of those years with her. So on a whim, I asked the girl standing in front of me if she was the 'so-and-so's who used to live in Swaziland. She was. 'Only in London...' I muttered to myself.

Finding someone in a room of people is not always easy if you only have a surname to go by. It becomes slightly more difficult when the pool of people is expanded to a metropolis of over 7 million and you have no way to contact them. Only in London would those odds be spited and a fellow Trojan be hanging out with a girl she met at a conference in South Korea who also happened to be the daughter of a family that used to live in Swaziland with my dad's co-worker. Only in London would you eat lunch at your vicar's house, and then realize that they are old family friends with yet another USC Trojan classmate that you baked 6 pumpkin pies with in one night (a sure sign of strong friendship). Only in London could you sit down to chat with your friend in a church courtyard, check the posting on the church's door and discover that Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and one of the world's leading religious figures, was lecturing inside. And where else could you nonchalantly step inside a church that took your fancy as you walked through the city and find the burial site of John Newton, the writer of 'Amazing Grace' and one of my personal childhood heroes?

In other cities you might get email addresses to make those connections, or look up lecture series to find Rowan Williams, or search for John Newton's bones. In London, these things happen to you.