I have not had time to write in days. I spent more time than average
sightseeing in London, visited a friend there on a couple of evenings,
and had a gregarious Russian, almost an oxymoron, in my hostel room for
the last few nights of my stay there. Due to people's using computers so
much for entertainment, a person sitting at a computer is taken, by
default, to be at leisure, and people in hostels are taken, also by
default, to be uninterested in doing work. I would have liked to have
written more from London, but I did not, and there is nothing to be done
now but to write as quickly as possible so as to make up for lost time.
When I have a lot to write, I often look at writing as more of a chore
than anything else, as a result of which I do not want to start doing
it. Writing quickly is a way to get past this aversion of mine.
London is culturally the richest city that I have ever visited, I should think, though it is unfair to compare it directly to Berlin and Vienna, as I spent as much time in London as in the latter two cities combined and can speak its language. It has such a rich history that a friend of mine once went on a two- or three-hour walking tour that only covered a few square blocks; near to my hostel, on the very outskirts of town, stands a garrison built in 1937 or 1939 (I cannot remember which, sadly, as those are such different years in terms of history.), which is just sitting there as though it were no big deal for a military building erected right before the biggest war of the century to be situated in a quiet, residential part of town.
Cheap fruit and vegetable markets belong, unlike in Vancouver, to Pakistanis, Turks, or Indians here, giving one access to a different range of foods. I know that the British were historically unwelcoming to South Asians, as a result of which those living in England are probably not used to being seen interesting or equal to their countrymen. One shop owner seemed happy to talk to me when I struck up conversation with her and learned that she was from very near Lahore; she explained that the main cultural difference between Punjabis in India and those in Pakistan is that the former are Sikh and the latter are Muslim, which I had not realized but probably should already have known. Produce stores here often sell high-fat yogurt, which I enjoy very much, in addition to various types of dried produce, such as lentils and rice, and cheap sweets. At one store, I was able to try a delicious variant of bakhlava, while at another, I bought cheap mango puree to go along with my yogurt, with which I made mango lassis for several days. The greengrocers here are often more friendly than those back home, as they are not as busy and are not yet quite so mainstream.
People here in general are quite friendly. Unlike in many large cities, where pedestrians look too busy to be bothered with lost foreigners, Londoners seem universally happy to stop and give one directions, explain how the trains work, or simply chat for a few minutes in the subway. London is a city of haves and have-nots as far as knowledge is concerned: its transport has some of the worst signage, perhaps the very worst, that I have seen on this trip, leaving people either to be lost or to have been born here and know their way around. The subway is cleaner and quieter than that of Moscow but is, to the shame of England -- for nothing should be worse here than in Russia -- less efficient, with fewer trains running per unit of time and more confusion about which trains are going in which direction. In addition, Londoners, or the designers of the city, have not yet discovered the modern crosswalk. Very few roads here have designated places at which pedestrians are supposed to cross them, and crosswalk signals are extremely rare, as a result of which the only ways that I found to cross the road were to be part a crowd, which is safe because few drivers are willing to risk driving through them, or to wait until no one was coming from either direction and to run for one's life. It was often safe to cross when apparent locals did so, but one had to be careful to be right next to them and to go at their speed, as what was safe for them might not have been safe for someone walking a few feet away and slightly slower. Locals of London can surely spot dangers that are invisible to the foreigner and could lead quickly to his death if he were not careful.
London has a fascinating history. It started out, like many sizable English cities (at least, in the south), as a Roman colony; like every big colony, it had am amphitheater, where people were killed, as often happened in the Roman world, for sport. While I do not know how London came to be so big in the Middle Ages, I expect that its already having been developed and being located on a major river helped; whatever the case, it was ravaged by fire, like so many medieval cities, in 1666, leading to its having to be largely reconstructed, as a result of which it has lost most physical remnants of its medieval heritage. It has a fantastic guildhall, which is free to visit and where I learned both that people were publicly executed in London until late in the 19th century -- the dates of executions are proudly displayed on the guildhall's inner walls -- and that watchmaking was a big deal in London for several centuries due to its importance for seafaring, warfare, and other medieval pursuits. It suffered from severe pedestrian and equestrian traffic, which could back up for hours, following the Industrial Revolution until the London Bridge was finally built in 1884 to take pressure off of the city's other bridges. This reminded me of the traffic that we face back home and the importance that the Second Narrows Bridge must have had when it was first made to take people to the North Shore and back.
The cities near to London were also very interesting, especially Norwich and Canterbury, in both of which every building appears to be roughly 1000 years old. In fact, both suffered bombing in World War II, as a result of which part of Canterbury's city center is now comprised of modern stores; many of Norwich's medieval houses, on the other hand, were demolished by choice in the 1960s and 1970s, when the local government declared them unfit for living and decided to get rid of them, rather than renovating them, as a way to forget the past. Bury St. Edmunds had a very pretty, if small, historic center but was not worth the trip there; Cambridge had some pretty buildings, but I did not like it as much as Harvard, of which it reminded me, as its center had too many cars and excessively-narrow sidewalks; Bath reminded me a little of Bordeaux, with its brown stucco houses and lack of trees; Oxford was pleasant and had an Asian (Chinese) food market, where I bought knock-off Japanese mochi cakes; and Windsor was a pretty town, a little like Fussen in then there was more to it, if not much more, in its case, than just is castle. Overall, I quite enjoyed my stay here, and I would love to return one day, perhaps to spend a year working at one of the universities in the south of England, if I get lucky enough.
At this point, I would love to try to give more detailed accounts of each of my days, but I will not have time, and such accounts would be boring and unmotivated. I made several notes to myself to the effect that London was amazing. It is convinced, like Paris, of its own greatness, but in the case of London, that conviction is fully justified. The streets here are perhaps not as clean as those in Stockholm, but they are a far cry from those of France; fascinating buildings sprout to one's left and right like mushrooms in essentially any part of the city within a five-mile radius of the city center; and the city is full of genial people and good food. I had a ball visiting Chinatown here: it was bigger than I expected, and it was cramped and dirty, jam-packed with stores, gaudy signs, and people jostling against one another -- I loved it. The Camden Market, a tourist attraction in a poor neighborhood in the north of town, a ways off from the city center, was fascinating. London had tons of good bookstores. I did not get to try much of the Indian food here, as it would have taken research to find a really good place and I was travelling on a budget, but I am sure that there are plenty of good options for people willing to shell out the money. London is so full of life and reminders of what life used to be like that it would take a week or two in the city alone to sample only its highlights. To see the whole of the United Kingdom -- or, rather, the most interesting parts of the United Kingdom -- would probably take several months.
It was only on my fourth day in London, or my third full day there, that I learned that all of its museums were free, which freed me up to drop into a few of them for just fifteen or twenty minutes without the sense of obligation to spend several hours there. I went on a free tour of the Wallace Collection, dropped into the British Museum, which is world-class, and looked at a few of the rooms, just a very few, of the National Gallery. London's commitment to promoting world culture and reminding people both of the past and the possibility of building into the future fully justified its reputation as a world city and was, as much as this qualifier is overused, inspiring in its rareness. I came to reflect, either while in the guildhall or in the ruins of the city's former amphitheater, about the difference between what people want and what they need, a difference about which I wrote an entire paper in college, using voting to build a new bridge as an example. Let us say that the residents of Vancouver want, I said, to be able to get to the North Shore mountains and are convinced that building a new bridge will get them there more quickly. Given the option to vote, they will declare that they want a new bridge to be built, but that is merely the secondary desire -- I made up some terms or other to this effect -- stemming from their primary desire to get to the North Shore. Now, if an expert engineer correctly determines that widening the existing bridge (let us say that there is one, for simplicity) will actually convey people more quickly to the mountains than building a new one, and the people say that they want a new bridge, should they be given the new bridge, which satisfies their superficial desire, or should city officials widen the existing bridge to satisfy their actual, primary desire?
It is clear that people have a universal desire for self-determination, or at least the illusion of it, and that one way to narrow the gap between the expert's knowledge and that of the voter is to inform people as fully and honestly as possible, and it is clear that authoritarian governments that decide what people should have (I believe that I focused on the difference between what people want, at root, and what they think will help them get it -- that was the main focus of my paper, I believe.) based on their own estimations of what people need do them a great injustice, not necessarily in theory, but in practice, based on an overwhelming amount of historical evidence. I do not have any original ideas about achieving fairness in society or making it better, and I do not remember what specifically spurred me to think about it or what main points I wanted to make when I made the note to myself a week or so ago. I am, however, convinced that we are doing much better than we used to. We no longer -- at least, in many countries -- exult in iconoclasts' executions or throw people to be torn apart by lions for our amusement. I was going to point to examples of medical and technological advances and improvements in literary rates across the world as examples of our humanity, but they are somewhat tangential to discussions specifically of improvements in human and democratic rights, and some people might point to current wars and other worldwide ills as signs that we are not doing so well; perhaps we are not so much better than we used to be after all.
England was, and, to some degree, remains a country of religious fanatics. At least one prominent World War I monument in London makes direct reference to the glory of God, while, in the past, Catholics were persecuted under Henry VIII but were so fervently faithful that they continued to practice their religion in secret, often hiding priests in so-called "priest holes" when agents were sent to root them out. Heretics and dissenters of various sorts used to be executed by fire or hanging. I learned in Norwich that it was the invading Normans who introduced stonemasonry to England, where people had traditionally built with timber. In Canterbury I learned that nobles in England often financed almshouses as a way of trying to go to Heaven, and I attended evensong, as I expected it to be akin to a concert of religious music. As it turned out, evensong was closer to a religious ritual, and its choral music was not as good as that which I heard in Hamburg or, last year, Prague. The church struck me as an obsolescent institution that could no longer serve to spiritually guide us; it may turn into a sort of societal appendix, much like the arts, and rely on individual patronage to continue to function. (I got to see a couple of new priests, of one sort or another, get initiated into the Canterbury church, which was a very big deal to everyone there but was millions of miles from what was actually happening in the world. While the church does some good things, like offering spiritual guidance to people, giving people a sense of community, running educational programs, and collecting funds for charities, I am directly opposed to its principal mission of spreading the word of God, and, while I consider it very important to donate money to individual churches of historic importance so as to keep them standing, I disliked giving money to the Bath cathedral (if my memory holds), which seemed especially proselytizing, and was irked that I had to pay 5 Euros for a tour of Norwich's Catholic cathedral, a tour that had been passed off to me as free.
I have a great many concluding thoughts. London has far too few benches. The very British Museum, a spectacular achievement of the English people, features a grand total of zero benches out front, and it even employs people to chase people away who try to sit on its front steps. Even smallish towns, such as Canterbury, have bike lanes here, and many cities have bike-sharing programs. The Oslo Airport sucks; many airports here seem worse than those of the United States. I liked the brick houses on the outskirts of London. I remembered, at the service in Canterbury, Nancy's fondness for going to concerts in churches. Part of the region for Norway's being such a successful country is that people follow the rules established by the government and are convinced that they will benefit from doing so. People assiduously avoid eye contact on the subway in London, and they are courteous, getting up to cede their seats to women and the elderly. People in Germany and, to a slightly lesser extent, here might have so many tattoos and social piercings because they are reacting, according to the friend whom I visited here, to the traditional reserve of their societies. And Sophocles is a real classic, a master of developing interesting characters, like Europides and unlike Aeschylus. The type of language used in Greek tragedy, such as (to make up an example), "No man has known the misfortune I have known," might, in its staidness, point to a certain stoicism that imbued Athenian society itself, but I have not knowledge or space enough to develop such theories.
London and its surroundings would be heaven for an art historian, a historian generally, or anyone interested in the development of human society. It turns out that one does not have to be in a country where people speak a foreign language -- they speak English differently enough here for it to feel foreign -- or to be in the south of Europe to experience a foreign culture and learn more about how people lived in the past. One simple note about heightening the quality of people's life is a comment on the St. Pancras International train station and, by extension, all train stations and major subway stations: while music played in St. Pancras station, there should be free bathrooms and water fountains, and even some form of visual art, in such places as well. If there were any logic behind requiring that people pay to use the bathroom and not giving them access to free drinking water, I could get on board with it, but as is, I cannot help seeing it as a gross oversight on the part of the Europeans, who are, in theory, cosmopolitan and able both to travel to places that have free bathrooms and water fountains and to learn from such places.
My last note is a funny one that has been bouncing around in my computer for weeks. I have encountered a great many East Asian tourists on this trip, and I have noticed that they are universally the best cooks in hostels. A massive proportion of them -- rather, of the ones who stay in hostels, and are thus, by default, travelling on a budget -- seem to prefer food from back home to local food, local groceries, and the junk food that so many people seem to eat on the road. I have seen dozens of Asian couples and families cooking meals that are vastly more complicated than what anyone else makes and probably taste about the same as what they get back home. Once, when I entered the kitchen while a trio of Koreans were cooking, I started coughing, and my eyes watered up as though I had been hit with tear gas. The family laughed, and I did, as soon as I left the kitchen and discovered what had happened: I had not been able to take the spiciness of their native kimchi, which was feeling the kitchen with the spiciness of a thousand split cloves of black pepper.
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| Many buildings in southern England look like this. |
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