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.

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.

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…

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.”