As I climb aboard the Airport Express bus in downtown Oslo at 6:05 a.m. to make my morning flight back to London, I hear that familiar Romance tongue and see elaborately spiked black hair poking up above the tops of the seats.

Unbelievable.

Of course, it’s one of the innumerable moments of deja vu I’ve had since breathlessly sprinting into Heathrow Airport eleven days and nineteen or so hours ago. I would almost have been surprised if I never saw my fellow passengers from Milan again. I smile and give one (a walking stereotype: he’s wearing a fucking ascot for God’s sake) a slight nod of recognition. He narrows his eyes, and I immediately realize that was a weird thing to do. He doesn’t share my appreciation for the strangeness of the universe — at least not right now.

Two days ago it was May 17: Syttende Mai, the National Day of Norway. I didn’t even know about it when I booked my flight to Oslo — just lucky I guess. It was a pretty impressive to-do. The morning was dominated by a three-hour parade marched in by at least half the schoolchildren in Norway, and in the afternoon, the streets of Oslo overflowed with Norwegians in myriad states of drunkenness, men in suits and ties, those gorgeous Norse women in frilly traditional costumes. Student groups from Lillehammer and Trondheim wandered the waterfront and drank Carlsberg in joyous clusters of garish red overalls.

After the parade, I walked amid the street vendors and the miniature Norwegian flags, eating bacon-wrapped hot dogs and sweet baked goods with unpronounceable names. I kicked around a soccer ball with some locals in Vigeland Sculpture Park and watched the 9:30 p.m. sunset from a bluff overlooking Oslofjord and the whole while, intermittent thoughts of home — Minnesota — kept popping up from the back of my mind somewhere. Familiar accents and baseball on television and shitty public transit. I’ll be there in sixteen hours.

Sitting next to the fjord the day before yesterday, that notion seemed sad beyond all measure. Three days earlier in Milan, I’d had a conversation with a friend about all the things I was going to do immediately when I got home (see my friends, play my drums, have Taco Bell for the first time in four months), but I sat and watched the Syttende Mai sunset with a lump in my throat, intoxicated with sick European nostalgia, the cold realization sitting deep in my guts that I could take a thousand photographs but this moment would only last until it was over.

Two weeks ago, before I left London, I bought a copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road from a street vendor on the south bank of the Thames for £2.50. I’ve been carrying it around Europe in my backpack, pulling it out to read a chapter whenever I have a few minutes to sit and breathe. It’s provided some special moments on its own — I spent one of the best half hours of the journey reading chapters of Kerouac’s frantic jazz during a Newcastle sunset on the Tyne River, and when Sal Paradise wildly suggested “Let’s go to Italy!”, I was sitting on a pew in Milan’s Duomo, catching funny looks from German tourists.

It’s also unified the experience for me. There’s an appeal to it that I think Kerouac would’ve appreciated: Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty zigzag across one groaning continent while I cut a demented trapezoid around the corners of another.

Moreover, I think it’s heightened my appreciation of the experience in all of its forms, increased my awareness of the little things, the coincidences, the strange quirks of the universe. Five days ago, I sat in front of Sforza Castle and watched an Italian man who looked stuck in the late ’70s as he set up a drum set and a donations bucket on the street corner and played along with some Bee Gees song over and over again. On Syttende Mai, I showed up at the morning parade and found the marching band playing a Sousa-fied version of the same disco tune. On the way to the bus station this morning, I passed an Irish pub named after Galway Bay, the nook of Ireland where I spent my first night out of London an eternal week and a half ago.

And then there are these familiar Italians, chattering away all around me as I write this.

By 10 p.m. on Syttende Mai, the sun was gone, but the sky hung in limbo, maintaining a shade of noncommittal gray. I wandered up and down the shoreline of the fjord, smoking the last of my Lucky Strikes and listening to the Germanic gobbledigook of straggling revelers. I savored the final pangs of narcotic homesickness and said an inward goodbye to Europe. After months, only hours. Hours before I land in Minneapolis, broke and exhausted, nothing left of Europe but memories and photographs and cheap souvenirs. Each moment lasts only until it’s over.

So after all that, what’s the point?

No point. Just this: In the past eleven days, I’ve met friendly Ulstermen in Irish pubs, celebrated victory with the incomprehensible Geordies at Newcastle United’s St. James’ Park, dodged African hustlers outside Milanese tourist traps, and seen one hundred drunk Norwegians sing along with “Play That Funky Music White Boy.” I awoke in Oslo this morning, and I’ll sleep in Minnesota tonight. I hope I always find some wonder in little things like those. Kurt Vonnegut said, “We were put here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”

After passing the landmark at least twice a week for the past two-and-a-half months, the novelty has worn off. In fact, the stadium is used so rarely that it’s easy to forget it’s there at all. That makes weekends when Wembley hosts an event all the more jarring, like when both semi-finals of the British soccer’s main cup competition took place in the stadium.

On Saturday evening, I was riding home from the city, picking my way through a British history textbook when the tube reached the Wembley Park station. Suddenly I found myself surrounded by jubilant Chelsea supporters, liquored up and noisily celebrating their 2-1 victory over Arsenal. Trying to be subtle, I took off my red sweatshirt (Arsenal’s color) and soon gave up the absurd notion of getting any more reading done.

The following afternoon, I boarded the tube on my way into the city to find a smattering of Manchester United jerseys, the wearers of which slumped low in their seats a few stations later when the train was flooded with the blue shirts and painted faces of Everton F.C. (United’s semi-final opponents). Once more, I quietly put away my book as the blue-noses pounded on the ceiling and sang “Manchester is shit” for the next three stops.

“We’ve been waiting years to go to Wembley,” one grinning Evertonian told me above the din.

It’s hard to explain just how big a role soccer plays in the British national consciousness – there’s simply no American sporting equivalent. Take America’s favorite pastime, for example: Major League Baseball consists of 30 teams spread across the U.S. and Canada. Beyond that, there are a number of minor league franchises that mostly act as feeders to major league teams. In American sports, there is a clear division between the major and minor leagues.

Almost everywhere except the United States, professional soccer works within a series of leagues, or pyramids, with a tiered hierarchy from world-class clubs in huge stadiums down to tiny semi-pro teams that play in front of fewer than a thousand spectators each week. In England, the Premier League is the top flight, home to heavyweights like Manchester United, Arsenal, and Liverpool. The next three tiers are the Championship League, League One, and League Two, all governed by an organization called the Football League. At the end of each season, the bottom finishers from the Premier League swap places with the top finishers from the Championship and so on down the pyramid.

It sounds confusing, and it is (if you’re lost, Wikipedia explains it better than I do). Within these top four leagues alone, there are 92 clubs and, if anything, the supporters get more devoted the further down you go. The most notoriously overzealous supporters in England are associated with Millwall FC, a club that has toiled in anonymity for the past 25 years, never reaching the top division. Granted, brick-throwing is probably not the best show of club loyalty, but I feel it’s a point worth making: I can’t think of a time when I’ve heard about anyone getting violent over the result of a St. Paul Saints game.

Clubs are closely and inextricably tied to communities here. Last month, my friend and I went to see Queens Park Rangers FC play at their ground in West London. It was an unremarkable stadium, about a third the size of most NFL arenas, and the intimate, energetic atmosphere of the match was something we simply don’t have in the United States.

Many of these fans come from families that have supported their club for decades, and whether it’s Manchester United playing to be the Champions of Europe or the Queens Park Rangers playing Sheffield Wednesday for tenth place in the second tier of English football, the supporters show a level of pride in their team, a kind of camaraderie among the home supporters that no American ballpark can match. There’s just something about match day in London that we never had back home.

By afternoon, the tone took a dramatic turn for the worst. OBAMA’S BIG DAY MARRED BY VIOLENCE, declared one headline. ANARCHY GROUPS FIGHT FOR CONTROL OF THE CITY, screamed another.

What? There I was, smack dab in the middle of central London, and everything seemed to be business as usual. No angry mobs, no overturned cars or shattered glass, not even the ominous scent of smoke in the air. The papers announced Armageddon—how had I missed it?

On Wednesday morning, swarms of protesters descended upon London’s financial district. A friend and I followed to gawk at the spectacle. In the days leading up to the summit, the media speculated ceaselessly about the possibility of riots. Armies of neon-clad metropolitan police cordoned off streets, shopkeepers boarded up their front windows, and banks warned their employees to come to work dressed casually to avoid harassment.

But even as my friend and I wound up right in the thick of the morning’s demonstrations, never once did we witness any acts of violence or feel we had a reason to fear for our safety. Still, I arrived home that evening to find my Facebook page and email inbox inundated with messages from concerned friends and family, asking if I was okay.

The simple truth is that the urban war zone portrayed by much of the press on April 1 was almost entirely fictional, a manifestation of the sensationalist media’s wishful thinking. At best, they portrayed a tiny portion of the actual events. Of the thousands of protesters who packed the streets of the financial district, there were about 60 arrests, a few broken windows and, sadly, one death (from a heart attack).

The story, in other words, was the same as ever. Thousands protested, most of them peacefully, but the substance of their message was inexorably swallowed by sporadic violence.

So what happened? These hordes of people congealed in a public place with signs and flags and home-made t-shirts and unflattering effigies, so presumably they had something to say, right? What happened to their message?

One reason why the demonstrators’ message was so thoroughly eclipsed by the tired narrative of cops versus protesters is that the latter is simply a sexier story. It’s the one that the media had been gearing up for well before April. Crowds with painted faces and crude representations of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are somewhat newsworthy, but they don’t have the shock appeal of beleaguered policemen wielding batons or protesters smashing windows.

The cover photograph of Thursday’s Times depicts one demonstrator launching a piece of debris through the front window of a Bank of Scotland branch. It might have been iconic, were it not for the wall of cameras in the background capturing the exact same shot. One anarchist, 25 photographers. Somehow it all seems a little artificial.

However, the press doesn’t deserve all of the blame for the protesters’ point being lost in the scuffle because the protesters never had much of a point to begin with. The crowd in front of the Bank of England on Wednesday seemed to be a confused mishmash of opinions and causes, not all of which necessarily had anything to do with the G20.

Good old-fashioned populist rage certainly fueled a good portion of the crowd; many of the demonstrators shouted angry chants like supporters at a soccer match.

Build a bonfire, build a bonfire,
Put the bankers on the top.
Gordon Brown in the middle,
And then burn the fucking lot.

The core of the crowd was anti-banker, but signs and banners indicated individual protesters’ other stances: anti-capitalism, anti-socialism, anti-government. Some in the crowd appeared to be anti-police. Some inexplicably held signs declaring their positions on climate change, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. One protester waved a Tibetan flag. Others voiced their support for Palestine.

In short, it was a clusterfuck. Instead of a coherent protest for a specific cause, the entire left side of the political spectrum came together to shout randomly for the entertainment of the onlooking police. What resulted was not a demonstration for a political ends, but an inarticulate scream for attention, political discourse on the level of children. It’s just as well that the news story ultimately turned to violence because, for all the demonstrators assembled in London, I neither saw nor heard a single constructive idea.

“We’re as mad as hell, and we’re… well, we’re as mad as hell.”

So when it’s all over, when the last shard of glass has been swept from the streets of London, when the mainland’s anarchist groups have packed up their black ski masks and returned to France, Italy and Germany, when every angry Briton has gone home and replaced his megaphone on its hook in the garage, will it have really meant anything at all?

Or was it just another car wreck for rubberneckers like me.

But I’ve found myself cut adrift from the news since arriving in London, particularly when it comes to the happenings back across the pond. This may come as a rude awakening to the ugly American who believes the USA to be at the center of the global consciousness, but it took me a full three days to even find out who won the Super Bowl.

In fact, most of my news over the past few weeks has been what I’ve been able to glean from The London Paper, a free periodical distributed by an army of glum-looking newsies every day when the sun begins to set. It’s just about impossible to catch the tube after 4:00 p.m. without having one of these thrust into your hands.

The London Paper isn’t exactly a tabloid in the traditional sense, although the UK has no shortage of these either (the sheer viciousness of popular rags like The Sun would make even the most brazen Us Weekly editor blush). This daily edition does cover politics, sports, and everything else a respectable publication would, but those sorts of stories can be conspicuously difficult to find within its pages.

You’ll almost never find stories concerning affairs of state on the front page—this space is typically devoted to the sort of stories you might see on Maury. Most recently, the depressing details of the current financial crisis have been bumped to page three or four in favor of the ongoing saga of Alfie Patten, a thirteen-year-old boy who recently became a father.

The British fascination with the cult of celebrity also appears to dwarf any level we’ve approached in the United States. On top of the obligatory style section, entire pages of “news” track the antics of a gaggle of vapid semi-celebrities called “WAGs” (that is, Wives And Girlfriends of famous soccer players). If I am a bit hazy on global affairs of late, the same ignorance does not extend to such pressing concerns as what Victoria Beckham is wearing these days, or where it was that the girlfriend of Chelsea FC midfielder Frank Lampard went out for dinner last Friday. The level of obsession with these banalities wouldn’t be quite so unsettling of these stories weren’t crammed in alongside (far briefer) articles concerning the ailing economy and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This kind of frivolity seems to taint even the more serious stories. Regardless of actual content, I’ve found that many British editors will regularly disdain conventional “Dog Bites Man” headers for their articles, opting instead for the most offensive pun within easy reach. Political coverage appears to be a bit of a joke as well; if local journalists are to be trusted, London Mayor Boris Johnson’s executive duties have taken a backseat to his full-time job of making off-color remarks and providing ongoing commentary on the same sorts of trivial stories I mentioned before.

In America, the rising prevalence of the 24-hour news networks has seriously dented the print media, and many of us feel a growing frustration with what we perceive as a slavish sort of devotion to high concepts and short attention spans. To those who are nostalgic for a more dignified era of journalism, cheer up—I’m getting the idea that we Americans may be luckier than we think.

After getting my luggage and converting all the cash in my wallet to Pounds sterling, I purchased a latté (less for the caffeine boost than for the comforting knowledge that, an ocean from home, this is still Planet Starbucks™) and sought out my cabbie, an Indian with a nervous grin and rudimentary-at-best understanding of the English language. As he drove me the fifteen minutes to Eastcote, a suburban neighborhood on the northwest corner of greater London, I sat zombielike in the passenger seat, panicking quietly every ten seconds or so at the oncoming cars on the right side of the road.

I staved off much of the bewilderment of my first 48 hours in England by sleeping for at least 60% of them. I’m still in the process of working out how to stay awake past 9:00 p.m. without a lengthy mid-day nap and I haven’t yet conquered my internal clock’s insistence that I get up at 5:30 every morning. But at the very least I’ve achieved some sense of familiarity with my surroundings.

For the next three-and-a-half months, my study abroad program has placed me here in Eastcote in the home of a couple named Kay and Antony—respectively a quiet London social worker and a genial, slow-moving Trinidadian whom I’ve yet to see outside the house. An awful lot of walking has given me a decent feel for the general area, and through trial and error, as well as careful study of my Underground map, I’m starting to get the hang of London’s geography. I feel like I’m starting to make the slow transition from a dazed tourist to a Londoner who can’t properly pronounce “aluminium.”

One thing that’s been somewhat helpful in this transformation is the Underground commute from Eastcote to my classes in central London. On any given day, the trek can take anywhere from 45 minutes to well over an hour, and I’m sure I haven’t seen the worst of it yet. It gives me and the other students the opportunity to join in a highly popular Londoner pastime: griping bitterly about the Tube.

The London Underground is a notoriously unreliable beast, and I’ve already encountered multiple mysterious “signal failures,” which delay the trains exclusively when I’m in a crunch to get someplace on time.

There are certain other elements of the Underground’s character that have also taken some getting used to. The pedestrians in this city roam the sidewalks at a breakneck pace, but that doesn’t bother me; as a gangly praying mantis of a freak on stilts, I’ve always been too fast a walker for most cities. What I can’t get used to are things like the unappetizing choice between squashing into an air-tight lift with at least 50 too many people and climbing the 200 stairs to street level, or the unnerving silence on a jam-packed station platform—four or five of us seem enough to fill even the most crowded train with American voices.

After a week of worrying about my backpack getting caught in automatic doors, being squashed against smudged windows and buffeted up and down escalators, I feel like I’m starting to understand just what the hell T.S. Eliot was talking about in “The Wasteland.”

Maybe next week I’ll work up the courage to give the bus system a try.