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.”