Culture Block

Cultural note of the week: my family warned me before I left that there may be some people overseas who simply don’t like Americans. Nearly everyone I’ve met so far has been very nice and welcoming – the cab driver to the res hall on my first day told me, “English people are nice to you Americans because everybody else hates us both.” There’s only been one real exception, which is laughable enough not to count: the conversation with a drunken neighbor who told me he had the impression all Americans were stupid. I said I wouldn’t be at this university if I were stupid; to which he replied, “Oh, you guys have to apply to get in here?” I think that settled it.

The disturbing thing is that the greatest instances of anti-Americanism I’ve witnessed here have been in the behavior of other American students. There’s a special subgroup of study abroad students who are so vehement about “blending in” that they’re embarrassed to be seen with other international students. I do support anyone who wants to learn about and become involved in another culture, but I’m also wary of anyone who likes to pretend they’re something they’re simply not (Americans claiming to be “British” after a month and a half). And it’s these students who also most freely bash American culture and habits – who make the most cruel fun of other American students’ accents, who most consciously deploy British slang at every available moment and refuse to recognize its American counterparts, and who are most culpable of shunning other Americans socially. Learning about another culture doesn’t have to mean vilifying your own!

A couple of my friends from JHU had spent the two weeks before coming to QMUL hopping European cities and staying in hostels. They love telling stories about the Canadians they met in Prague or the Australian they hung out with in Venice; in a similar way, I think that hearing about other Americans’ experiences here can be just as rewarding and interesting as getting involved in British life. I know one American student at QMUL who studied abroad here last year, and loved Britain so much he transferred to finish his degree and stay. He told me he couldn’t stand study abroad Americans who came here simply to befriend other Americans; so he was deliberately mean to other Americans when he was an international student, to ensure he was completely immersed in the British culture. The first half makes sense – only socializing with other Americans seems like a mistake – but the second half is sheer nonsense.

This same guy described his hometown, San Diego, to a Greek/British student from QMUL; and after going over the tourist attractions, the weather, the roads, he finished up with “It’s such a shithole country!” The British student only replied, “It sounds kind of nice to me.”

Wuthering Rugby

Travel stories and journals seem fairly thin without pictures, but I’m procrastinating embarrassingly on getting mine developed, so this will have to be episode two of Hannah’s Travelogue for the Blind.

First, vocabulary lesson: “fag,” in British English, which is not the same language that the rest of us speak, means cigarette. This came up while a neighbor and I were down at the pub during a false fire alarm in our building. The neighbor told me one of her flatmates was always going off “to have a sneaky fag in the toilet.” What can we learn from this? Sneaky fags cause two out of every three fire alarms.

Other fun pub story of the week: watching the Rugby World Cup finals while England battled South Africa. Well, I only caught half, as Adrienne, Onon and I had dinner first. Thus came about my first taste of Yorkshire pudding, in a dish called “toad in hole,” which is a Yorkshire pudding (savory puffed pastry thing, not pudding in the American sense) made into a kind of bowl and filled with sausage, mashed [potatoes], veggies and gravy. It is essentially happiness on a plate.

After obliterating both the toad and the hole, we joined two more friends at The Ship and Shovel, a pub near the Embankment stop…which process was difficult, as people were packed into the place like sardines, sort of blindly pushing toward the TVs in the corners and somehow miraculously not spilling beer all over each other, though making up for it in general clumsiness of every other sort. When we arrived, absolutely everyone inside was singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” for reasons we were never able to divine (except perhaps that England DYING). The song came up several times again that evening, with harmony. Drunk Britishers harmonizing. I will not begin to mention the number of movies that recalls.

England lost, everybody cried. Well, actually, I don’t think many people seemed that surprised. On the tube home, three South African girls screamed their national anthem and poked and prodded the sullen-looking England fans sitting next to them, before fortunately disembarking two stops down. Can anyone say “ends in violence?”

I am still in awe of myself for standing through the second half of that game – myself, or the packed condition of the crowd that managed to hold me upright. That day I had spent entirely walking – I alighted at Tower Hill tube stop, took a meander around the castle, and then headed down the river – and down the river – and down the river. I ended in Chelsea, and took District from Fulham Broadway home. It took me 5 hours. I’ve been asked if I saw anything interesting, but I spent most of the time looking at the river, and while I’m still not sure why I felt compelled to make the trek (except to destroy the claustrophobic feeling of only seeing one small stretch of the Thames near Westminster and never mentally connecting it to the rest of the city) I think I really just needed a good, long walk.

The rest of the week consists of museum mania. It bubbles past quickly, since time spent in a museum feels like time suspended, and one day of classes between can make it feel like a completely new week.

On Sunday I spent about an hour each in the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery. I didn’t feel compelled to do the whole of each museum in a single day, since they’re free, an easy ride away, and I have a whole year. The National Gallery is too large to describe – or it describes itself – but the Portrait Gallery was a surgical strike; I went in search of authors.

Robert Southey is only a few rooms away from the three sisters whom he informed “literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be;” those sisters now reside between Dickens and Tennyson. I sat and looked at the Brontes for a while – they were why I came, primarily – next to a girl about my age who, at one point, whispered to herself, “It’s good – it’s good.” She got up absent-mindedly and, as she wandered away, looked at the portrait to the left of them and piped, “Oh, Charles!”

I love people like this because they make me feel slightly less crazy.

The irony of Branwell Bronte’s artistic ambition finally being realized, a century later, by the literary fame of his sisters has already been remarked upon. The truth is, seeing it in the gallery was only slightly more exciting than seeing it on the cover of Juliet Barker’s biography of the family, which sports a very good photograph of that rather bad painting. This didn’t spoil the gallery, though – did I mention Dickens and Tennyson? – and upstairs the Regency crowd was waiting. I can’t begin to express the tranquility and happiness that wandering between these paintings can bring.

Postcards were duly purchased, and I wandered out to look for tea, which turned into a curiosity-driven exploration of the arch to the west of Trafalgar Square, leading to The Mall, the Horse Guards Parade, and St. James’ Park. Considering the stiffness from Saturday’s walk setting in, I figured I’d better keep moving or I’d never move at all, so I explored the Parade – a gravel courtyard edged by plundered canons, the Old Admiralty Building, and statues of angry men on angry horses, which combine to communicate the message, “Yeah, we pwned.” After a brief detour toward Duck Island, I walked down to Buckingham Palace and back. St. James is a beautiful park, and absolutely packed on a Sunday, especially the edges of the lake, where children shorter than the geese and little old ladies only slightly taller feed the birds. I saw one elderly woman painstakingly coax a squirrel onto her walker and then amble away with it.

Accounts of Wednesday’s trip to the Victoria & Albert Museum will have to wait for another day, because this post is already getting unwieldy, while I have five Word documents open beside this one, all of which require some degree of attention. Also, I must go celebrate the fact that our flat once again has a working kettle. Two days of caffeine withdrawal were long enough, and I’ve reached the sad stage of snobbery where microwaving mugs of water is simply unacceptable – actually, all my flatmates would laugh at me.

First Impressions

I’ve been in the UK for five weeks, and thought it was about time to share with the rest of the world what I’ve been up to, and whether British food is as bad as they say (it’s not), and whether all English people sound like Giles (they don’t). A lot has happened, so here's my official attempt at summing up my experiences in London so far:

Nighttime: When we go out at night, we usually just go to a pub or two; four Americans, one of whom (Ross) is a semi-permanent resident here, the friend of one of the two girls (Onon and Adrienne) I met through the study abroad program. Last night we played pool in a mostly empty place in Kensington, the kind of place where older guys will sit alone with a pint and stare into middle space, and middle-aged women will sit sulkily in booths complaining to each other unintelligibly, but it was the only place with a billiard table we could find. Ross brought along a friend from his philosophy college, and they sang songs from West End musicals not because they were drunk, but because they just liked to sing. Ross is an anomaly because he is the only heterosexual male who will admit to liking the six-hour-long BBC “Pride and Prejudice.” I don’t think they can have a lot of insecurities, at least when they’re outnumbered by girls.

One night, we wandered from a bar to Covent Garden and danced to the musicians on the street. A drunk man tried to dance with Adrienne and possibly take her purse; Ross shoved him away, and then Ross and the drunk man ended up having a very interesting drunken conversation that he refused to relate to the rest of us. They seemed to part on good terms. Then we went to a club where everyone was far more well-dressed and less spotty than me, but I didn't care at all because I was with friends and we were having a great time. There's a kind of perverse thrill in being the totally unfashionable one in a trendy club. It would absolutely entertain me if, one day, a bouncer asked me to leave because I'm just too dorky.

When we left, everything sounded like it was underwater because the music had been so loud, and it was eerie to see the streets still packed with people, but not to hear any of it. We decided that, one time, we want to stay up all night wandering central London, go anywhere as long as we end up by the river for dawn.

Other nights we sit outside cafes or go to a movie, or both. In the migration from café to cinema one night, Adrienne and I linked arms and walked nearly a quarter of an hour talking to each other in fake English accents. We picked it up again after the movie, when we all shuffled to Ross’ place to crash for the night, and we talked about the communal artistic life and world soul and how we would find three George Emersons made from the elements. By this time, we were about ready for bed. It was the first time I’d slept in a real home since leaving my parents’ in the States, and it was comforting to feel a world outside of campus where siblings will be in the kitchen the next morning, and the kitchen is clean, because people are settled and care for the things around them.

Daytime: Mostly spent on campus unfortunately, now that classes have started, though when I get away the best thing to do is randomly meander. Everything's older and more unfamiliar, almost scary in a way, especially for me since this is the first time I've ever been out of the States, and I came alone. The age of things still always surprises me. I was in Whitechapel the other day grocery shopping, and passed an eighteenth-century mission, an almshouse established for the care of 25 elderly women. Later, reading "David Copperfield" in my room, there's a scene where young Copperfield follows a teacher to a similar almshouse in Whitechapel, with dates that correspond, and I realized - I could have walked past a setting that inspired Charles Dickens, that actually appears in one of his novels, and I didn't even know it at the time. But art and history like that is everywhere in London; in America, it would have been such a big deal the place would have been covered in plaques and pamphlets, but here, I think the building's been converted into apartments.

I miss the Hopkins campus because it's green and the buildings are beautiful; the Queen Mary campus is rather stark and instead of grassy quads there are just ugly paved courtyards. But we go to parks, which is a nice escape, especially since the more I live in cities the more I appreciate quiet green things; in a city, I don't feel the seasons changing, and it's eerie. The other weekend, three of us went up to Hampstead Heath, a huge park in a kind of suburban area with wooded trails and a big grassy meadow-like field, and a pond. We had a picnic by the pond, and then after a walk we lay on the grass and slept for a while; then we went back into the neighborhood and found a place for Algerian coffee and hookah (they call it shisha here) and we sat smoking and sketching the things around us with pencils Adrienne and Onon had brought.

I don't know if this gives anyone a picture of life in London so much as it could be a cloudy picture of any city, but if I described the tourist attractions it would just sound like any other guidebook; you don't have to be here to know what those are like. I guess the things that make it London are the flower stalls on the street and the way the old pub signs are painted, and the cafes that, when all their windows are open, are simply alcoves from the street. Or drunken people on the night bus, and the guy next to me on the tube who was holding a rose bush, and how footie's a religion and breakfast at Weatherspoon's is only 3,50 GBP and has more food than I could eat in a week, and involves mushrooms and a tomato.

I have been tripping into tourist traps as well – never fear! – as you will hopefully see in the next post when I get my first rolls of pictures developed. Until then, I’m off to enjoy that fine British delicacy, the Halal fast food dinner, while I pursue a time-honored British pastime, working on homework – excuse me, I mean “revising.”