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31.12.00
This has been a crazy weekend�with John here, packing, and our fifteen-inch snowstorm that sprung on us over the weekend, I haven�t had the chance to write anything for my journal here�oh well�at least I�m enjoying the moment, right? And trying not to think about my impending flight tomorrow. Yuk. But don�t worry, I made up for my fears but getting into a snowball fight with John and dumping him headfirst into the snow!
02.01.01
Welcome to London! Well, it�s 2:33 p.m. greenwich mean time, and I�ve been up since oh, say, 6 a.m. yesterday eastern time (that�s 11 a.m. greenwich mean time yesterday). 27 hours!!! Okay okay, so I did sleep on the airplane for a few minutes here and there, but the flight attendants always managed to bring us our food at the wrong time, just as I was about to fall asleep. Go figure.
So I�m writing this response sitting in my bunk bed in the hostel. We�re at the New Atlantic Hotel, which is only a hotel by name�it�s totally a hostel, complete with bathrooms down the hall (although the washbasins are in our rooms). If I look out my room, I have a quaint view of a road in Paddington. We�re supposedly in the heart of the West End, near Notting Hill and Kensington Palace. (I saw signs for Kensington High, Kensington�s Main Street) There are cute little shops lining the streets here and gorgeous buildings. We even passed numerous mews�essentially alleyways that have houses on them and that were originally stables. There are lots of black taxis and red double-deckers wandering around, and I�ve even begun looking to the right before crossing the street!
Our flight was pretty boring, quite smooth and not much going on. Probably the most exciting part of it was that our captain delayed take-off for an hour before we left because there was a drunk passenger who had to be escorted off the aircraft, and then they had to search for his bags in the luggage compartments�pretty entertaining, eh? Well, I sat next to two British women who live in NYC now, and we chatted about all sorts of things. They weren�t big fans of flying, either. Virgin Atlantic gives really cool bags of goods, kinda like goody bags�pens, notepads, socks, eye-covers, and some other weird things. But my t.v. wasn�t working too well, and the food was ok. I prefer British Airways, though. Their flights are never full.
I think that�s all that�s up with me for now. I�m lucky in that I have a double room (most of us have quads), and my roommate is nice�she got in from Newark on a later flight than mine this morning. We�re going to go to Hyde Park or Kensington Park or someplace in a few minutes�just to try to stay awake until nighttime. But it�s always dark here. One of the other Americans commented today: �gee, it always looks like it�s 5:00 P.M. here; it�s always so dark!� The sun hadn�t even come up when we touched down at Gatwick at 7:30!
03.01.01
Well, there are quite a few things I�ve learned during my first full day in London! First, ketchup is called tomato paste and costs 10 pence per packet. The slang for the underground is �chube,� although it�s written as �tube.� There�s no rhyme or reason for when hot water will come out of the washbasin, or from which faucet it will appear. British computers are slow. Q-tips are called �cottonbuds� according to British English, although the term sounds a lot like �cottonbutts� when spoken in Cockney. And the various British accents are for the most part a lot easier to understand and differentiate than I used to think.
This morning my roommate and I woke up early, so early that the sun didn�t rise for another 1.5 hours! (We had to meet downstairs at 8:00 to go to orientation, so we had to be up early to wait for the showers!) But where�s the rain? It was warm and sunny this morning, go figure! We had an English breakfast at the hostel (minus tea, since our room was 35 degrees all night and we almost died in the heat) before riding the tube to City University for our meetings. I can�t remember much of them (thank you, jet lag!), but we did have a discussion with two MPs, one of whom was a lord! I tell you, British MPs are so much cooler than American congressmen�they�re very brash and bold. And also very friendly. After that, I think I remember a lunch of fish and chips, during which I was charged again for ketchup and also asked if I desired my meal �open or closed.�
The afternoon passed in a blur�sleep�during meetings�we rode a boat on the Thames to see the riverfront sights�fast fact-London Bridge is no longer a resident of London but instead is in Arizona on a manmade lake�but most tourists think the Tower Bridge is the famous London Bridge. Anyway, we also took a flight on British Airways� Millennium Eye (giant ferris wheel), scary as anything! 420 feet tall, glass capsules, 40 minutes to circle. Not good for a claustrophobic person who�s scared of heights! But! We found our way to Tottenham Court Rd and Leicester Square, SoHo, Chinatown, and Piccadilly Circus before returning to Paddington. Some parts of the city seem so similar to NYC�there�s even Pocky for sale in Chinatown! And we were asked directions to Piccadilly by a British bloke with a purple mohawk�maybe I am starting to look British after all! J
04.01.01
Orientation has finally ended and everyone has moved into their dorms, except for the four of us going to either SOAS or Oxford�we�re stuck in the hostel for at least another night. It�s taken three days, but we�ve finally managed to turn the heat off in the room�only after my roommate, Maryam, had to sleep in the hall because it was too hot here. So I�m off to bed in a minute anyway�
We did have an exciting tube ride this morning�we were going to take the circle line from Paddington to Barbican�same as yesterday, but we waited half an hour for a circle line train and finally took a district line train to edgware rd., where we had to wait another ten minutes for a circle line train, only to have it get stuck in the tunnel for a few minutes! Ahh�it was an adventure, you know!? For the most part, though, the tube has been a pleasure to ride�people are much friendlier on it than on NYC subways, and the general atmosphere is pleasant. I�m enjoying it!
Food here is expensive, but we�ve figured out how to avoid it now�there are refectories in all of the schools where food is subsidised, and you can get really cheap sandwiches (�1-�2) at them�ploughmen�s, egg salad, tuna salad, traditional ham and cheese, cole slaw and cheese�it�s great and they taste homemade! Yum! So I�m happy living off my sandwiches and refectory food. Not to mention fish and chips of course.
Tonight I�m off to a dinner on Regent Street with everyone else (paid for by school) and tomorrow we�re off to a train ride to Kidderminster, Worcestershire. I think that area is famous for apples, or so I�ve been told. Anyway, I�ve a homestay in the country there for the weekend, and I think it will be lots of fun!
5.01.01
After four days in the hostel, I hate to admit, I grew quite fond of its quirks like the constant smell of paint in the hallway and the scalding showers. Perhaps it�s because we finally managed to turn the heat in our room off. Of course, that didn�t put us to sleep any earlier than usual, 1 a.m. Jet lag likes keeping Americans in London wide awake at night.
Well, I woke up at 7 a.m. again this morning and I finally got an English breakfast�two fried eggs cooked median for �1�quite a bargain, and yummy too! Once again it was raining but I pulled my big suitcase to the Paddington Tube Station�I�ve successfully handled riding rush-hour trains with a 50-lb. Suitcase by myself in a foreign country�what could be harder?
Anyway, last night at dinner the SOAS head of student affairs told me that I could store my bags at my house, Dinwiddy, for �12/night, quite a bargain! Ha. Well, Dinwiddy fits in nicely with its surroundings in the red-light district of King�s Cross, it�s rather institutional. However, my flat is lovely; the rooms are new, big, and complete with toilet, internet, and telephone. I think I�ll be enjoying it quite a lot! J
Dave, Craig, and I rode the Thames Express out of Paddington Rail today: other than the slow speed of the train, caused by poor BritRail infrastructure, it reminded me of the trains in Ireland and Japan. The English countryside is beautiful�green rolling hills and sheep, tall forests every so often, farmhouses and villages�after we accidentally left our return rail tickets on the Worcester platform, we saw real Britain�schoolkids in uniforms using the rail to commute, more green scenery. I�m staying in the village of Broome approximately 30 minutes from Birmingham. There are 290 citizens in the village, and high �main� street consists of three houses and the town church! I think there�s more sheep than people in this town. Anyway, I�m staying with a lovely older lady who used to be a professor I think�I have my own bedroom, bath, sitting room, and kitchen. Those green fields and hedges surround her house to boot. Tonight, she�s taking me to see Peter Pan at a Birmingham Theatre, so I�ll write more later�
Addendum: It�s interval at Birmingham�s Alexandra Theatre. The city itself, the second-largest in England, bears lots of resemblances to Hartford or New Haven: although larger than its U.S. counterparts, it�s rather run-down. On the other hand, this adaptation of Peter Pan is, well, rather unusual. It�s done in pantomime, and although the audience is family-based with lots of young children, oftentimes the actors� jokes are crude and sexual. And I never knew that Peter Pan had a gyrating crocodile or �Livin� la vida loca� as sung by Tiger Lily! Go figure!
6.1.01-7.1.01
I�m writing this on the Thames Express from Worcester to London Paddington. Ah, the wonders of a laptop computer. I glance up out my window and I see rolling green meadows with a flock of birds flying off the ground, and the mid-winter sun creating long shadows against the horses in their pastures. The flooding is still clearly evident in the pastures, with plenty of areas of stilled water, but it�s truly beautiful, unlike anything I have seen in the states. As we begin to pull into our next station, it is slowly becoming more industrailised with many more large buildings, but the villages still look like they belong in guidebooks of England, with the high street often the only evidence of a village.
I spent this past weekend living with Diana Pheysey of Broome, Stourbridge. It�s in the west midlands, slightly south of Birmingham and a half hour�s drive west of the border with Wales. As I previously mentioned, the town itself was rather small�only 290 people�and Broome Lane (High Street) had only three houses and the town church, which doesn�t even have its own pasture. The area around Broome and Stourbridge is called Black Country for it�s the area in which the Industrial Age began, and there�s lots of evidence of the presence of iron and bronze in the Black Country. Yesterday Diana took me to the Black Country Museum, which is an open-air museum that recreates 19th-century England, during a time that heavily relied on the newfound industrialisation. After the museum, we drove on lots of country back roads before going to Holy Austin�s Rock, a sandstone rock that people in the 19th-century made their homes out of. Probably the coolest thing was riding around in the car on England�s back roads�many couldn�t have been more than one car wide and yet cars typically go over 50 miles per hour on them! When you see another car, you slam on your brakes and pull over to the side! Quite the cultural experience.
Diana invited her nephew Jeff over last night and the three of us had dinner together-place for Diana and me and duck for Jeff. We also had potatoes, parsnips, brussel sprouts, parsley sauce, and apple crumbler with custard. I think it was a traditional British meal, and it was very yummy! It was also nice to be with someone close to my age for a little bit of time�Jeff works for the Oxford and Cambridge examination boards (similar to the S.A.T.s), and so it was interesting to talk to him.
Back up to the present�as I said, I�m of the train heading for Paddington. We made the connection in Worcester and are now sitting at Evesham for our passengers who need to have a smoke before we continue. Craig and Dave had an interesting weekend, and although I requested to be with a family, I think I�m actually glad that I was in the middle of the country instead! They stayed in Kidderminster and did lots of shopping and clubs�apparently they even got picked up by two thirty-year old women in one pub! (One with a fourteen-year-old child.) So while I would have enjoyed being with a family, I was happy with the experience I had, even though I got in trouble for sneaking under some barbed wire and walking down a field to visit some sheep! (It all straightened itself out once I said that Diana had given me permission; the guy who was watching me was her cousin�s husband.) It was truly the British countryside, however fleeting it may have been�