Saying Good-Bye to the Home-Away-From-Home: In which I reflect on what makes a home and resolve to keep alive my (dis)comfort wherever I live.

On the way home from spring break, my travel buddy and I took a bus from Gatwick airport into London.  For the majority of the ninety minute journey, I had no earthly idea where we were.  English plains and suburbs, while beautiful, all look more or less the same to the untrained foreign eye.  As our bus rolled closer to central London, however, I began to recognize aspects of our surroundings: stations for the London underground; public maps set into pillars upon the sidewalk; red double-decker buses; the River Thames.  I was surprised by the emotions that these familiar sights stirred in me – relief, hope, comfort, contentment . . . the emotions experienced by one returning home.
 
London was never meant to be home.  Before coming here, I had termed this my “vacation semester.”  Sure, I was going to be sleeping, eating, doing schoolwork, and all the normal life stuff while in London.  But more importantly, I was going to be living life to the fullest!  I was going to be visiting each museum, eating at all the pubs, seeing every show currently in the West End, developing a beautiful posh English accent, finally going to Hogwarts, etc, etc.  I wasn’t going to be bothered by the mundane parts of life.
 
I look back at those notions and have to laugh at my past self.  Although I still refer to this as my “vacation semester,” these past four months haven’t just been a vacation, and they never could have been.  These past four months have been part of my life.  I have lived here.  When people live, they don’t just vacation leisurely.  They settle.  They develop habits.  They familiarize themselves with their surroundings.  And this settling, this habituation, this familiarization – this all led to London becoming a place that I identify with.
 
It’s not quite that simple, of course.  I am still acutely aware of my “otherness” wherever I go here, whether because of my accent, my obsession with maps, and/or my inability to keep the many London coins straight. Nonetheless, London is now a place that I am comfortable in.  London is now, and I think always will be, my home-away-from-home.
 
I have developed many comforting routines here, but I have also continually pushed myself into new and uncomfortable territories.  Despite my discomfort interacting with strangers, I have spoken to many strangers and stayed with a host family.  Despite my difficulty with public bus systems, I have become familiar with London buses (or at least a few of the routes).  Despite my firm belief that I am inclined towards the humanities and not the sciences, I took and enjoyed a Psychology class.  Despite my squeamishness, I made it through a haunted-house-type amusement park and through an incredibly gory production of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (and, okay, I did nearly pass out, but I still lived to tell the tale).  Despite my former inability to cook, I have cooked for myself nearly every week and made (mostly) edible things without causing myself serious damage.  Despite my distrust of city streets that have no grid pattern, I have become comfortable both navigating London streets with purpose and allowing myself to become lost amidst all the quiet treasures of this city. 
 
Doing all of these things that scare me certainly has not conquered all my fears.  Rather, doing these things that scare me has made me aware how thrilling and rewarding it can be to push myself into discomfort.  Routines are lovely, soothing things, but discomfort is what allows us to grow.
 
I want to maintain this attitude when I return to both of my other homes (Seattle and NYC, respectively).  I want to keep this comforting sense of familiarity, to enjoy and appreciate the routines of home.  But I also want to keep alive the sense that, even when among the comforts of home, there are still things that can scare and excite me.  I want to remember what my home-away-from-home that is London taught me.

[image of one of the dragon statues that mark off London's boundaries, taken by me]

Tips for London Living: In which I offer some pearls of wisdom for students who want to study abroad in London.

So, fellow NYU student, you want to study abroad in London?  Excellent decision.  Let me offer you a few personal tips for London living:
 
1)      Get a physical map.

 
Yes, GPS systems are wonderful and have helped me out on more than one occasion.  But technology is faulty.  Paper is permanent (well, if it’s laminated – and you do want it laminated, otherwise the rain will have a field day with your paper).  Plus, the streets of London are diagonal and strangely placed, so a lot of GPS systems struggle with how to depict them accurately.
 
2)      When looking at a bus sign, if the line is colored black (and the other side is colored white), that means the bus is going in the direction of the black line.  Cross the street if you need a bus going the other direction.
 
This might seem like a fairly ‘duh’ tip, but, well, it took me a while to figure this out.
 
3)      Timberyard Coffee House on Old Street is a fantastic place to study.
 
You can literally camp out all day with schoolwork and they don’t mind whatsoever.  Also their drinks are delicious and, while not “cheap,” they are cheap considering the quality of taste and of service.
 
4)      Explore the historically preserved houses.
 
Museums are fantastic, but what I’ve come to love even more are the preserved houses of famous Londoners (or even some people, like Sigmund Freud, who just had their entire house moved from Vienna to London.  No big deal, I guess).  They give you a great sense not only of the particular individual who lived there, but of how people of that era and class lived.
 
5)      Explore by yourself.
 
While doing the touristy things with friends is awesome, you can’t really get a good sense of London until you’ve wandered around by yourself with no particular aim or destination.  In the words of Virginia Woolf, “To walk alone in London is the greatest rest.”
 
6)      London is not New York City.
 
Another phrase that might provoke a ‘duh’ reaction, but this is another thought that I grappled over for a long time.  One of the reasons that I chose London was to avoid a huge cultural shock.  From most of my favorite films/books, I’d gathered that London was basically just a European NYC: both are cosmopolitan and globalized cities, its citizens all speak English, and there are lots of culturally significant places like theatres and museums.  While these statements are all true, they do not capture whatsoever the great differences between these two cities.  While at first I was frustrated by how different the actual London was compared to my fantasy London, I soon began to realize that we travel precisely so we can disturb our misconceptions about foreign places and come to appreciate these places on their own terms.  If you are able to explore and accept London as it is rather than constantly comparing it to NYC, I promise that your frustration will turn instead to love.

[image of me embracing the London life, taken with my camera]

Sustained Attention: In which I attend a theatrical performance and learn something about theatre, travel, and time.

In February, I had my first immersive theatre experience at a play called The Drowned Man.  For those unfamiliar with this type of performance, immersive theatre essentially erases the typical divides between performers and audience members.  The audience is allowed to wander through the performance space and interact with sets, props, and actors.  In the case of The Drowned Man in particular, audience members don full-face masks before entering the performance space of a five-floor warehouse in which approximately thirty actors, each with their own narrative strand, perform.

From the moment that I began watching the many performers interacting in and with the theatre, I was hooked.  The way that each performer reacted so uniquely to the space and to their fellow performers astounded me. 

Within the next three hours, I decided while watching a riveting combination of modern-rodeo dancing and acting, I had to see all the performers.  I had to witness every scene.  I had to find every nook and cranny on each of the five floors.  I had to touch all the props.  I had to figure out how these thirty narrative strands all connected.  And if I was going to do all of this within the three allotted hours (three hours!  Once that had seemed an infinite amount of time for a show, yet now it seemed no more than a breath),  I needed to stop watching this particular scene and get moving onto the other scenes.

But despite my desire to see everything contained within this show, I did not desire to leave my current location.  I wanted to watch the rest of this dance, to explore further the pub set design, to observe the characters’ carefree mannerisms and tangled relationships, to note the lights flashing from yellow to blue, to breathe in the scents of beer and wood paneling.  My choice was pretty simple – stay or go – but I felt stranded by its weight.  I realized that if I went, I would certainly have time to see everything, but I would not have time to experience it – and if I stayed, I would not have nearly enough time to see everything . . . but those things that I did see, I could experience from every angle, with every sense, as complete and unified wholes.

I decided to stay.

This epiphany impacted not just my time at The Drowned Man, but my entire semester in London.  Many times, I was confronted with the choice between trying to see everything (going on a whirlwind day tour of all of London, walking through the entirety of the British or Victoria & Albert museum, food sampling my way through a festival) and trying to sustain my attention on one or two things (touring a single district of London, loitering in two or three rooms at a museum, having a sit-down meal).  It wasn’t until attending The Drowned Man, however, that I was able to articulate these oppositions, or that I was able to realize my preference for the latter. 

It’s easy to bemoan all of the things that I did not and will not do this semester.  But my commitment to maintaining sustained attention for the things I did do has created memories richer in detail and happiness, and I owe that to the theatre.

Who ever said the arts aren’t beneficial to our real lives?

[image via the National Theatre]

My Fair (Stranger) Lady: In which I discuss the Londoner’s willingness to converse with strangers.

I think that I’ve had conversations with more random people during these past four months in London than I ever have during my two and a half years in NYC or my eighteen years in Seattle.  By a conversation, I mean more than an “excuse me” as I bump into someone on the sidewalk, or a “grande latte with skim” to a barista.  I mean an actual exchange of thoughts, whether about our personal lives, popular culture, and/or aspects of England.  People in the other big cities I’ve lived in tend to keep to themselves and their already-established networks.  Here, however, speaking with strangers seems to be not only socially acceptable, but socially desirable.
 
Am I more open to speaking with people than I used to be?  Are Londoners friendlier than New Yorkers and Seattleites?  Is there something about my Americanness that prompts people to strike up conversations?  Is there something about London itself that fills people with the urge to connect with strangers?  I’ve struggled and failed to come up with answers to these questions, but the fact remains that I’ve had many more temporary, but nonetheless meaningful, encounters with strangers here in London than I’ve ever had in my life.
 
One of my favorite chance encounters with a stranger occurred last month at a bus stop.  The stranger, a middle-aged woman with a face framed by blonde locks and with a voice like Audrey Hepburn, opened conversation by complimenting my dress.  I thanked her and was about to tell her where I’d purchased it, but then hesitated, because the dress was from an American store and I’d had enough American-cultural-awkwardness already that week.  The woman, whose name I soon learned was Alice, was nonplussed by my klutzy conversation skills, and continued to talk excitedly to me about how she couldn’t wait to get home and watch some political talk show, because tonight was the debate between so-and-so.  At this point, I decided to stop masquerading as a Brit and admit my foreignness, and so Alice happily informed me about the current English political hullaballoo.  The conversation meandered to our respective moves between England and America, to college degrees, to West End theatre, to marriage advice.  She leaned in close to me as we spoke, as though this talk show were personal information meant for my ears alone; within seconds, I had been taken in as her confidant.  At first, I felt unnerved by her intimate body language and conversation; soon, I felt honored, and took her into my confidence in turn.
 
Our exchange was cut short when my bus arrived, and I haven’t seen my stranger Alice since.  But our random encounter brightened my day considerably, and thinking back on our conversation still makes me smile.  Traveling, after all, is largely about being open to new experiences, even those experiences which may not go any further than a single moment in time.

[[photo of the Knight Bus at the Harry Potter Studios, taken by me. And no, alas, I did not meet my stranger Alice at that particular bus stop.]]

A Riddle of Contradictions: In which I attempt to describe London’s spirit through architecture, local habits, and vegetables.

London is busy but relaxed.  Like any city, London is a hub of activity.  There are more things to do and see than one can possibly fit into a single vacation, maybe even a single lifetime – but goodness knows that this fact doesn’t stop Londoners and tourists alike from trying to do it all.  Yet despite this constant hustle and bustle, London is also the most leisurely city I’ve ever come upon, and I don’t just say that because the tube closes at midnight (which, by the way, is really annoying).  No, I say that because, although Londoners know how to keep busy, they also know how to purposefully relax.  To put down everything and take a break from the continual motion.  As a New Yorker, I find such intentional and extended rests strange, but a pleasant change, too.
 
London is crowded but spread out.  Geographically, London is huge, but the city’s giant scope is often not felt in one’s immediate area.  The buildings are relatively short for an urban environment, and it’s not peculiar at all to wander down empty streets in the middle of the day.
 
London is friendly but reserved.  I’ve lost track of the number of times that a Brit has approached me while I stand on a street corner glaring at my map.  Locals are not only generous with helping lost tourists, but will go out of their way to do so rather than waiting for the tourist to ask them and then grudgingly give directions (as more frequently occurs in NYC).  But this London friendliness is not exuberant; tones and faces remain calm, and to offer more help than needed pushes into the territory of rude.
 
London is the familiar made strange.  Sometimes, for brief moments, I will forget that I am not in America: everyone speaks English; the buildings, although generally squatter and older, resembles NYC’s gorgeous mish-mash of architectural styles; and the weather is more-or-less like the temperamental Seattle weather I grew up with.  But then I remember my location again with a jolt: I have to press floor ‘0’ in an elevator, rather than floor 1, to get to the ground floor; the speaker inside the tube announces in a distinctly British posh accent to ‘mind the gap’ as we step inside instead of to just watch your step; and the plethora of British coins is not only confusing, but very heavy inside my wallet.
 
Does this riddle of contradictions help at all in describing the spirit of place within London?  Hopefully a simile will help.  For me, London’s genius loci, its characteristic atmosphere, is much like mushy peas.  Mushy peas, for those unexposed to this gem from English culture, are essentially mashed potatoes, but with peas instead of potatoes (and no, that’s not the technical definition or recipe, but that’s how I think of them).  It’s an English comfort food, served frequently with pies or fish and chips.  Peas are not a difficult vegetable to acquire in the western world nowadays, but the specific peas required for mushy peas (marrowfat ones) are harder to locate if you’re not in the U.K.  The sight is bright green, not a sickly green, but rather a healthy shade of growth and harvest; the taste is soft, a substance flavored rather than dominated by its vegetables; the smell, too, is soft, a delicate scent of mingled gardens and salts.  Mushy peas do not overwhelm the palate with distinction, but rather comfort with a familiarity that, although strange, is welcome.
 
If you can’t tell, although there are some days when I miss my good ol’ American garden peas, I really do like mushy peas, too.

[image via http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00118/82547106_chips_118500c.jpg]

Woolfian London: In which I attempt to reconcile Virginia Woolf’s London with my London.

Although Virginia Woolf’s London is not even 100 years old, it is still a very different London than the one I’m currently living in.  In The London Scene, Woolf chronicles different aspects of her hometown in six essays that were originally written for Good Housekeeping, taking us everywhere from the cozy home of the London dweller to the hustle of cargo around the Thames. 

It’s hard for me to picture some of the images that Woolf paints so well as being more than images, as being the landscape of a place she lived and of a place I currently live: sail ships dotting the Thames, stray cats wandering the busiest warehouses, or tortoises being sold alongside flowers and shoes at an outdoor market (6, 13, 20).  Am I really wandering the same streets that Woolf wandered?  She only wrote these essays in ’31 – how can so much change in such a relatively short period of time?

Woolf herself, however, provides me with the answer.  In her words, “The charm of modern London is that it is not built to last; it is built to pass” (23).  I struggled over this idea for a little while.  Of course I know that people, and thus cities, change over time, but I am used to thinking of London itself as a historical museum: even though the particular artifacts on display may alter through the years, the structure of the building itself will remain.  

But Woolf, a direct inheritor of the modern world from the old – someone who had seen firsthand the collapse of what were once believed to be permanent structures in the wake of WWI – knows better.  As she witnesses the constant cycle of demolition and creation upon Oxford Street, a garish yet attractive shopping district and neighborhood, she understands that this need to “prov[e]” that “stone and brick” can be made “as transitory as [Londoners’] own desires” is a constant source of not only delight, but of innovation (24).  To constantly demolish and rebuild entirely is a creative act, and a purposeful one, too; London’s contents can be rearranged, but London the city will and does remain.

Not everything that Woolf describes feels as though it arrives from another era.  St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey still stand proud, along with the preserved houses of writers such as Dickens and Keats; Oxford Street is still a great shopping hub; and the Port of London remains a bustle of activity. 

I was particularly struck by how contemporary Woolf’s musings upon government felt.  Woolf expresses concern over the fact that government used to call for great individuals, yet now government merely produces “instruments” to function well within “committees” (61).  The danger, Woolf suggests, is that government has become too much like a machine in which people operate and choose not as they believe, but as the political faction they have been pressed into would like them to believe.  Woolf praises the House of Commons for ushering in a new era of democracy that takes into account commoner voices, democracy that does more than listen to individual aristocrats (62).  Her praise, however, is measured by the worry that the political machine will grow beyond man’s control.  Given the ongoing debates in the western world on the individual versus the society, on the prevalence of divisive political parties, etc, her words could not feel more timely.

[image from Virginia Woolf Society]

Regents Canal: In which I escape from city life, converse with a stranger, and harangue about rude cyclists.

Regents Canal is a hidden gem.  Buried amidst the hustle and bustle of city life, one doesn’t expect to stumble upon a body of water with a pedestrian walkway while one is taking a morning walk through London.  At least, I didn’t expect to stumble upon it.  But that’s exactly what happened two weeks ago.  I left my house with no particular intention, only to become more familiar with my neighborhood, find a new favorite lunch or coffee spot, decide upon my future dream housing complex, etc.  Such intentions were completely derailed when I found Regents Canal. 
 
I was, and continue to be, delighted at my discovery.  Granted, millions of people before me have discovered, indeed created, this place, but it’s a place not often frequented by tourists.  Regents Canal is a wonderful, picturesque break from city life without the same jam-packed feel of, say, Hyde Park or Russell Square (which are lovely too, don’t get me wrong, but often overcrowded).  Boats dot the walls of the canal on either side; tangled vines grow along the walls separating the walkway from the motor traffic; the water gleams not quite blue or green, but instead silver, metallic but soft.
 
Although there are plenty of people always around the canal – pedestrians, bicyclists, joggers, and boaters alike – there don’t appear to be many tourists.  It seems to be a great meeting place; it’s not uncommon to see friends greeting one another for a walk or jog, or even for strangers to strike up conversations with one another. 
 
While on my morning walk, I stopped for a moment on a small landing, gazing out at the water.  As I stood there, a woman I’d never met before approached me, and I was filled with apprehension.  What did she want from me?  I wasn’t in the mood to be hassled.  But she only wanted to know if I knew about the rules for bicyclists on the canal.  I didn’t know, of course, but heartily agreed with her that they were rather annoying (sorry to any bicyclists, but look, when you’re clogging up the whole pavement, don’t give me the dirty look when I don’t immediately jump aside!).  We harangued together about bicyclists, then conversation turned to locations (as it turned out, she went to Barnard College and her father taught at NYU.  Small world), and how we’d both ended up in our respective cities.  It wasn’t a particularly long exchange, and we didn’t even trade names, but I walked away from both her and the canal feeling at ease.  Rejuvenated by my break by the water, I was ready to reenter the congestion of city life.
 
That in particular surprised me about Regents Canal, the ease with which strangers interact.  In London – in any city I’ve ever been to – strangers generally only chat to one another if they are in want of directions or money.  Here, however, has been carved a different sort of space.  A space without any want but to be there.  Much as I adore living in cities, there’s something comforting about knowing that, whenever urban life starts to swell around me, I can go to a place in which neither location nor people are buried under the city’s weight – even if only for a few moments.