Habituation: In which I tirade against the cost of London living and combine studying with urban exploring.

“Oh, London!” various friends and family would exclaim in the months leading up to my departure for England.  “How exciting!  Such a beautiful city.”

“Yes, so I have heard!”

And, then, inevitably, they would add, “Very expensive, though.”

And I would laugh and, just as inevitably, rejoin, “Oh, trust me, I’m used to expensive – I’ve lived in NYC for over two years!”

Oh, how ignorant the Anna of two months ago was.

An average pub meal with a drink here is around fifteen pounds.  My weekly grocery run comes to about twenty-two or -three pounds.  A one-way ride on the tube within central London costs two pounds and twenty pence (for comparison, a one-way ride on the NYC subway is two dollars and fifty cents).  A morning tea or afternoon coffee costs two pounds.  My phone plan of 100 minutes, 400 texts, and 1GB data comes to ten pounds per month. 

Now, all of this might sound pretty reasonable at first.  It did to me.  But let’s not forget that a single pound is equivalent to more than a dollar sixty.  So when I get excited about the fact that my £1.95 tea at Costa Coffee is equivalent to my $2 tea at Starbucks, I must correct myself that I’ve actually just paid over $3 for my tea.  Basically, most things in London have the same numerical value as those in NYC, but cost more because of the extra weight (yes, pun intended) of the pound. 

Oh, except the laundry at my dorm is three pounds a load.  There is absolutely no American equivalent to something that outrageous.  Never again will I complain about dollar loads in NYC.  But I will spare you my full-blown harangue about the modern society’s abuse of confused college students.

While I can’t say that I’ve learned to live frugally, I’m getting better at cutting corners.  I’ve started cooking a lot of my meals.  This might not sound like a big deal, but for someone whose biggest culinary accomplishment two months ago was knowing how to scramble eggs, it’s huge.  Even huger is the fact that, despite my many juvenile mistakes (forgetting to wash fruits, neglecting to oil the pan before boiling my rice, attempting to cut root vegetables with a regular knife, etc), I’ve found that I enjoy cooking.  It’s a creative outlet; I now use cooking as a homework break.

On the subject of homework, school dominates a fair portion of my daily routine.  This should not come as a huge surprise to those of you who know what a nerd I am.  Although I don’t feel as though I have an ‘average’ day in this city, my somewhat-average weekday consists of homework in the mornings, class in the afternoons, and theatre in the evening (two of my classes visit theatres semi-regularly). 

To keep myself from becoming a total academic hermit during the semester that I am supposed to be exploring a fantastic European city, I have decided to make my studying an exploration game: I am determined, within the four months of my stay, to find the best café study spot in all of Central London. 

So far, my favorite is Timberyard, a darling place about a mile away from my dorm.  It has everything one could possibly desire from a studying café: plenty of tables, ample outlets, free Wi-Fi, friendly staff who don’t mind if you camp out all day, clean bathrooms, and reasonable prices (well, as reasonable as this stupidly expensive city gets).  They even bring your drinks and food on a tray, accompanied by a bottle of water, and take your empty dishes away when you’ve finished.  If you order tea, they even bring you a little timer so you know how long the leaves have steeped.  I find everything about this place adorable, even (perhaps especially) those bottles of water and tea-steeping-timers. And yes, I am often delighted by the little things in life.

[image of my Timberyard tea, water jug, and tea-steeping-timer, taken by me]

Communication Gaps: In which I share my love for Downton Abbey and am excluded from the special inner circle of Britishness.

Can I be honest?  I didn’t just choose to study at NYU’s London site because of the fantastic architecture, my love for literature/theatre, and my obsession with British accents.  I also chose NYU London because I wanted to study abroad in a place that speaks English. 

My mind spiraled out of control the moment I contemplated choosing a study abroad site where English was not spoken fluently: what if I got lost and couldn’t ask for help? or needed to go to a hospital and couldn’t tell the doctor what was wrong? or needed to find a bathroom and couldn’t remember the word for toilet?  My worries ranged from the mundane to the solemn, so I decided it was best to avoid making those concerns manifest into reality.  I have great respect for those who do choose to live in a place where the language spoken is not their native tongue – but I am not one of those people.

Communication for me in London, however, is not a cakewalk.  Daily, I find myself challenged by slang (it still takes me a second to process that take-away equates with to-go), vocabulary (although cash machine is a more logical name, I still ask confused Englishmen where the nearest ATM is), and pronunciation (don’t get me started on “Lester” Square). 

The biggest communication hurtle is culture.  I never gave it much thought, but much of our daily conversation is shaped by the common knowledge of the particular culture we live in.  This fact first became clear to me last Friday evening when I attended The Only Way Is Downton, a theatrical parody of the television show called Downton Abbey. 

I knew from the moment the lights went down that I had made a brilliant purchase.  The single performer (who also wrote the script for the show) knew the television show well, as it was riddled with references – not to mention his impressions of the rather large cast were both hysterically funny and startlingly accurate.

As the show went on, however, the parody extended beyond merely Downton to poke fun at a wider array of British culture: reality television shows, Olympic medal winners, and “Oxbridge” students, to name a few.  While I could grasp the gist of some jokes, the particulars went over my head.  While the entire audience roared with laughter at a crack about some Olympic diver’s Twitter account or the details of Dame Maggie Smith’s bedroom life, I could only manage a weak grin as I tried and failed to mentally dissect the joke inside my suddenly-feeble-seeming American brain.  What is so funny?  I longed to cry out.  Or, more appropriately, Don’t keep me out of the special inner circle, guys!  I want to laugh, too! 

At first, I kept a mental list of jokes that I wanted to Google later, but the list became too extensive for me to recall.  Although I was upset for not remembering later on, I don’t know if it would have mattered even if I had: the moment had passed.  And even if someone did explain the references to me, there’s a high chance I would still not find the jokes funny, given it is not cultural knowledge that I am intimately familiar with. 

Besides, there is value at times to being outside the inner circle, to have no choice but to watch and observe.  Perhaps I did not, and still do not, understand why the collective-audience-minus-myself found the subject of that Olympic guy’s Twitter so hysterical – but I do now understand that this cultural knowledge binds them together, even if such a bond is normally unseen.  I do now understand that, as much as I embrace Downton and all the other artifacts that embody “Britishness” as I understand it, there will always be a divide between my understanding and the reality.  I do now understand that, although Brits and Americans speak the same language by all technicalities, the ways we communicate amongst ourselves are vastly different, and it is this communication gap that is part of why going abroad so intriguing.

But if someone does want to explain the humor of that Olympic medalist’s Tweets to me, I would not be opposed.

Tears of Anger, Tears of Joy: In which I learn to read maps, to trust people more, and to always have a loaded Oyster card.

On the first night of Hanukkah, when I opened a gift from my mother, I wanted to cry.  And not tears of joy, mind you, but rather tears of fear and bewilderment and anger.

The gift was a map of Central London compacted into seven doubled-sided panels.  It is incredibly detailed, filled with all the streets and landmarks, and it is also functional (it comes laminated, an essential feature when one must battle that force known as the London rain).

Why, then, did I want to cry?  Because, for the first time, I realized that London is not NYC.  I had been excited to explore a new city, but I’d assumed there would be security to my explorations.  I did not think I would ever find my way back home without the comfort of that logical grid pattern.

A month later, when I had been in London for a little over a week, I wanted to cry again.  And this time, they were tears of joy. 

My laminated map had become, and continues to be, among my dearest possessions.  It is something that I pack with me everywhere I go, as automatically as I pack up my wallet.  Never before have I understood the importance of maps.  As someone weaned off MapQuest and GPSs, I didn’t find them necessary.  It was easier to ask Google, so why would I plot out a route myself?  I realize now that, due to this map aversion, I never grasped the interconnections of a place.  It is one thing to know by heart a certain route to destination A and another for destination B; it is entirely another to know how to get between the two without returning to your original departure point.  For the first time, I am starting to do the latter, and it’s thrilling.

All that said, while it is not impossible to teach an old dog new tricks, it is – without question – difficult.  Getting lost is not always a time of proudly navigating the streets with my friend the map.  Sometimes, I really just want to get home and yet I cannot. 

Last Thursday, because of a tube strike, I had to take a bus home from the National Theatre.  Fine.  I wanted to get better at the bus system, anyhow.  Unfortunately, due to a series of miscalculations, I ended up taking several buses that were either the wrong route or direction.  By the time the clock struck midnight and I’d been riding buses for over ninety minutes, I was near tears.  I could not find where I was on my trusty map, and I did not have enough money left on my transportation card to catch another bus home (buses do not accept cash).

When I finally confided in my current bus driver how lost I was, I felt ridiculed when he exclaimed that where I wanted to go was in the opposite direction.  Gee, thanks for the novel information.  I clearly already knew I was lost, given that I had a useless smart phone in one hand and an equally useless map in the other, not to mention the rising tears in my eyes that I was trying to prevent from falling – did he have to rub it in that I was totally pathetic?

So I was completely surprised when he stopped his bus, marched into the road, and hailed another bus for me.  I think I thanked him, but I was so floored that I honestly don’t remember if I did.  This other bus driver, when I (tearfully) asked if I could pay in cash, said yes. 

And so, more than two hours later for what should have been a twenty minute journey, I finally made it home thanks purely to the kindness of strangers. 

As a pessimist, that is a surprising thing to find myself typing.  Yet I am glad to be typing it.  Because a place – any place, every place – is more than a single route from point A to point B.  And while there’s nothing wrong with having that route, it never hurts to learn the many other possible routes, or to meet the people who dwell alongside them.

[image of my friend the map, taken by me. And yes, I probably should give him a proper name.]

Accompanied By Myself: Discarding the rose-colored glasses

Even when travelling to new and exotic lands, the banal cannot be avoided.  Last week, I woke up at five in the morning nearly every day, and while I had several lovely strolls through the early London fog, I could only at times jealously dwell upon my snoozing roommate who seemed not to suffer from insomnia as I did.  On Friday, as I went on a walking tour around Buckingham Palace, I continually chided myself for having only shelled out five pounds instead of fifteen on an umbrella, for if I’d paid more I surely would not now be wandering around looking like a drunken cat.  Sunday morning, as I took in the delightful sounds and tastes of the Chinese New Year, I was nearly crowd-crushed several times and found myself silently cussing out the entire human race (and cussing out myself for being a part of said human race and not, say, the drunken cat that I already looked like several days ago).  Yesterday evening, as I watched Simon Russell Beale give an outstanding performance in the National Theatre’s King Lear, I continuously wondered when the next musical interlude would break through the long dialogue – not because I wasn’t loving the show, but because I’d come down with a cold and needed to blow my nose constantly but did not desire to disturb the communal silence of the theatre.  And the list goes on.
 
Even though I logically know that my insomnia, my penny-pinching tendencies, my dislike of large crowds, and my weak immune system accompany me wherever I go, I didn’t think about these things when I first started contemplating my time in London (I mean, who does?).  Instead, I fantasized about visiting all of the archaic cathedrals, finding every single free museum, trying all varieties of English ale, crashing through Platform 9 ¾ and finally attending Hogwarts (don’t laugh), and seeing every single West End and Off-West End show currently running.
 
And while I have done, or have started to do, all of the above, I have also been – for better or worse – accompanied by myself wherever I go.
 
It would be easy for me at this point to write that, oh, well, such is the experience of traveling, and from now on I will embrace both the commonplace and the joy of my time abroad.  But I don’t want to try and delude myself that it’s that easy.  I don’t think it’s ever possible to fully embrace the mundane.   What I believe is possible is to experience both the mundane and the extraordinary.  Because of my insomnia – while it is hardly enjoyable to fall asleep at half past one in the morning only to wake up four hours later – I have some novel memories of wandering London in the early morn, headache behind my nose and wonder in my eyes.  Because of my broken umbrella and the subsequent downpour, I got completely drenched last Friday, and I’m not going to pretend that I enjoyed the experience – but at least I know now to invest in a better umbrella, and besides, now I can say I’ve been in a proper London rainstorm. 
 
Maybe in a few years time, these memories will naturally give themselves rose-colored glasses, and all I’ll remember of those early morning walks is the beauty of the fog-streaked sky and the towering architecture.  For now, however, I’m going to choose to remember the good and the bad, the stunning architecture above me and the tension headache behind my eyes.  For now, I accept that living in London means dealing with throbbing headaches and broken umbrellas even amidst experiences of wonder and joy.  And rather than let these things take away from the joy, or try to convince myself that they overrule the joy, I’m going to just let them exist.
 
And hey, tomorrow evening I get to see King Lear again, with the talented Beale and my congested head and all.  

[photo taken by me during a bout of insomnia. Said insomnia is probably fairly self-explanatory due to a) the Tim Burton-esque dark circles beneath my eyes and b) the fact that I intended to take a picture of the view and totally did not realize until after I took this selfie that I had not, in fact, captured the view. Alas. 'Tis a good insomniac story, at least.]