Critical Northwest Outpost: Academia Miscellania: A Way, Way Belated Update...

Well, I’m finally home and many of you are probably wondering what happened to my promised postings. Well, despite my best intentions I found internet access to be very elusive in London. The wi-fi hotspot at the RGS went down on Thursday afternoon and never was fixed. I then searched high and low for another place to access the internet, but found that internet café’s wanted to charge me 10 pounds per hour to use their computers or to access their wi-fi; this is equivalent to $20 and being on a very tight budget left me with no choice but to be frugal and leave my loyal readership hanging. All I can say is I’m sorry….which is more than I’ve heard from British Airways…

Yes, BA still hasn’t found my bag and is completely unapologetic about it. I’ve spent about 15 hours on the phone with them, trying to achieve some resolution and they have been less than forthcoming and far from helpful. I think that part of the problem is that the BA call center in the UK is in Scotland. Now the Scots are a folk who are used to suffering and are terse, to say the least, every time I got through to a thickly accented highland lassie I usually had to have her repeat what she said multiple times until I understood it, and I usually got the silent treatment when it came to my complaints. The standard reply was (insert your own thick Scottish accent here): “Just go out and by the necessities, then send us the receipts and we’ll see what we can do.” When I pressed them about what they considered necessities the standard response was (again, insert thick Scottish accent here): “Necessities are the things you need”; a less than helpful rejoinder that usually signaled the nigh end of the conversation. So, I have figured that just between the time I spent in the airport and on the phone with BA, the near $20 pounds I spent on phone cards to talk to them they owe me at least $350 in time and phone charges, to say nothing of reimbursing me for the time it took to find shops that sold razors, deodorant, toothpaste, toothbrushes, socks, underwear etc. Central London is very good at catering to the impractical material desires of tourists, but makes little provision for helping them find the “necessities”.

On my way home yesterday I did make quite a scene in Heathrow trying to ensure that the cheap little backpack I’d bought to bring home the gifts I had bought for my kids was checked, double checked, and insured. I then demanded that BA upgrade me to first class for my pain and suffering. I ended up going through four levels of management and was a great poster boy for the stereotypical “rude American”, but I was at the end of my rope by that time and wanted, at least, some acknowledgment of my suffering. My antics didn’t work as effectively as I would have liked, but I did get upgraded to business class which meant that I had two more inches of leg room, two more inches of elbow room, and a little fuzzier blanket; all cold comfort for losing my luggage.

So after my ticket counter antics I had to endure the Heathrow security gauntlet which must be almost as daunting as the security procedures in Israeli airports. They go through all of your bags and make you take off almost everything except your pants and shirt (the necessities?). Everything has to be placed in different bins, so shoes, belt, coat, wallet, computer, etc are all in different bins, which means that you are pushing a line of bins 5-7 long. It’s quite the juggle. Once I was through and re-dressed, someone decided to pull the fire alarm in the airport and we were all evacuated. If you can imagine trying to evacuate the Seattle Airport or O’Hare then multiplying that in scale by 2 then you can imagine how chaotic that process was. The great thing was that after we’d been evacuated into our little holding pens, that were strikingly familiar to feed lot pens, we all had the privilege of going through security again! It was quite the morning….

But my trip was not all drama and frustration and I imagine that at some point I will be asked what part of London I most enjoyed. Before I answer that I have to qualify my response by saying that I didn’t go visit some of the sites that most people would consider essential, and I also didn’t visit some of the sites that I initially wanted to. Everyone has said that I had to go to the Tower of London, but the tales of horrid crowds and endless lines scared me away since I really only had Friday and Saturday for some sightseeing. I also didn’t go to Buckingham palace to see the changing of the guards, nor did I brave the long lines to ride the London Eye. I also wanted to go to see the manuscript collections at the British Library, but it was too far out of the way and the Tube line to that part of town was closed over the weekend. But despite the sites that I didn’t see, I did see some sites that absolutely blew my mind. I think that the most moving site was Westminster Abbey, followed by Westminster Castle and the Halls of Parliament, the British Museum, and the Imperial War Cabinet.

Perhaps my favorite thing was just wandering around the street and alleyways of London. I really enjoyed the time I spent walking through the quintessential London suburb of Highgate, the tightly packed streets and alleys of Holborn with its old restaurants and book stores, the gentrified rowhouses of Kensington, and the circuitous alleys around St. Paul’s and Temple Bar. Back in 1997 when I went to Montreal I learned that walking through neighborhoods and the places where the city lives is infinitely more fascinating than visiting the “must see” attractions. There is nothing more satisfying than finding a small, local restaurant in a back alley that caters to residents and not tourists. This is where you really get to know a city and the people who live there. Certainly London is in her monuments and museums, but the day to day pulse of life is in the streets and neighborhoods. This is where you meet people, can sit and watch life pass at a normal pace, and really get to know a place.

I’ll never forget the wonderful little family owned Italian restaurant I ate in in Holborn following my presentation. I wanted to eat somewhere nice and quiet as a reward and decided to wander the alleys until I found the restaurant that smelled the best as I walked past. This tiny Italian place was in an alley about 4 blocks from the British Museum and was full of Italian families eating their midday meal. I was the only English speaker in the restaurant. I had a lovely lunch of prosciutto, melon, and penne a l’arrabiata across the alley from the apartment where philosopher and peace activist Bertrand Russell used to live. I sat there eating this meal alone and imagined Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot walking this alley or even eating in this same restaurant discussing the weighty issues of the day, reading drafts of each other’s work, and forming plans to shake up the philosophical and literary vanguard of early twentieth century London.

Although London is most famous for her monuments and museums most of these have been civilized and overinterpreted. There’s nothing surprising to discover in these sites. If there’s a surprise they’ll tell you about it before you get there and then try to sell you overpriced souvenirs at the end to help you remember how much fun you had not being surprised. There’s nothing to discover in these tourist draws. You enter and they set you on a predetermined path that you must follow until you reach the end. It’s almost like a pilgrimage or traveling the Stations of the Cross; you know what you’re going to see and have built it up so much in your mind that it can’t help but be somewhat of a letdown when you realize that it is exactly what you expected it to be.

Well, with that said, after eating in the Italian restaurant is Holborn I headed to the British Museum, the first real tourist site of my trip. I’ve always wanted to go to the British museum, so I was surprised at my reaction. As I walked through the halls that covered the ancient cultures of Babylon, Egypt and Greece my first though was: “Holy crap…all of this stuff is stolen!” All of the placards on the artifacts told of the glorious exploits of the grave robbers, collectors, and army men who stole these artifacts, primarily during the Victorian era. Many seemed blatantly jingoistic and were somewhat distasteful in my opinion…but then I had to reconsider. Given the history of many of the parts of the world where these artifacts were taken from they would have, most likely, been destroyed or at least damaged in the wars and upheavals of the past several hundred years. So, I went through these exhibits experiencing a mix of emotions that left me intellectually confused and emotionally exhausted. The British Museum houses so many icons of Western civilization that one cannot help but be overwhelmed in their presence.

So I have much more to tell, but that will have to come tomorrow. I’ll post a few pics here and leave you with a list of my impressions of London gathered over the week. This is only a partial list and I will add more as I get time…

Thoughts on London

Flat green patchwork land cut through with threads of jet black canals and rivers;

The River Thames is the same color as the Tanana except it carries 40 million pounds of trash to the sea each year instead of silt;

Bishops on bikes in black robes with black, slip on Vans;

From the top of St. Paul’s a northern city skyline with 49 tower cranes building layer, upon layer;

Perfume follows everyone;

The patina of several thousand years from grease and grime from several hundred thousand hands;

Everyone pronounces my surname correctly! Everyone!;

Lead feet and crossing friendly;

Blast furnace of the Tube;

Monuments with names worn off from hundreds of years of kneeling and touching...there are actually deep troughs in the floor in front of the tomb of Edward the Confessor where people have kneeled over the centuries;

Trains preceded 30 seconds by a mechanical grease flavoured column of syringed air;

Halls that smell like industrial antiseptic;

Salty unsmoked bacon, sawdust sausages, watery eggs, baked beans, stewed tomatoes, hash browns, and other unrecognizable breakfast comestibles;

Late night meals and parties every evening; no one sleeps;

Dead city streets until 10 in the morning, I suspect from too much partying the night before;

Lines, lots and lots of lines (or queues, to be British about it);

Americans are big and unmistakable; they stand out like their bellies;

Homeless men wearing ties, having an early morning “cuppa” on their cardboard beds;

The sky is light all night and they never see stars, just the brightest ones on clear nights;

Narrow alleys with no discernible beginning or end;

The “hub and thrub” of British “process”;

A culture built around the “honored” dead…everyone even remotely great is mythologized;

Everyone walks and those who don’t drive cars that cost more than the average house;

Different languages are spoken around every corner and in every train car…English is only a symbolic national tongue;

Dark skinned people serve, white skinned people supervise;

Musty church’s that smell like thousands of years of death;

Surprisingly clean air above ground, indisputably toxic air below the ground;

Tight pants and terribly stylish but wholly impractical shoes;

Alleyway granite cobbles polished smooth……

A major realization I came to in London: the foreign exchange rate. It’s not that prices in London are inflated; in fact, prices are the same, but the value of the dollar is too low to achieve equivalency. For example, a cheap lunch is about 10 pounds, which is what I’d expect to pay for a decent lunch in Moscow, but the dollar is only worth 2.1:1 so a reasonable 10 pound lunch is actually equivalent to a $20 extravagance. So, if anything, this trip has at least clarified the mystery of the monetary exchange system…somewhat. I still don’t understand why the U.S. dollar is valued so low against the pound, but that’s a question for another day.

Here's some pics:

The front of the British Museum