Midnight Rambler

Sergei Glebov, my Russian history professor at Smith who is himself Russian, scoffed when I told him I would be in London for a semester abroad. London, he claimed, was not abroad. Not for an American such as myself, with an interest in world history and culture that had pushed me to take two of his classes (one on the Empire, one on the USSR). How could England, parent of the US, be foreign to me?

And maybe he had a point. The US, or at least the part I grew up in, was directly influenced by the British and Anglo-Saxon evidence is present in many aspects. We share a language, a body of literature, a history and special relationship like with no other country. And yet.

Perhaps it’s because of the similarities, but in the UK I am very aware of a dissonance. Yes, I speak the language and understand many cultural references; however there is a different air in London than in New York. ’Well, obviously,’ you say. ‘Of course they’re wildly different.’ Except that it’s not wild. There are skyscrapers and old quarters, suburbs and parks, public transport and coffee shops just as in every city. But here and now in London I feel uncomfortable in my own skin in a way I never did the other times I was here.

The last two times I was in London, it was for only a month each, and maybe that wasn’t long enough. I find myself more and more feeling a strong urge to go somewhere more familiar. As the weeks go by this stops being a fun little vacation and becomes more a reality: I live here, for the time being, and adjusting to that is scary.

It’s the tiniest things. It’s in the more subdued air of the passerby on the street. The absence of sales tax. The differences in the cars, the vernacular, the coinage, the food brands—all of it adds up in little ways to remind me I’m somewhere different. And maybe it’s because the culture is otherwise so similar that the smaller differences stand out more. A kind of cultural Uncanny Valley, if you will.

I sit in my room and berate myself, ‘what would you be doing if you were in the US? the exact same thing you’re doing now, so there’s no point feeling homesick.’ But it’s not the actions, it’s the atmosphere, the very air of this city that impresses upon me that I am an outsider.

And it’s when I’m walking back from the library in the small hours of the morning that I feel it most, because this is a situation I so often found myself in at Smith—breathing the cold night air after a night of schoolwork en route to my room. And at Smith I had friends and a phone to call home with, a constant link to familiar things that would ground me. Here I have nothing except my own thoughts and the ambience of a land so similar and yet so, so different.

Please Hello, America Back

I did not plan on having an adventure today, but sometimes these things happen, you know?

I got off the tube at Oxford Circus, took a stroll down Regent Street and then I found a tourist map which kindly informed me the Mexican Embassy was in the vicinity. That's when the adventure started. It's the little indent up near Hanover Square.

No, Father, I did not go in to sign the guestbook.

Most of my adventures continue in the same fashion: I look down a street, see something interesting, and pursue. And I swear I did not mean to find the New Bond Street Victoria's Secret store, which is their UK flagship location, but I found it, because wherever I am a Victoria's Secret will appear.

After that it was just a slew of embassies left and right, because I kept seeing flags and thinking 'I wonder what that is!' I went down Brook Street in pursuit of what turned out to be Claridge's--

--and then not even two buildings down the block there was the Argentinian Embassy, and then Italy, and Monaco, and the British Virgin Islands, and Indonesia, and then--completely by accident!-- I found the United States of America.

It's a bad picture because it was very dramatically backlit by the setting sun.

Far be it from me to tell the State Department what to do with their property but this does seem a tad overkill. There was a statue of FDR, and one of Reagan, and one of Eisenhower! His had multiple flowers laid at the base. I guess the British like Ike.

Interestingly there are a number of buildings that fly foreign flags that don't actually seem to be embassies. Two buildings were flying very large Greek and Bahraini flags, respectively, but Google tells me the embassies of Greece and Bahrain are located elsewhere. Actually Google also tells me I narrowly missed the Serbian Embassy. Ah well. I suppose embassies just tend to clump near each other, maybe it's easier for the British government to keep track of?

In other news, I've spent no inconsiderable amount of time shopping recently. I had to return a super cute pair of heels because they were too big, but they were £24 and in their place I scored a £10 pair of jeans and a £14 pair of slightly-less-cute-but-properly-sized heels, so who's the real winner here? (It's me.) Lord, I thought jeans shopping was complicated in America.

I'll tell you about my adventure in Birmingham...eventually. I'll get to it, I promise.

The toenail hasn't fallen off yet, which is annoying because I would rather it just get the whole proccess moving and also I'm beginning to doubt it ever will, which will be doubly aggravating when it inevitably does. I also went out again with my flatmates and friends and managed to skin my knee something fierce, which is a step up on the Grace's-Drunken-Injury scale. A sad, pathetic step. Although I'm finally being a real person with a real social life and not sitting in my room all the time, just 80% of the time, so I think I still win. I had fun, anyway, and isn't that what really matters? (Yes.)

The social life, yes, that. Becky says I'm her favorite flatmate, except she was inebriated at the time and I assume this excludes Raj with whom she is practically conjoined at the hip, but it counts. Chris bugs me incessantly to come out with all them and sometimes it even works. I get along well with Myfi and Michael (who reminds me eerily of James Cranston from high school). We all sat in Becky's room and watched bad movies on Tuesday night. The weather is improving rapidly, it's mild and sunny more often than not and I've been in high spirits lately.

This may be soon to change, however, as the semester is wrapping up and coursework is beginning to pile up. Lots of essays that make up ridiculous portions of my grade. I think the British have bizarre standards because I've had at least two of my professors halt the lecture in order to go over essay structure, referencing, and just really basic writing mechanic stuff I learned in high school. They don't get much practice, I suppose, seeing as how we're only writing like two papers for each class. Over the entire semester. Bizarre.

What I'm saying is that I got a 69 on that architecture paper. That's a very good grade in this country. It's barely-passing in the US but it's really high here. Anything above like a 70 basically means the professor thinks you should be publishing.

This is a very strong and well-structured essay. The relationship you raise between the use of brick and ‘constructional polychromy’ as a characteristic of the Victorian Style is interesting, and your reading of it is very thorough. Your vivid account of the building contributes to the construction of your argument. One of the points in which it would have been nice to have a more in depth development, is in the comparison of the interior with the exterior, the plain brick against the painted tiles. It is very nicely written and rigorously referenced. Good use of sources. Well done!

BOOM. Grace takes London by storm. This is extra good because this class is counting towards my major at Smith.

I have exactly one final exam and it's on May 12. So I basically have from March 31 to early May to do whatever I want. We'll see what happens. Maybe I'll conquer Latvia.

Mother demanded a picture of my toe.

This is from about a week ago.

And this is today.

Despite the lovely development in color it doesn't hurt at all anymore, basically, but it's gonna fall off pretty soon.

Hello. It's been a while.

I had the previous week off from classes, as it was "Reading Week"--allegedly a time to catch up on coursework and such. Of course I completely failed to take advantage of the opportunity to travel or anything and instead stayed on campus the whole time and wrote two papers that were due last night. As you do.

One paper did involve me visiting a structure in London to write about its building materials; I chose All Saints, Margaret Street, which is a church on Margaret Street, built in the 1850s by William Butterfield and famous for its decoration scheme.

 

These are bad pictures. It's much prettier than this.

Look at that. They just don't make 'em like that anymore. Of course they didn't make 'em like that back then, either. It was very controversial and critics called it the "Streaky Bacon Style." I know this because I had to do some research on it for the paper. I spent a lot of time in the library. It was a fun week.

I also got to write about Elizabethan Catholic martyrs for another class, which meant that I got to go to the big university library in Central London to get my books.

Senate House Library. Apparently the closest thing to fascist architecture in Britain.

The thing about Senate House Library is that it's right next to the British Museum. I did not go inside the museum, because I had something else on my mind.

So, okay. The first time I went to London in 2010, on that internship program, we stayed in the University of London dorms. I never made the connection between University of London and Queen Mary University of London until about last week.

Apparently I was within walking distance of the British Museum the entire time and had no idea. So that's exciting.

After visiting the library I did take the opportunity to wander back to my old haunts. I found the smoothie guy outside Russell Square tube station, just like he always was--but when I asked what kind of smoothies there were, he said he doesn't do those anymore. Just fruits and juices and whatever. I had a strange sense that the world had moved on without me.

pictured: the world moving on without me.

This was all right around Valentine's Day. Now, on Valentine's Day, I decided to leave my cocoon and go clubbing with my flatmates. That was all very fun and I don't regret it but the important bit is that at some point during the night I slammed my foot against the curb. When I woke up my toenail was purple and apparently I can expect the nail to fall off sometime in the coming weeks.

In Chinatown, which is near Leicester Square, you can buy socks with Korean pop stars on them.

SHINee is a very popular K-pop group. And now you can have them on your feet.

We Need To Talk About Fire Alarms.

I asked several people, online and off, what I should expect from living in Pooley. Not one of them mentioned the fire alarm.

It's an infernal device which activates with an loud, continuous whine that burrows into your eardrums and sends shivers up your spine. It's gone off several times since I've been here; on each occasion, the entire building has to evacuate (they send someone around with a clipboard taking down names--I don't see the point of this, as someone could just be out at that particular moment). When that happens, we stand outside until a fire truck arrives, a troop of firefighters inspects the flat which instigated the alarm, the all-clear is given, the alarm is deactivated, and we file back inside. A thoroughly annoying but ultimately harmless process. Never more than 20 minutes.

This was not the case at 3:58 on Monday morning.

I was watching the Super Bowl, you see, which was a painful experience in itself, but it resulted in my only just having laid down in my bed and turned off the lights when a loud beeping filled my room and every other room.

Dear God, no, thought I.

I stayed still for a moment, staring at the ceiling and contemplating my life, before laboriously putting on pants, slippers and my coat, and trooping outside with the rest of the building.

The only saving grace was the weather, which thankfully was mild if somewhat chilly. It became soon clear that this was no normal alarm--no misguided stoner, no incompetent chef. Because the whine which signaled a normal alarm was instead that constant beeping, and also the firefighters had left the scene shortly after arriving and we were not permitted back indoors, and there was nobody taking names.

Rumors spread that the mechanism by which to disable the alarm was malfunctioning, rumors which were soon proven accurate.

"You can go inside," they said, "and we'll try to get it off as soon as we can, but no promises."

It was 4:56.

Armed with headphones and playing my music at a volume entirely unconducive to sleep I did indeed crawl back into the bed I had never settled into, and it was at 5:02 that the hellish noise finally ceased and peace was restored.

Well. At least they were quick about it.

Culture!

So Gayle was like "I want to see a different museum every week" and invited me along, and that's why I was at the Tate Modern today.

No.

It was pretty fun, there was lots of snarky commentary and sheer disbelief, but also some nice things. Like Pollocks and Picassos.

She's really nice and I think I'll try to hang out with her a lot because she's interested in traveling and seeing stuff as well.

Everyone's pretty nice so far. I do get along with my flatmates but I don't see them very often because everyone sort of does their own thing. But twice now when they've been planning to go out, I've joined them in pregaming with card games and alcohol, which is lots of fun.

Also I got a phone. Nothing huge, just to text and in case something goes horribly wrong.

It's a little flip phone with no camera, no internet and a pink back. I feel so 2004.

I got it at the O2 store in the Westfield, which is a big mall one Tube stop down in Stratford, which is also right next to the Olympic Park (so I'll be checking that out eventually). I'd been to the mall once before, my second weekend, but I was still pretty timid so I didn't really explore very much, but when I went back on Tuesday it looked much more inviting and I'll probably go on a big shopping trip sometime this week.

The Starbucks has a wall of cups signed by Olympic athletes that got drinks there. It was cool. A lot of people from Canada and Australia and Japan, and of course dozens of British athletes.

It's so awful here. Like I know it's not snowing and I should be glad, but I'm not, because with snow at least there's something pretty to look at, whereas here I wake up and I see another grey sky, and most or the brick buildings I see from my window are brown or this absolutely gross yellow, and I believe the entirety of Britain is covered in a thin layer of moss.

Awful.

Tomorrow's the big Chinese New Year celebrations so I think I'll wander in the general vicinity of Chinatown (it's near Leicester Square) and see what's what. If the weather's not too awful, that is.

An Adventure

Occasionally I like to go on adventures, which involve going to a place and walking around and seeing what happens. That's my definition of an adventure.

On...sometime last weekend, I went on an adventure through Central London. The first job was getting there, because I got on the Tube and then the train I was on wouldn't move, because the Central Line was being held for some reason or other, so I hopped off and got on the District Line. When I got on the Central Line I had absolutely no idea where I was going, because that line honestly does not go to very many interesting places, but the District Line does.

So I got off the Tube at Westminster, which was packed, and decided that I wanted to wander up by Trafalgar Square.

Did you know that the Houses of Parliament has a gift store? I do now.

Getting there means walking up Whitehall, which is where Downing Street is and also various War Memorials, statues to various generals and earls and also Monty, and the Horseguards Parade.

The sign says "Beware: Horses may kick or bite."

So I made it to Trafalgar Square but then I was like "nah" so I veered off down the Mall and headed in that direction. 

You can't swing a cat in Central London without finding a statue.

That's George VI and Queen Elizabeth, by the way.

There were tourists, because of course there were (strangely, I do not consider myself a tourist in London), and what is at the end of the Mall but the Palace!

I saw no royals.

Forming a vague plan in my head, I cut through Green Park and made my way up Picadilly. It's the area I worked in back in 2010, so it was a lovely walk of 'oh that store's still there!'

There's a little church on the street which has a courtyard of sorts and there was something of a fair happening.

And I was like 'okay.' So I browsed. And there was a Russian woman operating one stall, selling hats and matryoshka dolls and various Soviet coinage, and also a selection of pins from the 1980 Olympics.

I bought the gymnastics one, obviously.

And then I hit Picadilly Circus, and I was thinking it might be time to head back, because Picadilly Circus is nice and all but it was getting dark, so I looped back around towards Trafalgar Square.

On my way, and quite by accident, I ran into the embassies of Kazakhstan and Brazil, which are right next to each other. Earlier I had passed by that of Malta. Now I happen to know something about Trafalgar Square, which is that the embassies of Canada and South Africa are located there.

So one might say I now have a goal of sorts: find as many London embassies as I can. It's a strange ambition, but I never claimed to be traditional.

Classes are going fine. There's a teachers' strike going on, which is exciting because we keep getting emails about it. It's scheduled at very strange times, only for a few hours each day for only three specific days, apparently to disrupt the campus as much as possible. It only affects one of my class times, however, and the teacher of that class is not a member of the union, so she said she will be teaching but we are not obligated to come to that particular lecture. Unfortunately I'm part of a presenting group that day so I do have to go.

Everyone smokes in London, I'm going to come home with secondhand lung disease. They make up for it with their excellent sandwiches. I love sandwiches.

"bits" is British for "pulp." Why?