Parkuestions

While living on the ground floor of our building certainly has its advantages (*cough* stairs), the eye-level view of the street afforded to my roommates and I by our place on this floor most frequently provides us with one thing and one thing only: really weird encounters with people on the sidewalk. Directly outside our windows, you see, is a rather bustling stretch of pedestrian walkway. A few feet and some wrought-iron fencing separate us from the actual sidewalk, but the enormity of our windows ensure that we are always in close contact with the people walking by. This usually just entails some interesting people-watching. Thousands of British people walking past your window every day is bound to be entertaining, even when none of them do anything particularly out of the ordinary.

Occasionally, though, things happen on the sidewalk that are quite out of the ordinary - and it is these moments that make the extreme sketchiness and probable danger of having one's windows open to a busy metropolitan sidewalk all worth it. Arguably my favorite of these instances result from the varied reactions to the exterior of our building. The London Program dorm, as it happens, was once a hospital for women and children. And as far as you'd know from reading the signage on the outside of the building, it still is. Passersby have all sorts of interesting reactions to seeing the "Royal Hospital for Children and Women" sign for the first time, but the best of these came from the woman who saw both that sign and me and my roommate. As her gaze moved from the high-up sign back to the street in front of her, the woman naturally caught sight of my room. I don't know what the woman expected to see through the windows of a building marked "children's hospital," but, judging from her reaction, I'm pretty sure it wasn't a girl in pajamas Snapchatting someone from her loft bed at 3 PM while her roommate curled her hair at her window-ledge vanity. I kid you not when I say this woman jumped back a good four feet when she inadvertently made eye contact with me. Thinking, from the look of her disappointed and disgusted face, that this was some kind of sick joke of a hospital that gave its patients entirely too free of a rein concerning their leisure time, this woman continued to stare into our room for the entire rest of her way down the sidewalk. It was one of the funniest things I have ever seen.

The most popular activity that the people of London engage in to unwittingly entertain a flat full of American college students, however, is parkour. For those of you who don't know, parkour is a sort of extreme urban sport in which strikingly athletic idiots fling themselves off of stuff so as to impress passersby and each other and to flirt daily with death. The half-wall-, concrete platform-, and railing-filled stairway entrance situated a few feet outside our building is, apparently, the perfect location for practicing parkour. Almost every day, a group of people, usually male and usually uncomfortably young, will gather on the sidewalk outside and spend hours doing flips, twists, jumps, and other stupid stuff onto and off of the various hard surfaces found there, and, almost every day, we watch them. I always find myself thinking of dozens of questions for these mysterious practitioners of parkour, and, after watching today's especially peculiar bunch, I decided that it's time to ask them. Ask the questions, that is. On my blog. Where the parkour guys will never see them. Okay. Let's begin, shall we?

1. Where are these guys' parents?

2. Seriously, all of their tennis shoes are, like, really nice. You did not buy those yourselves. Are your parents okay with this? Do they know you do this? Do they know the 150 pound Nikes they just bought you are not for after-school sports teams but for jumping off of stairwell railings? I don't understand.

3. It is 2:00 on a Friday, don't you people have school or something?

4. Literally, do you ever do homework

5. WAIT HOW DO YOU DO THAT FLIP WITHOUT DYING?

6. Do you learn this stuff somewhere? The Internet?

7. Why aren't you guys Olympic gymnasts?

8. Wait, are you Olympic gymnasts?

8B. If yes, have you met Tom Daley? Okay sorry.

9. Are you going to be Olympic gymnasts the next time the Olympics roll around and you're legally old enough to compete?

10. Seriously how old are you

11. Where did you get that Chicago Blackhawks sweatshirt? Do you even know what the Chicago Blackhawks are? I feel like you don't!

12. Why is one of you seven years old??!?!

13. Okay where are THAT kid's parents, for real

14. Little kid, how did you get mixed up in this rough and tumble world of suburban kids jumpin' off stuff on the mean streets?

15. Little kid, why are you climbing that - WHY DID YOU JUST JUMP TWENTY FEET FROM A TREE

16. Should I call Child Protective Services?

17. Does Great Britain have Child Protective Services?

18. Have these guys seen Les Mis and do they know the horrid end they are omen-ing by making this kid their parkour Gavroche?

19. Why does this kid also remind me of Somebodys from West Side Story?

20. Why do all of my cultural references come from musical theatre?

21. Speaking of West Side Story, is there such a thing as parkour turf?

22. Are there parkour turf wars?

23. If there is parkour turf, why have I never seen the same group of guys parkouring in this spot twice?

23b. Is parkouring a word?

24. If rival parkour gangs have to fight each other in a turf war, are their battles more fistfight or dance-off?

25. Why do I feel like it's dance-off?

26. How come none of you guys have Beats precariously slung around your neck while you're jumping off stuff like the guys did who were here last week?

27. Exactly what kind of music makes for a parkour soundtrack anyway?

28. Does it involve West Side Story?

29. Why do none of you guys have girlfriends hanging around?

30. Do you people date? Are you old enough for that, even?

31. Do your girlfriends, assuming they exist, like that you do this? Do they date you because they think parkour is really sexy? Or are they more like protective girlfriends, like somebody Channing Tatum would date in a movie about drugs, who are like, "Baby I wish you'd walk away from the life of the street"

32. YOUR GIRLFRIEND WOULDN'T LIKE THAT MOVE, HOW ARE YOU ALIVE

33. Would you please stop doing that? You are going to give me a heart attack and this is not actually a hospital, that sign is false advertising

34. Have you noticed that I'm watching you?

35. Am I considered creepy for watching you and your friends just, like, bro'ing out for an hour? Or is it creepier if you notice me watching, since that means you were looking into my bedroom?

36. Do people do this in America?

37. Correction: do people do this in America other than when they're walking around college campuses in the middle of the night ironically yelling "HARDCORE PARKOUR" while they kick fire hydrants and jump over benches and stuff?

38. How do your pants stay on when they are so baggy and you are moving so fast?

39. How would your parents feel about your pants falling off in the middle of the street like this?

40. Oh yeah, we don't know, because no one has answered what remains the most important question, where are your parents?

41. Your mom was the woman who thought I was a hospital patient, wasn't she? This explains so much.

So, those are my questions for you, young parkourers of London. What, what, what are you doing. Look at your life. Look at your choices. Don't look in my windows. K thanx.