I’m putting my travel journal (of sorts) on hold because this is a very exciting time to be in London. Yesterday was Election Day! English elections don’t happen very often, so it’s particularly special. There hasn’t been an election here in 5 years, which I find mind-boggling. The same people are in Parliament who were there five years ago (until last night in many cases). Doesn’t that just get a bit stale? It’s also a bizarre and complex political machine. There’s tons of parties, but the main two are labor (liberal) and tories (conservative), with lib-dems forming a sort of independent, but more aligned with labor, third party. The day’s been full of scandal and drama. In some areas people weren’t allowed to vote. They send people voting ballots in the mail which they have to arrive with at the polls, and, of course, students have been turning up en masse without the documents they need. In some districts they ran out of ballot paper. In the home county of Nick Clegg, the lib-dem nominee, who was widely lauded for dominating the three televised debates and thought he could bring the lib-dem party into prominence, there was an overload of people and they just started turning people away once it got too late. This led to some Florida-style recounts. The only difference being that they only have to recount thousands, not millions, of votes so it all gets done in a couple hours. It is now the morning after and everything is still chaos. Some districts still don’t know who they’re MP (parliamentary representative, as opposed to PM, the prime minister) is. Also, since it seems like no party will have a majority, everything turns into a schoolyard scrum over who gets the seats necessary to decide on Prime Minister. Basically, the tories have more votes and seats in Parliament, but labor has enough to keep them from being decisively declared the majority and establishing a new Prime Minister. The Prime Minister election isn’t run like our Presidential campaign. The three PM candidates are all in Parliament, and whoever’s side wins, that side gets to put their leader as the nation’s leader. Like if whoever won the majority in Congress by default had their president elected. However, in this situation the current PM, Gordon Brown, who is the leader of the second place party, can make a deal with the lib-dems, who will throw their seats behind the labor party (the labor and lib-dem are more natural allies than lib-dems and conservatives, and there’s a sort of weird, unwritten right for the current PM to get the first crack at forming a coalition with the third party). So this is what they call a coalition government, and it will mean some deal will be hashed out to keep the tories from becoming PM. Of course Cameron, the conservative PM nominee, is wheeling and dealing behind the scenes as well. According to BBC he’s offered a deal to the lib-dems where he’ll be the new Prime Minister (with their seats he’d have a solid majority), and he’ll concede to them certain cabinet positions. So the fact that the lib-dems had a terribly disappointing election is sort of nullified by the fact that the seats they did earn become wildly valuable as the possible decider on the next PM. Lib-dems hate the labor party for shitting up Iraq so badly amongst a couple other issues, Labor is angry with the lib-dems for being liberal but not voting for them, the conservatives hate liberals but like the lib-dems for splitting up labor’s vote, everyone hates the conservatives and some lib-dems vote “strategically” (aka they vote labor because they know they wont win and anybody’s better than the Tories). It’s madness. And then you have to get Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales involved.
The election seems to bring out the stereotypical in everyone. England votes more conservative, so the Scottish go liberal. Also, when the English announce a vote it takes place in a town hall and everybody claps respectfully for their candidate. In Scotland it’s mayhem, with drunken hordes bellowing threats and insults from the crowd so much they can barely announce the winner. A woman I was watching with (a friend’s mother, and of Scottish origin) chuckled as a raucous Scottish man in the crowd tried throwing something at the conservative nominee and said, “Well…they’ve all had a few bevvies.” The Irish all vote for obscure parties then don’t send anyone to Parliament anyways because they don’t believe in the system. And who cares about Wales? When they announce the winner in Wales they do it in Welsh, which sounds like a dying hyena, so that’s kind of fun.
Saturday, 8 May 2010
Monday, 3 May 2010
When in Rome....be vigilant of your belongings
Touching down in Rome is a bit of an adventure (it always is with RyanAir. They never seem to manage to land both wheels simultaneously.) I get through customs, buy a blue powerade and a bus ticket and go outside to wait. My bus is arriving in forty minutes and I’m lounging beneath a tree in front of the Rome airport. It’s a gorgeous day. The kind of day English people wish they could divorce their wives and run off with. Resting on my overstuffed backpack I drift happily to sleep. When I wake up to catch my bus I realize that my laptop, which I keep in a padded travel case, is gone. And not just that, but since I considered it the safest place, far more safe than my pockets, I’d put a small reserve of cash and my passport in it. Not good. Semi-hysterical, I run back into the airport and start checking and rechecking all the places I’d been hoping it would turn up. I knew it wouldn’t though. On a hail-mary attempt I try to go back through the doors to customs, since I knew I had to have had my laptop and passport there since I did in fact get through customs. I’m greeted by an Italian police officer wielding what looks like a World War II style submachine gun. After I explained the situation he was actually really nice. In fact, everyone was. I’d heard so many awful things about Italians mistreating Americans (and everyone else) and about the abysmal failings of the Italian police that despite being in a state of desperate panic I was pleasantly surprised at how helpful and sympathetic all the Italians were. The guy who sold me my bus ticket stopped working to search everywhere and translate for me. The people outside rooted around under bushes. And when I realized that where I was sitting had been directly beneath a security camera they told me they would look at the film in 24 hours (evidently you can’t look at it for 24 hours?) and send the results to the American Embassy, where they’d helped me set up an appointment to get a new passport. But this was not how I envisioned starting off my trip. If you’d asked me the two things in the world I would least want to lose, especially while on an extended trip through Europe, my passport and laptop would probably be numbers 1 and 2, followed closely by my wallet. I’d have rather lost a kidney.
Anyways, shelving my troubles for a minute, I head into Rome to meet up with the fam. My cousin Katie is studying in Rome and her family was there visiting at the same time. So, obviously, I unashamedly took advantage of their hospitality. Spent the next few days in total luxury at the Hotel Rocco Forte, or something like that, sharing a room with my cousin, Michael, in the same suite as my Uncle Steve and Aunt Petunia (random aside: her real name is Sylvia, but we called her Aunt Petunia before J.K. Rowling made it cool). The first dinner involves a lot of pizza, pasta and wine. I thought my aunt and uncle were getting a lot of wine more out of sympathy to me, what with having been sliced open and had the most valuable objects I own stolen in the past twelve or so hours, but that would turn out to be a nightly affair. So would the pizza and pasta. This may seem kind of obvious, but nobody does Italian food like the Italians.
Rome is a fantastic city. I mean, I thought London had this palpable sense of history. And it does, just its history is more Napolean era. Rome makes London’s dusty statues look like newborns. I’m talking about shit that was around when the “known world” was missing out on more than half the continents. And not just that, but it’s all still so imposing. If the hulking shell of the coliseum is this incredible, imagine what the real must have looked like? And the aqueducts. Don’t get me started on the aqueducts. Constructing hundreds of kilometers of aqueducts that provided safe, clean water to cities, was used for sewers and agriculture, all that. And they knew enough to build the aqueducts either high up or underground so the water couldn’t get contaminated. Two millennia later and people still had outbreaks of disease in because they didn’t realize that the drinking water should probably not serve as the de facto cemetery/toilet. The idea that there is any, any, no matter how minute, aspect of our culture that will be more advanced than something human society two thousand years from now will provide is, I think, ridiculous. And yet, the Romans did it consistently.
Modern Rome does a good job, in that way that European cities tend to, of balancing progress with all their historical-ness. Women in huge high heels (not like they need it, Italian women are like six foot on average) walking around on ancient cobblestone without so much as breaking stride. Although really when I say they balance modernity with their history I mean they manage to develop a gorgeous, modern-day city without detracting from the totally absurd amount of awesome historical stuff. The city has approximately a gagillion fountains (give or take, like, 5) and most of them would probably be a legitimate tourist attraction in any other city, but since its Rome they don’t even come close to making the cut. This city is the all-star team of fountains; you could be fantastic, but you’re still not making the roster. And then there’s the Trevi fountain (the Lebron James of the fountain-world), which makes even fantastic fountains look meek. Everyone should go to Rome. Except maybe lactose-intolerant people. Italy is kind of lactose-intolerant-intolerant. Not like I care, cheese is nestled comfortably between the Mets and Steve Jobs on my favorite things ever list, but it should be noted that this is a group of people that slather everything in cheese and butter and then have ice cream for dessert. How are Europeans not as fat as Americans?
Anywho, I expected to do all of Italy in one post, but this is getting kind of long and Cinque Terra deserves its own post. So that’ll be coming soon…
Anyways, shelving my troubles for a minute, I head into Rome to meet up with the fam. My cousin Katie is studying in Rome and her family was there visiting at the same time. So, obviously, I unashamedly took advantage of their hospitality. Spent the next few days in total luxury at the Hotel Rocco Forte, or something like that, sharing a room with my cousin, Michael, in the same suite as my Uncle Steve and Aunt Petunia (random aside: her real name is Sylvia, but we called her Aunt Petunia before J.K. Rowling made it cool). The first dinner involves a lot of pizza, pasta and wine. I thought my aunt and uncle were getting a lot of wine more out of sympathy to me, what with having been sliced open and had the most valuable objects I own stolen in the past twelve or so hours, but that would turn out to be a nightly affair. So would the pizza and pasta. This may seem kind of obvious, but nobody does Italian food like the Italians.
Rome is a fantastic city. I mean, I thought London had this palpable sense of history. And it does, just its history is more Napolean era. Rome makes London’s dusty statues look like newborns. I’m talking about shit that was around when the “known world” was missing out on more than half the continents. And not just that, but it’s all still so imposing. If the hulking shell of the coliseum is this incredible, imagine what the real must have looked like? And the aqueducts. Don’t get me started on the aqueducts. Constructing hundreds of kilometers of aqueducts that provided safe, clean water to cities, was used for sewers and agriculture, all that. And they knew enough to build the aqueducts either high up or underground so the water couldn’t get contaminated. Two millennia later and people still had outbreaks of disease in because they didn’t realize that the drinking water should probably not serve as the de facto cemetery/toilet. The idea that there is any, any, no matter how minute, aspect of our culture that will be more advanced than something human society two thousand years from now will provide is, I think, ridiculous. And yet, the Romans did it consistently.
Modern Rome does a good job, in that way that European cities tend to, of balancing progress with all their historical-ness. Women in huge high heels (not like they need it, Italian women are like six foot on average) walking around on ancient cobblestone without so much as breaking stride. Although really when I say they balance modernity with their history I mean they manage to develop a gorgeous, modern-day city without detracting from the totally absurd amount of awesome historical stuff. The city has approximately a gagillion fountains (give or take, like, 5) and most of them would probably be a legitimate tourist attraction in any other city, but since its Rome they don’t even come close to making the cut. This city is the all-star team of fountains; you could be fantastic, but you’re still not making the roster. And then there’s the Trevi fountain (the Lebron James of the fountain-world), which makes even fantastic fountains look meek. Everyone should go to Rome. Except maybe lactose-intolerant people. Italy is kind of lactose-intolerant-intolerant. Not like I care, cheese is nestled comfortably between the Mets and Steve Jobs on my favorite things ever list, but it should be noted that this is a group of people that slather everything in cheese and butter and then have ice cream for dessert. How are Europeans not as fat as Americans?
Anywho, I expected to do all of Italy in one post, but this is getting kind of long and Cinque Terra deserves its own post. So that’ll be coming soon…
Thursday, 22 April 2010
James's great adventure in Europe!...but without crossing the Channel yet.
4:30 in the morning on the 21st of April and I am walking in the door of my room. I will, in a moment, fall into a sleep so deep it would probably be confused for a coma. I have just finished flying, hiking, training, bussing, walking, driving, stumbling and boating my way around continental Europe. I have gone through 4 languages, 3 boxes of antibiotics, 2 passports and 1 computer. This is where my story ends. This is also where my story begins. And, as is appropriate for the beginning of any story, this is where we will start.
4:30 in the morning on the 3rd of April and I am walking out the door of my room. Lugging my self and my backpack, loaded with enough crap to last me (I hope) a couple of weeks, I mentally prepare to step into the cold, rainy night. My bus to the airport will be departing in six hours, but I need to go to the A&E (the British equivalent of the ER, not related to the grocery store chain). For those of you who are unaware, I had been developing a pilonidal cyst in the few weeks leading up to my trip. It’s a problem I ran in to a year ago, so I was pretty sure what I was dealing with. Unfortunately, this doesn’t help whatsoever. I am unable to sit, lay down or walk for more than a few minutes without being in excruciating pain so the idea of a flight to Rome, followed by two weeks of buses, trains, planes and ferries is more than unappealing. I know that even if I somehow managed to make it to Rome I would immediately have to go to the hospital. There’s just no way I would be anything close to a functional human being. I would probably ruin my aunt, uncle and cousins’ vacation in Rome and end up in the emergency room somewhere where people didn’t speak English or give a shit about me. You may hate on the NHS all you want, but I now have a stunning amount of experience with the British health system and they are more than sympathetic despite the fact that I pay no taxes and me and my countryfolk unashamedly abuse their system to get free medical treatment and prescriptions. So I say, “fuck it, James, go get this taken care of so you can enjoy yourself.” Half an hour later I walk into the A&E and register with the nurses (I’ve been to the hospital so many times, usually between 1 and 3 a.m. that I’ve begun recognizing the bums who spend their nights in the hospital waiting room). Luckily there’s only one other person in need of medical attention, some emo kid who walked down the wrong dark alley and was now tearfully sniffling through a nose pointing in the wrong direction. Ha. So after some time (I don’t know how, but regardless of whether there’s 50 patients or 2 in the waiting room it ALWAYS takes one-and-a-half to two hours before you get seen. Bizarre.) I get checked out by a nurse. I tell her I have a pilonidal cyst that needs to be lanced and go off on a 5 minute story I’d prepared about my brother being married in Rome in 2 days and how I couldn’t sit but desperately needed to get there (I chose this story because I thought if I told them I would be flying in a few hours they would refuse to do the surgery and make me stay, but it would elicit just enough sympathy for them to perform the operation). She nods sympathetically then proceeds to take my temperature, my blood pressure, asks me my height and weight and then tells me to go back outside. Intense screening process. Eventually I get to see a doctor, but at this point I’m getting nervous. My bus is leaving not too far from now and I still have to have somebody slice my back (lower, upper, lower back) with a scalpel and squeeze out some blood and pus. Yum. I retell my tale about my brother’s impending marriage and I see that this doctor is actually a bit of a softie. It’s not something I normally do but I’m desperate so I try to turn on the big, wet Bambi eyes. He says it’s not a procedure they usually do at the A&E. I insist. He says they’re really not allowed to and they should defer me to a general practitioner. I insist. He tells me that the procedure would be painful and very temporary. I insist. He cuts me open. I imagine nobody’s ever been too happy to have a doctor digging around their rear end with a series of bloody instruments, but I couldn’t be more thrilled (despite being stuffed with so much gauze I feel like a Thanksgiving turkey). I make my bus with time to spare, am now comfortable sitting down and have everything I need for an awesome couple weeks of traveling.
This trips gonna be great. Goodbye England!
4:30 in the morning on the 3rd of April and I am walking out the door of my room. Lugging my self and my backpack, loaded with enough crap to last me (I hope) a couple of weeks, I mentally prepare to step into the cold, rainy night. My bus to the airport will be departing in six hours, but I need to go to the A&E (the British equivalent of the ER, not related to the grocery store chain). For those of you who are unaware, I had been developing a pilonidal cyst in the few weeks leading up to my trip. It’s a problem I ran in to a year ago, so I was pretty sure what I was dealing with. Unfortunately, this doesn’t help whatsoever. I am unable to sit, lay down or walk for more than a few minutes without being in excruciating pain so the idea of a flight to Rome, followed by two weeks of buses, trains, planes and ferries is more than unappealing. I know that even if I somehow managed to make it to Rome I would immediately have to go to the hospital. There’s just no way I would be anything close to a functional human being. I would probably ruin my aunt, uncle and cousins’ vacation in Rome and end up in the emergency room somewhere where people didn’t speak English or give a shit about me. You may hate on the NHS all you want, but I now have a stunning amount of experience with the British health system and they are more than sympathetic despite the fact that I pay no taxes and me and my countryfolk unashamedly abuse their system to get free medical treatment and prescriptions. So I say, “fuck it, James, go get this taken care of so you can enjoy yourself.” Half an hour later I walk into the A&E and register with the nurses (I’ve been to the hospital so many times, usually between 1 and 3 a.m. that I’ve begun recognizing the bums who spend their nights in the hospital waiting room). Luckily there’s only one other person in need of medical attention, some emo kid who walked down the wrong dark alley and was now tearfully sniffling through a nose pointing in the wrong direction. Ha. So after some time (I don’t know how, but regardless of whether there’s 50 patients or 2 in the waiting room it ALWAYS takes one-and-a-half to two hours before you get seen. Bizarre.) I get checked out by a nurse. I tell her I have a pilonidal cyst that needs to be lanced and go off on a 5 minute story I’d prepared about my brother being married in Rome in 2 days and how I couldn’t sit but desperately needed to get there (I chose this story because I thought if I told them I would be flying in a few hours they would refuse to do the surgery and make me stay, but it would elicit just enough sympathy for them to perform the operation). She nods sympathetically then proceeds to take my temperature, my blood pressure, asks me my height and weight and then tells me to go back outside. Intense screening process. Eventually I get to see a doctor, but at this point I’m getting nervous. My bus is leaving not too far from now and I still have to have somebody slice my back (lower, upper, lower back) with a scalpel and squeeze out some blood and pus. Yum. I retell my tale about my brother’s impending marriage and I see that this doctor is actually a bit of a softie. It’s not something I normally do but I’m desperate so I try to turn on the big, wet Bambi eyes. He says it’s not a procedure they usually do at the A&E. I insist. He says they’re really not allowed to and they should defer me to a general practitioner. I insist. He tells me that the procedure would be painful and very temporary. I insist. He cuts me open. I imagine nobody’s ever been too happy to have a doctor digging around their rear end with a series of bloody instruments, but I couldn’t be more thrilled (despite being stuffed with so much gauze I feel like a Thanksgiving turkey). I make my bus with time to spare, am now comfortable sitting down and have everything I need for an awesome couple weeks of traveling.
This trips gonna be great. Goodbye England!
Wednesday, 24 March 2010
"If you're too open-minded your brain falls out," Travels in Amsterdam and other, sunnier, places.
I finally have my computer back! I have lots of posts to make up for, I’ll try to start cranking them out over the next week. First things first though, going way back, all the way back to Amsterdam….
I don’t remember anything.
Just kidding. I actually developed a bit of a stomach bug so I didn’t get to experience too much of Amsterdam, what with being bedridden for over 24 hours. On the other hand I single handedly bankrupted the Holland Casino. I’m presuming the loss of 730 euros would bankrupt the Holland Casino. When I was walking through Amsterdam all I could think of was a quote by Richard Dawkins, “if you’re too open-minded your brain falls out.” I couldn’t help feeling that way about the people of Amsterdam. I wanna congratulate them for being so liberal and progressive. But, I just can’t. I come away feeling like the whole thing might be a mistake. And I think the Dutch are starting to feel that way too. The laws regarding drugs and prostitution in Amsterdam have been slowly but steadily rolled back over the past decade, and it looks like they’ll be clamping down even more in the future. This was the first city I traveled to, besides London, that seemed wealthy to me. In a lot of ways it felt even more wealthy. The people there clearly tried to give the impression of wealth, judging by their obnoxious clothing. But, to be fair, they’re hard-working and ambitious, and as the aging generation of ex-hippies fades away I can’t help thinking all these young professionals are gonna try to do away with all the red-light district craziness. A city can’t be taken seriously on the world stage if it sanctions sixteen year old girls becoming prostitutes, can it? If I were from Amsterdam I would hate my city’s laws. They probably account for a lot of the money coming into the city, so maybe I would tolerate it, but it would be tough watching hordes of potheads desecrate my home every weekend, littering in my beautiful canals and covering my scenic streets and plazas in a thick carpet of urine and Doritos wrappers. What holds me back from feeling really sympathetic towards the people of Amsterdam is the fact that they are all such tools. I used to joke around that I hated Dutch people, but I’d never actually met any, they just seemed silly with their windmills and wooden clogs. But it turns out to be true, I hate Dutch people (or at least the people of Amsterdam). They all have perfectly coiffed hair, gleaming with product, their skin shines like a poorly made wax statue because of all the moisturizers and lotions they use and their clothes are in much the same vain. Going out to a bar or club made me think of being at bar mitzvah, all the Dutch people flirt like seventh graders, sending little groups of scouts from one side of the room to the other to test the waters, I imagine they all had notes that asked the girls if, “you like me or maybe wanna dance?” Bar mitzvahs are funny for this reason, but what’s comical and endearing in a 13 year old is downright pitiful for a group of 20 somethings. To sum it up, you should go to Amsterdam, it’s an experience, and it does have some great museums and all that if you don’t want to leave thinking all you did was turn your brain into sludge, but come with friends and ignore the natives.
Next trip, the Canary Islands….
……………………………………………..
Sorry bout that, I got lost daydreaming about Las Gran Canarias. Even at this time of year, which is far from their peak, the sun blazes down and hordes of Germans come to enjoy some overpriced Heinekens by “el lago” (one of the giant pools at my resort). I should say that this was a weekend I spent well outside of my price range, which is a great thing to do every once in a while, even though it means I’ll be training through Europe for two and a half weeks in April without ever paying for accommodation. Hmmm…should be interesting. But the canaries are incredible. They’re volcanic islands so the resorts, or at least my resort, imports fake sand to make people feel more comfortable. I wouldn’t mind the black silty stuff their more familiar with, the fake sand feels like walking on Legos.
Living in London for only a few months has already changed the way I feel about the sun, like it’s water in the desert. You forget for some people it’s not a precious commodity. And it astounds me how the sun could be however many millions of miles away from Earth and yet I could fly south for a few hours and it feels like it’s sitting on top of my head. It’s a shame I can’t really appreciate just lying in the sun, since I start to crisp after about half an hour. In fact, I’m so embarrassingly susceptible to sunburn that when I don’t apply suntan lotion evenly, which I never do, I burn in strange layers and blotches. Ugh…someday I’ll be tan (you have to imagine me saying that while sitting at my window, looking out at the stars, and sounding like Pinocchio). Also, the canaries, unlike, say, Amsterdam, which also relies heavily on tourism to bring in cash (probably not as much as the canaries, which is essentially just one, giant string of resorts) is full of genuinely friendly people. They love you, love that you come to visit their island and love that you’ll pay 8 euros for a “mojito” that’s nothing more than 2 shots of rum, a sprig of mint and a cupful of ice.
One funny anecdote though: when I got to the Madrid airport I was supposed to have just an hour’s wait and then connect to the Canaries. However, unbeknownst to us, they had changed the flight, pushing it back almost 5 hours. I, being American, went all over the airport trying to find people to talk to as if I could bitch and moan enough to make an airplane arrive on time. The English people on the plane who were also going to the islands, and there happened to be several other 20 something year old guys, decided to pub crawl the airport. There are 90 gates, and every 3 has it’s own little area with a tv, seating, small shops and, most importantly, a bar of some sort. Our flight took off from gate 88. Yeah. I met up with them at gates 10-12, and by gate 22 we’re all cruising down the automatic walkways singing football songs (two of the four guys were Arsenal fans. Go Gunners.) I’m not sure exactly what happened to them. I picked up a seat on an earlier flight and abandoned the enterprise somewhere around gate 38. They were at the final stages of friendly-drunkenness, where you confess bizarre secrets to total strangers, but nothing gets British people in a fighting frenzy like raucous signing and beers every three minutes. I’m also almost positive we were being followed by security by the time I left. I assume they didn’t make it to gate 88, let alone the Canaries, which is a shame because they would have enjoyed themselves. This also dovetails into what I plan on writing about soon in my next installment, which is the love, passion and glory that is English Football.
I don’t remember anything.
Just kidding. I actually developed a bit of a stomach bug so I didn’t get to experience too much of Amsterdam, what with being bedridden for over 24 hours. On the other hand I single handedly bankrupted the Holland Casino. I’m presuming the loss of 730 euros would bankrupt the Holland Casino. When I was walking through Amsterdam all I could think of was a quote by Richard Dawkins, “if you’re too open-minded your brain falls out.” I couldn’t help feeling that way about the people of Amsterdam. I wanna congratulate them for being so liberal and progressive. But, I just can’t. I come away feeling like the whole thing might be a mistake. And I think the Dutch are starting to feel that way too. The laws regarding drugs and prostitution in Amsterdam have been slowly but steadily rolled back over the past decade, and it looks like they’ll be clamping down even more in the future. This was the first city I traveled to, besides London, that seemed wealthy to me. In a lot of ways it felt even more wealthy. The people there clearly tried to give the impression of wealth, judging by their obnoxious clothing. But, to be fair, they’re hard-working and ambitious, and as the aging generation of ex-hippies fades away I can’t help thinking all these young professionals are gonna try to do away with all the red-light district craziness. A city can’t be taken seriously on the world stage if it sanctions sixteen year old girls becoming prostitutes, can it? If I were from Amsterdam I would hate my city’s laws. They probably account for a lot of the money coming into the city, so maybe I would tolerate it, but it would be tough watching hordes of potheads desecrate my home every weekend, littering in my beautiful canals and covering my scenic streets and plazas in a thick carpet of urine and Doritos wrappers. What holds me back from feeling really sympathetic towards the people of Amsterdam is the fact that they are all such tools. I used to joke around that I hated Dutch people, but I’d never actually met any, they just seemed silly with their windmills and wooden clogs. But it turns out to be true, I hate Dutch people (or at least the people of Amsterdam). They all have perfectly coiffed hair, gleaming with product, their skin shines like a poorly made wax statue because of all the moisturizers and lotions they use and their clothes are in much the same vain. Going out to a bar or club made me think of being at bar mitzvah, all the Dutch people flirt like seventh graders, sending little groups of scouts from one side of the room to the other to test the waters, I imagine they all had notes that asked the girls if, “you like me or maybe wanna dance?” Bar mitzvahs are funny for this reason, but what’s comical and endearing in a 13 year old is downright pitiful for a group of 20 somethings. To sum it up, you should go to Amsterdam, it’s an experience, and it does have some great museums and all that if you don’t want to leave thinking all you did was turn your brain into sludge, but come with friends and ignore the natives.
Next trip, the Canary Islands….
……………………………………………..
Sorry bout that, I got lost daydreaming about Las Gran Canarias. Even at this time of year, which is far from their peak, the sun blazes down and hordes of Germans come to enjoy some overpriced Heinekens by “el lago” (one of the giant pools at my resort). I should say that this was a weekend I spent well outside of my price range, which is a great thing to do every once in a while, even though it means I’ll be training through Europe for two and a half weeks in April without ever paying for accommodation. Hmmm…should be interesting. But the canaries are incredible. They’re volcanic islands so the resorts, or at least my resort, imports fake sand to make people feel more comfortable. I wouldn’t mind the black silty stuff their more familiar with, the fake sand feels like walking on Legos.
Living in London for only a few months has already changed the way I feel about the sun, like it’s water in the desert. You forget for some people it’s not a precious commodity. And it astounds me how the sun could be however many millions of miles away from Earth and yet I could fly south for a few hours and it feels like it’s sitting on top of my head. It’s a shame I can’t really appreciate just lying in the sun, since I start to crisp after about half an hour. In fact, I’m so embarrassingly susceptible to sunburn that when I don’t apply suntan lotion evenly, which I never do, I burn in strange layers and blotches. Ugh…someday I’ll be tan (you have to imagine me saying that while sitting at my window, looking out at the stars, and sounding like Pinocchio). Also, the canaries, unlike, say, Amsterdam, which also relies heavily on tourism to bring in cash (probably not as much as the canaries, which is essentially just one, giant string of resorts) is full of genuinely friendly people. They love you, love that you come to visit their island and love that you’ll pay 8 euros for a “mojito” that’s nothing more than 2 shots of rum, a sprig of mint and a cupful of ice.
One funny anecdote though: when I got to the Madrid airport I was supposed to have just an hour’s wait and then connect to the Canaries. However, unbeknownst to us, they had changed the flight, pushing it back almost 5 hours. I, being American, went all over the airport trying to find people to talk to as if I could bitch and moan enough to make an airplane arrive on time. The English people on the plane who were also going to the islands, and there happened to be several other 20 something year old guys, decided to pub crawl the airport. There are 90 gates, and every 3 has it’s own little area with a tv, seating, small shops and, most importantly, a bar of some sort. Our flight took off from gate 88. Yeah. I met up with them at gates 10-12, and by gate 22 we’re all cruising down the automatic walkways singing football songs (two of the four guys were Arsenal fans. Go Gunners.) I’m not sure exactly what happened to them. I picked up a seat on an earlier flight and abandoned the enterprise somewhere around gate 38. They were at the final stages of friendly-drunkenness, where you confess bizarre secrets to total strangers, but nothing gets British people in a fighting frenzy like raucous signing and beers every three minutes. I’m also almost positive we were being followed by security by the time I left. I assume they didn’t make it to gate 88, let alone the Canaries, which is a shame because they would have enjoyed themselves. This also dovetails into what I plan on writing about soon in my next installment, which is the love, passion and glory that is English Football.
Wednesday, 24 February 2010
Behind Enemy Lines: Travels Across the Channel.
Ok. Sorry it’s been so long, I’ve been traveling and having technical difficulties. Let me just say that the geniuses at an English Genius Bar don’t compare to the good ol’ freedom-loving geniuses at an American Apple store. But anyways, Berlin…
Berlin is not a pretty city. The dirty snow fades imperceptibly into the bland, concrete buildings, which in turn becomes the grayish white cloud and fog that perpetually hover above the city. The boundaries between Earth, buildings and sky merge into a sort of constant off-white haze. It might not always have been this way. Perhaps once upon a time the dirty snow and cloudy sky were separated by rows of beautiful structures, but those days are gone. This is becoming sort of a common thread in my travels around Europe. Clinging to the buildings and monuments that survived World War II. And Berlin, as one might expect, suffered worse than most cities in this regard. The city is littered with the half-built husks of buildings, apparently all abandoned, with ancient scaffolding still hanging, or falling, from their sides. It’s for the best anyways, since even if the construction on these buildings were completed it wouldn’t look any more attractive. It would just look like giants dropped rows and rows of huge cinder blocks on the city. The city’s tourist attractions didn’t fare much better. Checkpoint Charlie, the infamous crossing point between the USSR controlled half of Berlin and the half maintained by the Western powers, is now a clearly fake, plastic imitation: with people dressed like soldiers standing in front of it, not even bothering to clear off the candy wrappers and McDonald’s coffee cups, trying to sucker Asian tourists into taking pictures with them for a couple euros. One of the cities main attractions, and tallest structure, is the Berlin television tower. You know you’re in pretty bad shape when your tallest building and one of your main tourist attractions is a glorified antenna. The only museum we went to was the Jewish History Museum. This is not to be confused with the Berlin Holocaust Museum, which I hear is poignant and powerful. This museum was not. The first part of the museum has a few Jewish artifacts, letters written from hiding, tools, little suitcases, and along the wall is written all the different cities around the globe where Jewish people fled. Ok, a decent start. Then all of a sudden you go into a cold, dark room, which is supposed to symbolize the plight of the Jews in Berlin. This I found almost comically foolish. “Wow after spending ten seconds in a kind of cold, dark, sort of uncomfortable room I know exactly how it felt to be a Jew living in the heart of Germany from 1935-1945.” I was willing to forgive this as well. As an English major, and a human being, I believe quite strongly in the power of metaphors. Metaphors are not just literary devices but also a means to help people understand a foreign idea, and are used by people such as Darwin, Adam Smith and Einstein just as effectively as Dickens, Mark Twain and Shakespeare (ok…maybe not as effectively as Shakespeare). But the point here is that the Holocaust is not just a foreign idea, it’s unfathomable. It is one of the few things for which the power of language and metaphor fall flat. Which is why I was willing to forgive the museum for this foolishness. It’s understandable that the museum would try and include some metaphor like this and inevitable that it would fail since any metaphor attempting to convey the situation of the victims of the Holocaust is bound to be hollow and inadequate. Unfortunately, it all goes downhill from there. After this the museum continues with a basically chronological overview of Jews in Germany throughout the past half millennium. I wandered through about a floor and a half without encountering any sign of World War II or mention of the Holocaust or concentration camps, placating myself the entire time by saying, “it’s ok, it is a Jewish history museum, not specifically a Holocaust museum, they’re probably building up to it.” They weren’t. I learn about the Jews in Berlin in the 1920’s and the early 1930’s, of the ever-increasing fear and desire to flee. Then, all of a sudden, I’m in the 1950’s learning about the post-war Jewish situation in Germany and dealing with the aftermath. I look around, trying to make eye contact with the other people in the museum, who all look appropriately grave, and can’t help but laugh. There was an entire room dedicated to some Jewish man named Samuel Bloch or something who collected and categorized fish from the Berlin river system, but they skip the Holocaust?! The others who I’m traveling with react the same way. We have a lot of fun climbing through a little fake tunnel, at the end of which you can stick your head through a hole and take a novelty picture of yourself as a holocaust child. There’s also a game, reminiscent of the beginning of Oregon Trail when you have a certain amount of space and have to decide what you think will be best to store in your wagon, but instead you’re packing for the Holocaust. Also, one of the options was a mobile phone. No joke. The end of the museum, the very final room, has a sign that says “You can be German and Jewish” and a giant Christmas tree. I couldn’t make that up. It would be strange to see a Christmas tree anywhere in mid-February, let alone a Jewish history museum. Being generous I’d say the museum was uninformative and dull, but being honest I was kind of offended. And I’m not easily offended, I consider myself Jewish only in the sense that I have Jewish family members, and from a religious standpoint I’m completely indifferent. But this seemed to me like a mix between stupidity and poorly masked bigotry.
I realize upon rereading what I have so far that I’ve given an unfair representation of Berlin. I really enjoyed Berlin. Loved it, in fact. I remember getting off the plane to discover my phone was dead, I didn’t know where in the city my hostal was (I couldn’t even remember the name of it) and I had no idea where to go to meet people. I started to panic a little. Then this little German baby looked over a seat in front of me and started to make faces. Obviously I made faces back. Obviously the kid starts laughing. And that was it, I’d fallen in love with Berlin. It might just have been that it was the first place I’d ever gone alone, really alone, where I couldn’t understand people and people couldn’t understand me. There’s something really wonderful about that. There in front of me was a little, German baby breaking into little, German giggles. How could I hate this place? Also, the more you see of Berlin the more you realize that the museums, the tourist stops, all that crap, are not in any way the real places of culture. For instance, if somebody was going to New York you could tell them to visit the Guggenheim or Moma, walk through Central Park, maybe go to the theatre. If I met someone going to Berlin I’d say fuck the museums, skip anything you see in a tourist book, and just walk around for a while. Duck into dark, strange buildings and alleyways, under bridges, places that in any other city you’d conscientiously avoid. The corpse-like shells of buildings, colorless skyline and poorly executed cultural exhibits are really a Potemkin village. Like if you saw a man who looked like he was an inch away from death but in fact he had a young, vigorous mind and a heart pumping like Lance Armstrong. The city is full of small, eerie galleries with Germans wielding blowtorches and paint brushes turning anything they can get their hands on into small, eerie pieces of really cool art. And, if you can, try and talk to the young people doing this, because even though people speaking German always sound like they’re about to bite your head off, they’re generally nice and have really cool stories. It’s one of the few places where a group of people who many would consider petty criminals are the ones driving the city forward intellectually, culturally and artistically. It reminded me in that way of Brooklyn’s ascension over Manhattan as the “it” borough in NYC. Inside these drab and dreary buildings every inch of space is covered by colorful, bursting with energy, ever-changing graffiti that rival the Arab mosaics of the Alhambra or the stained glass windows of any Cathedral. At night you walk along streets that seem hauntingly silent, and then the doors to one of the brutish cement structures is flung open, vomiting forth a hundred green and red lasers that paint the snow and night sky and the uberbass sound of German house music. The key to understanding Berlin is not to be sad or unimpressed by the fact that it’s all a muted shade of white, but to think of the city as a giant blank canvas. It’s clearly what the Berliners do, each one wielding a spray can. If only the German people could discover a sense of humor, they’d have the most popular country on the planet.
Berlin is not a pretty city. The dirty snow fades imperceptibly into the bland, concrete buildings, which in turn becomes the grayish white cloud and fog that perpetually hover above the city. The boundaries between Earth, buildings and sky merge into a sort of constant off-white haze. It might not always have been this way. Perhaps once upon a time the dirty snow and cloudy sky were separated by rows of beautiful structures, but those days are gone. This is becoming sort of a common thread in my travels around Europe. Clinging to the buildings and monuments that survived World War II. And Berlin, as one might expect, suffered worse than most cities in this regard. The city is littered with the half-built husks of buildings, apparently all abandoned, with ancient scaffolding still hanging, or falling, from their sides. It’s for the best anyways, since even if the construction on these buildings were completed it wouldn’t look any more attractive. It would just look like giants dropped rows and rows of huge cinder blocks on the city. The city’s tourist attractions didn’t fare much better. Checkpoint Charlie, the infamous crossing point between the USSR controlled half of Berlin and the half maintained by the Western powers, is now a clearly fake, plastic imitation: with people dressed like soldiers standing in front of it, not even bothering to clear off the candy wrappers and McDonald’s coffee cups, trying to sucker Asian tourists into taking pictures with them for a couple euros. One of the cities main attractions, and tallest structure, is the Berlin television tower. You know you’re in pretty bad shape when your tallest building and one of your main tourist attractions is a glorified antenna. The only museum we went to was the Jewish History Museum. This is not to be confused with the Berlin Holocaust Museum, which I hear is poignant and powerful. This museum was not. The first part of the museum has a few Jewish artifacts, letters written from hiding, tools, little suitcases, and along the wall is written all the different cities around the globe where Jewish people fled. Ok, a decent start. Then all of a sudden you go into a cold, dark room, which is supposed to symbolize the plight of the Jews in Berlin. This I found almost comically foolish. “Wow after spending ten seconds in a kind of cold, dark, sort of uncomfortable room I know exactly how it felt to be a Jew living in the heart of Germany from 1935-1945.” I was willing to forgive this as well. As an English major, and a human being, I believe quite strongly in the power of metaphors. Metaphors are not just literary devices but also a means to help people understand a foreign idea, and are used by people such as Darwin, Adam Smith and Einstein just as effectively as Dickens, Mark Twain and Shakespeare (ok…maybe not as effectively as Shakespeare). But the point here is that the Holocaust is not just a foreign idea, it’s unfathomable. It is one of the few things for which the power of language and metaphor fall flat. Which is why I was willing to forgive the museum for this foolishness. It’s understandable that the museum would try and include some metaphor like this and inevitable that it would fail since any metaphor attempting to convey the situation of the victims of the Holocaust is bound to be hollow and inadequate. Unfortunately, it all goes downhill from there. After this the museum continues with a basically chronological overview of Jews in Germany throughout the past half millennium. I wandered through about a floor and a half without encountering any sign of World War II or mention of the Holocaust or concentration camps, placating myself the entire time by saying, “it’s ok, it is a Jewish history museum, not specifically a Holocaust museum, they’re probably building up to it.” They weren’t. I learn about the Jews in Berlin in the 1920’s and the early 1930’s, of the ever-increasing fear and desire to flee. Then, all of a sudden, I’m in the 1950’s learning about the post-war Jewish situation in Germany and dealing with the aftermath. I look around, trying to make eye contact with the other people in the museum, who all look appropriately grave, and can’t help but laugh. There was an entire room dedicated to some Jewish man named Samuel Bloch or something who collected and categorized fish from the Berlin river system, but they skip the Holocaust?! The others who I’m traveling with react the same way. We have a lot of fun climbing through a little fake tunnel, at the end of which you can stick your head through a hole and take a novelty picture of yourself as a holocaust child. There’s also a game, reminiscent of the beginning of Oregon Trail when you have a certain amount of space and have to decide what you think will be best to store in your wagon, but instead you’re packing for the Holocaust. Also, one of the options was a mobile phone. No joke. The end of the museum, the very final room, has a sign that says “You can be German and Jewish” and a giant Christmas tree. I couldn’t make that up. It would be strange to see a Christmas tree anywhere in mid-February, let alone a Jewish history museum. Being generous I’d say the museum was uninformative and dull, but being honest I was kind of offended. And I’m not easily offended, I consider myself Jewish only in the sense that I have Jewish family members, and from a religious standpoint I’m completely indifferent. But this seemed to me like a mix between stupidity and poorly masked bigotry.
I realize upon rereading what I have so far that I’ve given an unfair representation of Berlin. I really enjoyed Berlin. Loved it, in fact. I remember getting off the plane to discover my phone was dead, I didn’t know where in the city my hostal was (I couldn’t even remember the name of it) and I had no idea where to go to meet people. I started to panic a little. Then this little German baby looked over a seat in front of me and started to make faces. Obviously I made faces back. Obviously the kid starts laughing. And that was it, I’d fallen in love with Berlin. It might just have been that it was the first place I’d ever gone alone, really alone, where I couldn’t understand people and people couldn’t understand me. There’s something really wonderful about that. There in front of me was a little, German baby breaking into little, German giggles. How could I hate this place? Also, the more you see of Berlin the more you realize that the museums, the tourist stops, all that crap, are not in any way the real places of culture. For instance, if somebody was going to New York you could tell them to visit the Guggenheim or Moma, walk through Central Park, maybe go to the theatre. If I met someone going to Berlin I’d say fuck the museums, skip anything you see in a tourist book, and just walk around for a while. Duck into dark, strange buildings and alleyways, under bridges, places that in any other city you’d conscientiously avoid. The corpse-like shells of buildings, colorless skyline and poorly executed cultural exhibits are really a Potemkin village. Like if you saw a man who looked like he was an inch away from death but in fact he had a young, vigorous mind and a heart pumping like Lance Armstrong. The city is full of small, eerie galleries with Germans wielding blowtorches and paint brushes turning anything they can get their hands on into small, eerie pieces of really cool art. And, if you can, try and talk to the young people doing this, because even though people speaking German always sound like they’re about to bite your head off, they’re generally nice and have really cool stories. It’s one of the few places where a group of people who many would consider petty criminals are the ones driving the city forward intellectually, culturally and artistically. It reminded me in that way of Brooklyn’s ascension over Manhattan as the “it” borough in NYC. Inside these drab and dreary buildings every inch of space is covered by colorful, bursting with energy, ever-changing graffiti that rival the Arab mosaics of the Alhambra or the stained glass windows of any Cathedral. At night you walk along streets that seem hauntingly silent, and then the doors to one of the brutish cement structures is flung open, vomiting forth a hundred green and red lasers that paint the snow and night sky and the uberbass sound of German house music. The key to understanding Berlin is not to be sad or unimpressed by the fact that it’s all a muted shade of white, but to think of the city as a giant blank canvas. It’s clearly what the Berliners do, each one wielding a spray can. If only the German people could discover a sense of humor, they’d have the most popular country on the planet.
Saturday, 30 January 2010
English pleasures are like English sauces: simple and, at first, intolerable.
There have been a number of things that confused me when I first got to England, and which I would like to forewarn other Americans of before they travel here.
Some things you just have to get used to. For instance, kids aged 18-22 in London party hardest Monday-Thursday and relax more on the weekend. I had heard this from a bunch of English kids and people who were here first semester but it goes against so many of my deeply held convictions that I refused to believe it. But it’s true. Clubs have student discounts during the week, and kids go where the cheap cover charges are. On Saturdays it isn’t unheard of to have a cover charge of 15-20 pounds (POUNDS! That’s 25-35 dollars!). It’s not really the students’ choice, we’re handcuffed by our wallets. I think this is why it took me so long to adjust to the sleep pattern, English kids rest on different days.
Also, sports. In America people like to watch sports to see mammoth superhumans perform acts of physical prowess that we mere mortals could only dream of (i.e. Lebron James). With the exception of football/soccer, English sports tend to have no regard for athleticism. A good analogy would be the American sports that are becoming more popular in London. The NFL has repeatedly tried to entice English fans, having staged games here for the past couple years. These have been utter failures. English people I ask assure me those games are a joke, the only people who go are given tickets or are ex-pat Americans. But do you know what sport is catching on? Bowling. That’s right, mofo, BOWLING. At first this is mind-boggling. I mean, I love bowling, I proudly bowled competitively through high school, me and a couple of my friends were captains of the team my senior year, but how could a culture embrace a sport like bowling while giving the cold shoulder to something as awesomealicious as (American) football. I mean, darts is on television here more than Friends and Seinfeld combined in America. It took me a while to understand how these people could be so into darts. The reason behind all this occurred to me the other day. English people don’t really care about the sport that’s going on: they’re just trying to get drunk. Again, with the sole exception of football, which they still do get hammered while watching. But the other sports, even rugby, which requires an immense amount of athleticism, are just an excuse to drink. Somebody was trying to explain cricket to me and I just could not grasp what the fuck he was talking about, it sounded so dumb. Because it is sooooo dumb. But then he stopped and said something really enlightening, “no, man, you’re going about it all wrong, you’re focusing on the runs and wickets and overs, when you should be focusing on the fact that you’re out there all Sunday afternoon in the sunshine gettin’ rounded out (British equivalent of nicely drunk).” This changed everything for me. He’s right, every British sport is just a way for people to get together and get cheerfully drunk. Thus the popularity of stuff like bowling, darts and snooker, which are admittedly not sports at all. They like games with convenient bars where you don’t have to exert yourself.
And, finally, how are English people so well-informed????!!!! When I tell people I’m from New York they start to talk about Giuliani’s lasting impact on crime in New York City, ask about Bloomberg (as if he comes to Thanksgiving) and want to know how people felt about “the whole Spitzer thing.” They ask if I think prop 8 is going to make a comeback. They wanna know about recent Supreme Court rulings. They’re more informed on American Politics than the vast majority of Americans. This alone wouldn’t surprise me, I know better than anyone that the vast majority of Americans are blithering idiots. But the thing is, it took me forever to realize how the English came to know so much. Their newspapers are embarrassing, more like a mix between grocery store checkout line celebrity gossip rags and softcore porn than anything resembling news. The reason it took me so long to figure out was that I didn’t watch any English television until this past week. What it all comes down to is the fact that ENGLISH PEOPLE HAVE NO CONCEPT OF ENTERTAINMENT. Take, for example, the Monty Python, probably England’s most revered Comedy troupe. For a long time I thought they were the funniest group in the world. I was wrong. Dead wrong. I thought that because all I ever saw was the “best of” of Monty Python. That’s all anyone sees really. Have you ever watched an actual episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus? It’s awful. Nearly unwatchable. There’s a reason they play it at 4 am on public access, that’s where it belongs. From seasons upon seasons worth of footage they can pull together an episode’s worth of truly hysterical sketches. Compare that with something like the Chappelle Show, an American sketch comedy show, which is funny every time and shit-your-pants funny 50 percent of the time – I know there are the rare gems, people like Sacha Baron Cohen and Eddie Izzard, that are the exceptions to the rule, but even they had to come to America before achieving their potential. And the truth of the matter is Monty Python is good by English television standards, that’s why they love it. Think about that. Most English tv wouldn’t cut it even as the unseen graveyard-shift of American public access programming. No wonder they’re still waiting patiently for the third season of the OC to premier here. And I know this all seems like a digression, but it’s not. On multiple occasions I’ve seen English kids flick through the channels once, then twice, and usually another time after that, before reluctantly settling for BBC. It’s not that they care more about what’s going on in the world, the news is just the most exciting thing on tv! I’d be interested to see what happens as more and more popular American programs cross the pond and start to take off in England. It might not be our nuclear bombs or fast food that ends up destroying the world, it could be our knack for creating entertaining diversions.
Some things you just have to get used to. For instance, kids aged 18-22 in London party hardest Monday-Thursday and relax more on the weekend. I had heard this from a bunch of English kids and people who were here first semester but it goes against so many of my deeply held convictions that I refused to believe it. But it’s true. Clubs have student discounts during the week, and kids go where the cheap cover charges are. On Saturdays it isn’t unheard of to have a cover charge of 15-20 pounds (POUNDS! That’s 25-35 dollars!). It’s not really the students’ choice, we’re handcuffed by our wallets. I think this is why it took me so long to adjust to the sleep pattern, English kids rest on different days.
Also, sports. In America people like to watch sports to see mammoth superhumans perform acts of physical prowess that we mere mortals could only dream of (i.e. Lebron James). With the exception of football/soccer, English sports tend to have no regard for athleticism. A good analogy would be the American sports that are becoming more popular in London. The NFL has repeatedly tried to entice English fans, having staged games here for the past couple years. These have been utter failures. English people I ask assure me those games are a joke, the only people who go are given tickets or are ex-pat Americans. But do you know what sport is catching on? Bowling. That’s right, mofo, BOWLING. At first this is mind-boggling. I mean, I love bowling, I proudly bowled competitively through high school, me and a couple of my friends were captains of the team my senior year, but how could a culture embrace a sport like bowling while giving the cold shoulder to something as awesomealicious as (American) football. I mean, darts is on television here more than Friends and Seinfeld combined in America. It took me a while to understand how these people could be so into darts. The reason behind all this occurred to me the other day. English people don’t really care about the sport that’s going on: they’re just trying to get drunk. Again, with the sole exception of football, which they still do get hammered while watching. But the other sports, even rugby, which requires an immense amount of athleticism, are just an excuse to drink. Somebody was trying to explain cricket to me and I just could not grasp what the fuck he was talking about, it sounded so dumb. Because it is sooooo dumb. But then he stopped and said something really enlightening, “no, man, you’re going about it all wrong, you’re focusing on the runs and wickets and overs, when you should be focusing on the fact that you’re out there all Sunday afternoon in the sunshine gettin’ rounded out (British equivalent of nicely drunk).” This changed everything for me. He’s right, every British sport is just a way for people to get together and get cheerfully drunk. Thus the popularity of stuff like bowling, darts and snooker, which are admittedly not sports at all. They like games with convenient bars where you don’t have to exert yourself.
And, finally, how are English people so well-informed????!!!! When I tell people I’m from New York they start to talk about Giuliani’s lasting impact on crime in New York City, ask about Bloomberg (as if he comes to Thanksgiving) and want to know how people felt about “the whole Spitzer thing.” They ask if I think prop 8 is going to make a comeback. They wanna know about recent Supreme Court rulings. They’re more informed on American Politics than the vast majority of Americans. This alone wouldn’t surprise me, I know better than anyone that the vast majority of Americans are blithering idiots. But the thing is, it took me forever to realize how the English came to know so much. Their newspapers are embarrassing, more like a mix between grocery store checkout line celebrity gossip rags and softcore porn than anything resembling news. The reason it took me so long to figure out was that I didn’t watch any English television until this past week. What it all comes down to is the fact that ENGLISH PEOPLE HAVE NO CONCEPT OF ENTERTAINMENT. Take, for example, the Monty Python, probably England’s most revered Comedy troupe. For a long time I thought they were the funniest group in the world. I was wrong. Dead wrong. I thought that because all I ever saw was the “best of” of Monty Python. That’s all anyone sees really. Have you ever watched an actual episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus? It’s awful. Nearly unwatchable. There’s a reason they play it at 4 am on public access, that’s where it belongs. From seasons upon seasons worth of footage they can pull together an episode’s worth of truly hysterical sketches. Compare that with something like the Chappelle Show, an American sketch comedy show, which is funny every time and shit-your-pants funny 50 percent of the time – I know there are the rare gems, people like Sacha Baron Cohen and Eddie Izzard, that are the exceptions to the rule, but even they had to come to America before achieving their potential. And the truth of the matter is Monty Python is good by English television standards, that’s why they love it. Think about that. Most English tv wouldn’t cut it even as the unseen graveyard-shift of American public access programming. No wonder they’re still waiting patiently for the third season of the OC to premier here. And I know this all seems like a digression, but it’s not. On multiple occasions I’ve seen English kids flick through the channels once, then twice, and usually another time after that, before reluctantly settling for BBC. It’s not that they care more about what’s going on in the world, the news is just the most exciting thing on tv! I’d be interested to see what happens as more and more popular American programs cross the pond and start to take off in England. It might not be our nuclear bombs or fast food that ends up destroying the world, it could be our knack for creating entertaining diversions.
Friday, 15 January 2010
The weather outside is frightful...
I normally wouldn’t have two posts back to back, I’m too lazy for that, but this is burning me up inside. London has weathered more difficulties than perhaps any other city on Earth. It is a survivor amongst survivors, one of the pillars of urban human civilization. London has been around long enough to watch the Romans, Vikings, Saxons and Ottomans come and go. It has seen the Christian Church turn from one, unified body into the vast and disparate branches of faith it is today. It has lived through one of the worst fires in human history, sixteen outbreaks of the Plague (amongst other horrible poxes and assorted epidemics), far worse recessions than we currently have, years of back-breaking, stomach-warping rationing, civil wars that make inner city Compton look tame, they were shellacked into rubble by the German Luftwaffe and have probably spent more years at war than America has existed for at all. Any one of these could very legitimately have brought an end to London’s run as a center of international commerce and society. Far lesser woes have brought other cities irrecoverably to their knees. The one thing, I’m sure beyond any shadow of a doubt, that would destroy London is a single, good dump of snow. One stray New England blizzard would permanently wipe London off the face of the Earth. These people DO NOT know how to deal with snow. They react to snow the same way I expect an 8 year old in the middle of the Sahara Desert would, an even mix of fear, awe and a burning desire to go play in the stuff. Or maybe a more apt example would be of a turtle, since at the first crystal flake they check their stores of water and hole up for at least 24 hours. And we’re not talking about a lot of snow. This is the inconsiderate kind of snow that would just frustrate me as a kid, since it would not be enough to play in or get out of school for. But for them, schools close, works out, shops close and public transportation calls an unofficial strike. There are people trying to ski down Primrose Park Hill, the “snow” nothing more than a slushy mix of melted water and mud. Part of the problem is that the country has run out of salt. This is true. Evidently some months ago the British government, staring into the black hole that represents the country’s funds, decided to take a chance and not replenish the nation’s store of salt, testing their luck and hoping they wouldn’t have a white Christmas. Oops. Now they’re having one of the coldest, snowiest winters in recent memory. And there they are, stuck with only enough salt to give one good coating to London’s busiest streets. That might have been enough to get by after the first snowfall, but they have been left helpless to watch the past two mercilessly drown their city, turning every street and sidewalk into a kind of semi-liquid, muddy ice-rink. It’s funny actually, because you’re damn near guaranteed to see one girl wearing boots fall on her ass per day. And according to the BBC (I’m not sure, but it appears to me that they only have one channel?) people have started burning books. Books, evidently, cost less per lb than coal. So old people across the country-side have been snapping up every second hand book they can find and tossing them in the furnace. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere: something about books keeping you warm better than coal? I dunno. Whatevs. I like to see small bookshops make a little money for once. The sky is ominously grey right now. I gotta go check and make sure my water pipes haven’t frozen and I have my requisite 24 bottles of H2O.
Wednesday, 13 January 2010
I never drink water; that's the stuff that rusts pipes.
People here drink a lot. I’m tempted to just leave this blog at that, since it sums up the message pretty succinctly, but I’ll continue with some anecdotes and ramblings because I’m still a little jetlagged and wont fall asleep for another half hour at least. And when I say people here drink a lot, I don’t mean, “whoa, those uni kids can play, like, a bajillion games of flip cup.” This is more of a nation-wide, state-sponsored alcoholism that people just choose not to confront. My dorm is attached to the pre-med campus (which is also a very reputable hospital, Guy’s Hospital, and the ambulance bay ten stories below my window occasionally wakes me up at 4 am, probably with victims of an alcohol related accident) and a bunch of the science-y kids came back from their first day of classes with horror stricken looks. Not because the classes were hard, but because there is a pub attached to the hospital, which the doctors flock to during their breaks and lunch hours. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against someone kicking back with a cold one after a hard day’s labor, but a pub in a hospital sounds like a comically (tragically) bad idea. And when English people drink, they drink. It’s not like the binge culture of American Universities, with the super-intense drinking from 10-12 and then seeing who can make it until the wee hours of the morning, it’s more of a constant deluge. I went to visit my British friend and his group of other Londoners for brunch and they started drinking the moment everyone arrived and didn’t let up until we left at around midnight. With these guys, it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. When they turn sixteen or so (the legal age is 18, but if the drinking laws are universally disregarded by Americans how do you think the far more tolerant limeys are going to respond?) they hit the bottle, and with them it tends to be love at first taste. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out English people are buried with a pint of Carling. But it’s just a different atmosphere. Most of the English kids I’ve hung out with I could probably drink under the table, and I’m a D3 drinker. They wouldn’t last a night at the University of Wisconsin, because they don’t know how to respond to “sprinting” style drinking. They drink massive amounts, but over vast periods of time. Also, there are no drinking games or any sort of peer pressure. They don’t drink kegs of Bud Light, they drink bottles of dark, flavorful beer in a really relaxed way. They drink alcohol the same way they drink tea, it’s more of an appreciation than drinking just to get drunk. I like it, but it takes some getting used to. And I miss pong ☹ It’s not uncommon to see people staggering the streets drunk at 11 o’clock on a Tuesday, but they’re usually foreign (American), and the English give them a chuckle and a wide berth. And damn straight, because it’s funny as hell. Well, it’s 4 a.m. and the ambulance siren is going off. seriously, I wrote that first half at 2:30 then took an hour and a half break to see if it was possible to watch Jersey Shore online in the UK. It isn’t. And now the ambulance is actually going out at 4:07 a.m. I’m gonna test to see if I’m a prophet or just got lucky...the sun will come out tomorrow…the sun will come out tomorrow…the sun will come out tomorrow…
Sunday, 10 January 2010
Post Numero Uno
Well, here I am. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised, but London really is exactly what you expect. After the fifth time someone says “Cheerio chap” or you realize crumpets have their own aisle in a supermarket it becomes clear that London strictly adheres to every stereotype there is. The people here really do drink tea the way most people breathe oxygen. This would all be ok, I don’t mind tea and you can never get enough of a country full of British accents, but the weather’s just what you expect too. The sun rises at 1 pm and sets three hours later, and that’s not even on a bad day. It’s so gray you feel like you’re in a black and white movie sometimes. And even on days when it doesn’t rain everything still manages to be wet and cold. I think the British, Londoners especially, build up a sort of tolerance, and even cheerful acceptance of, what many in America would call painful deprivation. For instance, their tube (underground) is fantastic, it’s comfortable, fast, efficient and only rarely smells like piss, but it also has a tendency to just not work. You’ll be waiting at the platform and they’ll announce that trains on such-and-such a line aren’t working, try again later. They seem to just go along with this in a way that would absolutely not fly in New York City. I mean, this is a group of people who think a real treat is having one or two hard, tasteless (except for a hint of butter) cookies with their tea (no cream, no sugar). They seem to genuinely enjoy their food to be just a bland, bready mush. Except for curry. They love curry. They LOVE curry.
All this being said, I really love it here. I have a great single right near the London Bridge with a fantastic view of the city. At night the buildings light up an incandescent green and blue. I definitely lucked out with housing. London has a lot of character too, in an entirely different way than I’m accustomed to. Unlike the cities I’m more familiar with, London is not based on any grid system or logical organization. It’s clear that this is a place that was around well before the years when people could take courses in city planning at school. The streets are almost never parallel or perpendicular, and streets just tend to turn into different streets without any sign or marker. But that’s part of the charm. The history is strangely tangible, it hangs about the city like the fog. Like in a house where someone died and you feel kind of creeped out when you walk in their bedroom because in a weird way you still feel their presence. London’s like that, just everywhere. You walk down the street and think, “Wow, there were horse-drawn carriages here” or “They use to hang people by the boatload over there.” It might be that the buildings are all old, ornate and stone, but the ghosts of history just seem to hang around everywhere. This is a city unlike any in the United States. It’s a city that suffered through months and years of non-stop bombing in World War 2. Of course there are no visible signs of that now, but you still feel it on a subconscious level. I guess after all that lackluster sweets (somehow they haven’t figured out pretzels should be salted) don’t seem so bad. Maybe it’s just the wind, which whirls through the strange little tunnels and alleyways that London is full of so that no matter what it always feels like it’s blowing directly in your face, but there’s something stoic about the city that rubs off on the people. You don’t think “I haven’t seen the sun in four days, time to start thinking about ending it by jumping in the Thames,” it’s more like, “I hope the sun comes out tomorrow, but it probably wont. Good thing I got this nice, warm scarf. Better have a cuppa tea and a pint.”
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