It's the age old conflict: one can have time, or one can have money. This month I had lots of the former and not so much of the latter. On the other hand, I did have frequent flier miles...
It was hard to believe that I hadn't been abroad since returning from China over a year ago, or in Europe at all since returning from Hamburg in 2005. Obviously this situation could not stand...
Thanks to my current interest in the career of Stephen Fry I've spent the last few weeks more immersed than usual in English television largely thanks to the Internet, where I've been able to watch every single episode of QI (a very funny English quiz show he hosts), all of his documentaries, lots of his pre-A Bit of Fry and Laurie comedy and altogether hours and hours of fantastic English television. And all for free! Oh, the horror...
But look at it this way, British Broadcasting Company: Had I not gotten to see all this television, I never would have had my curiosity so piqued about the country that produced it. In other words, were it not for all this Internet "piracy," I was all set to visit France instead.
Of course, a trip to England did make a nice bookend to the Great Change since the last time I went was just as it was beginning. Like the last trip I was induced to travel this time because of the influence of a performer. But that time it was an American one, and the trip itself largely seemed very American, like we had just all packed up our American lives and transplanted them over there. This time I thought it would be better to immerse myself as deeply into English life as possible.
I arrived around midday Christmas Eve. My seatmate on the flight over, also traveling on frequent flier miles, would a few days later be continuing onto France so I gave her a list of things to experience in Paris, a list I realize is getting increasingly outdated as more time passes between the present and my last visit in 2003. (Perhaps there's some French tv on YouTube I should watch? Perhaps something starring a 6'5 Etienne Frire?) However despite having been to London a few times before I didn't feel I knew the city well enough to give her tips about it. In fact I didn't even realize myself just how ill-advised it was to travel there over Christmas. Nothing is open. But maybe that's just as well since you couldn't get to anything anyway, what with every form of public transport completely idled. I don't understand that: on major holidays people like to visit each other - how are they to do so if they can't get around? Everyone seems to be locked within their neighborhoods, which, particularly in such an ethnically pluralistic city as London, seems to border on cruel.
But, it's England, and things there are different from the US. Which is why it was worth the trip in the first place. No point in having a change in scenery if the new scenery is no different than where you started. Anyway, I wasn't particularly inconvenienced once I got settled in and acquired groceries. My hostel had warned me when I checked in on the 24th, "If you want to eat tomorrow you'd better get food today." Even the neighborhood McDonalds across from the Kings Cross train station would be closed(!). So after I checked in I rushed back out to track down a supermarket. Fortunately I have a map of London that happens to list where every Tesco is. Unfortunately this map is from 1999, and the first Tesco I sought out today turns out to be but a hole in the ground...
Fortunately I found another one near Leicester Square. Unfortunately it was nearly completely out of food. Even grocery stores in 1992 Russia had more vegetables... But I managed to get what I needed and then spent the remaining late afternoon hours wandering the Covent Garden area as throngs of shoppers tried to make last minute purchases before the shops all closed - many as early as 4pm! How very unamerican it all seemed, to shut down even when there were so many potential customers ready, willing, and able (if not also desperate) to buy things. England is certainly not a country that favors procrastinators...
I had forgotten to send Santa the address to my hostel so Christmas itself was a low-key affair. But with nowhere to go anyway I just kicked back in the lounge. It's an interesting hostel - slightly upscale, with more grown-ups as guests than young backpackers. Rooms have only 5 to 8 beds in them with en suite bathrooms and are clean, comfortable, and reasonably safe. (Maybe not so quiet though if your roommate happens to snore...) There were lots of interesting people to talk to in the lounge - Brits, even - as we all sat around watching British television all day, including the Queen's annual Christmas speech (her fiftieth televised one), a rather nihilistic Doctor Who Christmas episode, two even more nihilistic EastEnders Christmas episodes, and a 25th anniversary reunion special of To the Manor Born, which I'm sure WGBH will soon be bringing over to disappoint American viewers everywhere (there were some really funny moments in this episode, but sadly not enough of them). Meanwhile I ate all the food I'd brought in the day before. Good, decent, English food. Like a Tesco Shephard's Pie... And a Christmas pudding I got from Harrod's. In fact, I've been eating a lot of English food as part of the whole travel experience. In Covent Garden the day before I'd come upon a pastie stall. I'd never had a pastie before and was thinking about daring to try one when a little girl came away clutching her steaming pastie-filled sachet, sighing in her English accent, "There's nothing in the world like a warm pastie..." Turns out she might be right.
The other odd thing about English television on Christmas was the commercials. I saw no less than five, maybe even six, consecutive sofa commercials during a single commercial break. Boxing Day is apparently a big sale day in England, but where it differs from the US is that apparently everyone uses it to buy big ticket items. I guess that's a good use of a sale day, but I didn't even know there could possibly be so many couch commercials out there in the world...
My own Boxing Day plans involved first meeting up with an English friend at Victoria Station. Unfortunately our rendezvous nearly turned into an unrequited disaster as we experienced a complete collapse of all information technology. E.g., not only did I not have a cell phone that worked in England, I didn't even have his phone number... I did have a laptop from which I sent him email, but then Hotmail decided not to bother to deliver any of it. Compounding these problems I also had no idea what train he was coming in on, and, since we've only met once before, little idea what he looked like... Of course, I have successfully met men at train stations in London under even sketchier circumstances before (wait, that came out wrong...), and like then this time it all ended up working out too.
This friend, one of the Stephens of this trip, had done me an enormous favor, vis a vis one of the other Stephens. Through some fortuitous googling after I'd already planned the trip I discovered that Stephen Fry had written a pantomime that was currently being performed at the Old Vic. Given my current interest in his work I thought it would be nice to see it. Besides, I'd never seen an English pantomime before, which, as I discovered through some additional googling, is itself an English Christmas tradition. So, as they say, when in Rome... er, London... It was too close to the performance date to buy my own ticket online, so my friend was kind enough to buy it for me. Of course, there was an awkward moment in our email exchange when he wrote, "Let me know if you still fancy it and I can have a word with a mate in London to pop along to the box office." Sure I knew what he meant but I had no idea how to phrase a response answer that wouldn't sound like I was mocking him...
The show wasn't until the evening, so I walked around for a while beforehand. I was curious to see what Belgravia was like since it was a setting used by Hugh Laurie in his novel. But it turns out I already knew...
My first trip to London had been with my mom and sister when I was 17. In a bit of wise parenting my mom had allowed me two days to myself so she wouldn't have a sullen teenager on her hands for the days we were together. One day I went to Oxford, and the other I spent wandering around London. I remember at one point walking around the neighborhood near our hotel searching for something for dinner and completely failing to find anything suitably casual or affordable. It was really an incredibly boring neighborhood. Which I realized the other day, as I stumbled out of Belgravia only to find myself directly in front of the Intercontinental, was this very same incredibly boring neighborhood.
Not everything on that trip had been so dull, thankfully, and I did spend a lot of time in the Piccadilly Circus area exploring all the book and record stores for items relating to Huey Lewis and the News. But times change, tastes change... and this time I found myself in one of the same large bookstores I'd been in before but in a section I'd never ever thought to approach: the law section.
It was so strange: I found myself positively giddy standing before all those law books, like a kid in a candystore. If this isn't evidence of the Great Change, I don't know what is. As I looked at all these books on English law I realized I desperately wanted to know everything inside them. Moreover, as I flipped through them I realized I could know everything inside them. The specifics were often different from American law (although not always - Rylands v. Fletcher, anyone?) but case law is case law and I do know how to read case law.
I resisted the enormous temptation to buy any or all of these books and instead headed over to the Paul boulangerie I'd earlier seen in Leicester Square. Paul is a French chain of artisan boulangers. When I'd given recommendations to the fellow traveler heading to France I had included the suggestion to have a baguette sandwich there. It's not my favorite boulangerie in Paris (for that you need to find the tiny anonymous place in Courbevoie across the street from the studio apartment I lived in for two months), but it is definitely better than most. So, to scratch my "Were it not for YouTube I'd be in France" itch, I went there for a sandwich jambon et beurre. Sadly, however, I chickened out on using French with the francophonic clerks and instead just spoke embarrassingly incompetent English. Which was too bad, since their English was perfectly fine.
Soon it was time for the pantomime. I think I may write about it separately at some point, but my most important thought is that I was immensely glad I went. All details of the production aside, which were generally quite good, as a foreign tourist it was fascinating to see something so of the place I was visiting. Watching the audience watch the play was just as entertaining to me as my watching the play itself.
I began my last full day in London by seeing the movie St. Trinian's. It too was very English. I can't imagine it will ever make it over to America, although Colin Firth fans might want to try track it down somehow. (Much of the movie seems to involve humiliating his character - and potentially also him. At one point he kills a character named Mr. Darcy. One wonders, given Colin Firth's strange self-referential career trajectory, if he might have wished to do so himself...) Most of it involves satirizing very English things (public schools, quiz shows, English celebrities, etc.) that would only really make sense or be funny to people who knew enough about them to have some sort of cultural reference. Thankfully because I watched all those QI episodes I at least understood Stephen Fry's quizmaster cameo and its implicit self-mockery... but most other Americans probably wouldn't have. Interestingly the movie seems to have largely been panned by local press, most of whom seem to feel the original did not require a remake. But for my part, while I've never seen the original, I thought this particular version stood reasonably well on its own. Perhaps not BAFTA-worthy, but sufficiently entertaining nonetheless.
It was very strange though, seeing the movie. I saw it at 11:30am for a mere 5.50 early bird rate -- at Piccadilly Circus no less. But just a few hundred yards down the road at Leicester Square the matinee price would have been over 12 pounds! It was good that I'd saved my pennies though, because I was about to spend them when it was back to the bookstore for me...
Because who needs a souvenir t-shirt when instead you can bring home English law books? I got three small subject summaries on tort law, contract law, and English constitutional law, and a big textbook-like thing on intellectual property because, yes, I really am that much of a geek. (Interestingly there were no books on "Property," like in the US. Instead there were books on "Land." I didn't get one, but I wonder if that was the right call. There's a lot of unintuitive nuance to English land law I'd be curious about, but judging by the bits of it that have made it into American property law it probably would have been so esoterically cryptic as to reduce me to tears...)
Then I also got some paperbacks. This is really unprecedented for me. I rarely buy books. Hell, I rarely even read books... But lately I've been rediscovering just how pleasurable it is to enjoy good ones. So I got Hugh Laurie's because I really liked it and now won't have to run to the library whenever I want to enjoy the language again, Stephen Fry's memoir and poetry books for the same reason, Michael Palin's Python diaries, and a Terry Pratchett novel. That last one was sort of spontaneous; I'd never read anything of his before. But England seems to have this annoying predilection for 3-for-2 sales. "Buy three of something you'd never want three of, and the third one is free..." In this case though two of my desired books were part of the 3-for-2 promotion so I essentially bought them and then got another book for free. Of the possibilities to chose from it was a toss-up between the Terry Pratchett novel or one by Ben Elton (a Fry and Laurie peer) but I opted for the former partly because I'm annoyed with Ben Elton over his Maybe Baby movie, a movie that I really wanted to like but couldn't, and partly because coincidentally I've randomly been running across Terry Pratchett's name quite a lot lately, sometimes for silly reasons, and sometimes for more somber ones.
My next stop was Kensington, which is where I was when I heard about the Benazir Bhutto assassination. Particularly after reading Ann Althouse's justifiable excoriation of American tv news that seemed to completely miss the significance of it, I was glad I was somewhere where I able to see the BBC's much more globally-aware coverage.
There was one more very English thing left to do on my trip, which was to meet up with my friend again in a pub to watch some English football. Manchester City (his team) v. Blackburn (I think?), who managed to force a tie thanks to an extremely offsides player who got away with it. Oh, but first we went to a different pub for what turned out to be some of the worst fish and chips I've ever had. O'Neill's is a chain of Irish pubs which advertises that it's about traditional pub food with that little extra Irish touch, where "touch" apparently means "Guinness." However they were supposed to add the beer to the batter, not to the cook, who must have had several before producing what appeared on our plates...
And that was pretty much the end of the English part of my trip. The next day it was time to fly back to the US, detouring to NJ in order to see some of my family before heading back home to California. Unfortunately it turned out that I didn't get to see the third intended Stephen of the trip after all: my dad. Oh well, I guess I will on the next trip, as I'm sure there'll be lots more Stephens in the future to lure me away again.