The Ravings of Demented Rabbits

Please Direct Your Attention to the Rediculously Large Building on the Left

3/30

Well, here I am, writing on my third day in. My roommate, Mike, and I will be heading out for school here in 40 minutes or so, using London's most excellent public transportation, the tube (or the Underground, if you want to be technical about it).

The plane ride in sucked about as much as you would expect it to suck - I stayed up all night Friday for the trip up, sort of crashed on the plane to Dallas, and I mean sort of the in the sense that no, you're not really awake, but you're not really asleep, either, but you'll definitely be in pain at the end of things.

Anyway. For some reason, North Texas has these enormous circular things all over the place, which look quite green and sort of like bizzare crop circles. You might be tempted to connect them to the oil industry, if there was any indication of it, but it seems like some sort of strange Texas farm or another. Along those lines, DFW airport sucks the good suck - it's big, it's confusing - three big semi-circles, with a bunch of signs that make no sense unless you know where you're going and the worst shuttle service on the planet. Of note, I was talking to one of the airport workers, and I'm like "So how's the weather?" "Oh, a bit chilly." Turns out it's 70 degrees out or so. In Portland it was like 48 and pouring, and London's cold without the rain - nice and sunny out right now in fact, which is pretty nice.

The plane across the Atlantic was more of the same, pretty much - I sort of slept a lot, in between reading my way through Ring of Fire and the first part of Cryptonomicon. This Japanese kid next to me did almost nothing through the flight except sleep or stare at the seat in front of him while listening to the airline music.

Gatwick Airport in London is a pretty strange place. You get off the plane, go up an escalator, and almost immediately go down the grandaddy of all ramps, which takes up the better portion of a house-sized structure. This gets you to the passport line, where a small army of annoyed-looking civil servants interrogate you about your entry into their domain. Then you get to go up another escalator to baggage claim, then down another ramp to the parking garage. Quite something.

On the subject of driving, it's worth noting that England is NOT a country you want to drive in if you value your life. I haven't figured out speed limits yet, but since everyone is driving cars the size of Geo Metros, and they speed down roads barely the size of a two-lane country road in the US with cars parked on both sides, along with bus stops of all things, I'm not going to worry about the speeding thing. What's worse is, straight streets in London are sort of frowned upon, which means the road system is exceedingly chaotic, random, and hard to navigate.

Fortunately, we're not driving anywhere these days, what with the tube and all. It's pretty pleasant and clean. Not crowded if you take the Metropolitan line, which Eastcote and my house are on; crowded if you take the tiny Piccadilly line cars. It's fairly speedy, too - the slow train took us 45 minutes to get into central London, the fast train considerably less. The only problem is figuring out which train is which, a thing that apparently involves random spur of the moment judgements on the part of the passenger.

Anyway. My host family, the Longs, are both pretty cool. They've made both Mike and I pretty welcome, and opened their house to us, fed us well, and generally made themselves liked. The neighborhood we're in, Eastcote, is pretty nice, though finding something that ISN'T nice in London is pretty hard, because EVERYONE builds out of brick around here, and has for a few hundred years, which means everyone's house looks sort of delightfully old and lived in, except the poor bastards who live in what look to be 1830's-era industrial rowhouses along the tube line, which are pretty ghetto and rundown. Too, there are various parts of the tube that have some damn old brickwork, which is sort of strange to realize when you pass it by.

I've seen a brief few sites - we walked by the outside of St. Paul's, which is undergoing reconstruction and has this enormous black and white 1:1 photo of the outside over the shrouding on it, which is VERY impressive. Saw the outside of the Tower of London, which is sort of bigger than I had expected it to be. Took a trip down the river, as the Thames is known locally, and saw a few assorted bridges and such. Of note, Paul and Jan's (the Longs) daughter and son in law own a pub nearby us, so we went out to eat Sunday. Very good.

Pictures will be forthcoming, I think, since I need to hit an internet cafe to upload them, and I haven't had the time to look yet - it's REALLY busy here right now. Should have more later.

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3/31 addendum:

Tuesday was a pretty big day. We toured the University of London Union, which is pretty much an overpriced, crappy version of what any university in the US pretty much gives you. The "second biggest swimming pool in Britain" is MAYBE the size of one of OSU's pools, likely not. The gym sucks, and there's no way anybody's going to pay 105 pounds to get into the thing. For the exchange rate challenged, 1 pound is about 1.8 dollars, or a lot.

Since we were sort of in the area, we hit the British Museum, too. And, uh, damn. The moving van is going to have trouble getting all that stuff back to my house in the States (we're all calling it "the States" here, for some reason, and I don't think I did this at all at home. Oh well.). I can't do it justice without pictures, but they've got two of those big winged Babylonian lion-men flanking this big freaking GATE. And that's sort of off in this corner. The place is HUGE. And it's got tons of cool old stuff in it. Absolutely amazing.

Along those lines, we hit Trafalgar Square for kicks afterwards, and believe you me, Nelson's statue on that column is pretty freaking big. Hundred or two feet up there. It's pretty serious. And it's got, in true London tradition, this glass box at the foot of it, where these people are reading, one at a time, all the dates from like 1 million BC to 1969 AD, and 1980 AD to 1 million AD. This is somehow art. It's...bizzare.

We've been doing a bunch of pubs, too. Hit a few random ones with some of the guys during our excursion, then went out with all 21 of us Americans to this pub in Harrow (Harrow-on-the-Hill, as it were) called the Rat and Parrot, where we pretty much took over the place and had a lot of fun. Apparently we're going out tomorrow, too, which should be entertaining. Lot of drinking, here, though never to excess. Lot of smoking, too, which is sort of surprising. Dublin just banned smoking in pubs, and the citizens are in this giant uproar. Kinda funny.

Coinage in this country is pretty bizzare. There are actual paper notes down to fairly small denominations, but they also have pound and two pound COINS, along with a variety of smaller pence coins - fifty, twenty, ten, five, two of all things, and one. So I now have this giant pocket of change. Of special note to us Oasis fans, the writing on the side of the two pound coing says "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants." Heh.

Mike's going to bed, so I'll write some more when I have the time.

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4/2 Addendum

It's been a long day, made even longer by this new routine I'm in. We wake up at 7:30 or so around here, because the tube ride to King's Cross is about 45 minutes long, and with two of us sharing the bathroom, or toilet as the polite expression here goes, it takes a while. This involves eating breakfast, a thing I haven't done with regularity since high school. It's worth noting that the cereals here are sort of odd. You have your Rice Krispies, your Frosted Flakes, your Corn Flakes, your Choco Corn Flakes, your...Choco Corn Flakes? Yeah. Among other assorted oddities. Whatever. They work.

On a sort of related note, stores here are bloody well SMALL. Figure a typical grocery store here is a slight bit bigger than a 7/11 in the States, except it's, yknow, a real grocery store. There's a mall ("shopping center") in Finchley, which has a full-sized grocery, plus a bookstore about the size of a Borders back home that missed its growth spurt and ended up half the size of a real Borders.

At any rate, last night was spectacularly unspectacular for the most part, except for my having to find lunch at the Hare and Tortoise, the local Asian-themed noodle bar place, which so happens to be close to campus. This place follows the Chinese model - the food is cheap, good, and so plentiful that a plate here feeds two people anywhere else. That having been said, the waitresses are incomprehensible, so that I followed one around the place for a few minutes until I finally got the clue that she wanted me to SIT AND WAIT IN THE WAITING AREA PLEASE.

The other event of last night was the American contingent taking over a chunk of the Rat and Parrot, and having a good, alcohol-infused time of it, which I was marginally a part of due to the loud, loud music making me deaf. Fun nevertheless. Apparently the other group (the private universities have something like what we're doing) showed up randomly as well, so something like a third of the people in the pub were Americans. Unfortunately for the Rat and Parrot, we've been hearing about a good many substantially cheaper places nearby in Harrow, so we'll see how that works out. In any case, it looks as if pubs are going to be a major feature of my social life from here on out.

We hit the Tower of London today (Friday), which is sort of beyond me to describe to you in words, other than "Damn this place is huge" and "Ohwowlookatalltheneatstuffdrool" with a bit of "You think they'd miss one of those crowns? That's a lot of diamonds." Pictures at some point.

Somewhere early, I hooked up with Laura, who just so happens to look like a somewhat more familiar Laura who observant readers of this blog may have heard of once or twice before. We browsed our way through the White Tower (the central keep), which is stuffed to the brim with a variety of arms and armor, including assorted royal armor, a few walls of assorted firearms, and a staff topped with some big spikes labeled "Henry VIII's Walking Stick."

After the White Tower, we hit the Beauchamp Tower, which in and of itself isn't all that impressive, except that it's got a lot of assorted graffiti carved into the interior walls. Pretty neat. After that, we did the Jewel House and the Crown Jewels, which are just as impressive as you might imagine, and include the obligatory huge diamonds as well as a golden punch bowl thing the size of a small couch. There's a whole wall of golden scepters, most of which seem to have been made to satisfy some sort of scepter fetish on the part of William and Mary.

The Royal Fusiliers' Museum was next, which if you're Marechal is a must-see, and if you're like most of the rest of us, was merely interesting, showing a variety of objects and relating the Fusiliers' fairly lengthy history.

After the Fusiliers' Museum, we stopped to listen to a couple of folks in costume relate the tale of Sir Walter Raleigh, who's one of those guys that's almost as good as he thinks he is, which got him in trouble with a whole bunch of people, and got him locked up in the Tower three times, not to mention executed. He got a pretty nice prison, however. Two main rooms in a single tower, with a well-furnished study, and an even better furnished bedchamber, which at one time housed Raleigh, his wife, and two sons.

We also hit the area known as the Medieval Palace, which is a pair of towers made up as they would have looked in the time of Edward I (The Longshanks of Braveheart fame). Nifty stuff, which looks better in the pictures you can't see yet.

At that point, we had sort of run out of stuff to do in the Tower, so we started walking, eventually ending up going over Tower Bridge. We didn't do the lift to the top bit, since they wanted 5 pounds for admission, which is sort of a lot. So we just walked over to the other side of the Thames. While figuring out what to do next, we bumped into Dustin and Katie, and a consensus was quickly reached that food and drink might well be a good idea at some point, so this was accomplished at a handy corner market, whereupon we commenced walking from there half-way to King's Cross tube station by the long way, which took us past a whole bunch of assorted random nifty buildings (understand that enormous parts of London were built a hundred and more years ago, so random stores and houses and things are pretty nifty. The Long house, frex, was built in the 1930s, which is pretty new.), including the Banks of Scotland and England, Lloyd's, the vast covered Victorian Leadenhall Market, and St. Paul's Cathedral, which is of course as cool as they say it is, and I haven't even been inside yet.

Somewhere in there, Katie got a call on her cellphone to go meet a bunch of people at Westminster Abbey. No problem, we figure, we're halfway there, we'll walk. So about an hour later, we show up, having missed the bus group, and proceed to wander around the outside of Parliament and Westminster Abbey, before deciding that it was sort of, you know, 6 pm and some food might be a good idea. Fortunately, nobody had any idea where to go for cheap food, a total rarity in London. Eventually somebody came up with the idea of going to Finchley Road and going to the shopping center (a mall by our terms), and going to a Sainsbury, which is the big grocery store here. Some French bread and Cadbury Egg later, life was good, and we feasted upon some random rock formations in the middle of the mall. That having been done, we caught the fast train to Harrow, jumped off, and immediately got onto the Uxbridge train, the second time in as many days I've been able to do that.

And as my laptop has all of 3% battery left, I'll leave it at that. There will hopefully be pictures at some point, once I find a way to upload them.

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4/3 addendum:

Back up and running. Thankfully my power converter hasn't yet blown up my laptop, so life is at least that good. I'm not even all that sore after having walked for an entire day, which is even better, considering I could barely move last night.

It's laundry day for me, which in England is more akin to some bizzare alien ritual than, you know, doing laundry. For starters, the washer and dryer are freaking SMALL. I put in five days worth of pants, and that's stretching capacity. And while the dryer pretty much involves throwing clothes and Bounce in and hitting the button, the washer is the creation of evil gremlins. You have a bunch of wash cycles, A through I believe H, which denote different spots on this dial, and magically correspond to what kind of clothes you've put in and how clean you want them. Then you slide out this tray, which you then put a cube of this one stuff in, and then another cube, this time with a ball of something sticking out, and then a small measure of this blue liquidy stuff. Push On, and it sort of does its' thing. As long as it doesn't shrink, that's all I want.

And that's where we're at now - me and the Pringles typing, my clothes washing. We may or may not be all exciting today, but probably not - gotta do homework at SOME point. Me, I did mine, which means computer gaming time - I'm tired of walking.

A couple other observations I don't think I've made yet:

For one, it's pretty amazing, especially to a white kid from the Pacific Northwest, where everyone's pretty much either white, Mexican, or Asian, to London, which is probably one of the single most ethnically diverse places on the planet. The Longs, frex, are English. The folks running the grocery store down the street are Indian. A few of the guys working the tube are black, I've a teacher who's Scottish, the Hare and Tortoise folks are either Chinese or Japanese, and it's fairly common to see Muslim women in full robes going down the street. Sat down on the train the other day, and the girls next to me were all speaking Spanish. The conversation next to us a few nights ago was in German. It's really quite something, and something you're not likely to see in the States outside of, say, New York maybe.

Speaking of the Muslim bit, apparently a few days ago the police stopped a plot by Islamic terrorists to blow up something or another. Some of the places they've arrested people and are looking around are pretty close to Eastcote. And yet I'm not particularly worried at all.

I think I've touched on the food thing as it relates to cereal, because let's face it - Choco Corn Flakes are just strange no matter where you are, but there are a bunch of other things that may or may not be familiar to Americans. McDonalds' and Burger King are pretty familiar, and they have Dominoes and Pizza Hut here as well, and Coke is pretty familiarly Coke. On the other hand, the cherry flavor in Cherry Coke is REALLY strong compared to what it is back home, and Dr. Pepper is about the same way. And while cans of pop are the exact same size here, the 20 oz equivilent (500 mL, off top of my head), is a little bit skinnier and taller than a US 20 oz. Also, they apparently have Costco here, which ought to be interesting.

Eating well so far. I've mentioned the Hare and Tortoise, and I've mentioned the grocery stores. I've also had fish and chips, which they apparently do by taking a whole fish (minus the icky parts of course), and battering that. We've got a pretty good shop for it here in Eastcote just down the way. There's an Indian place right next to it, which I haven't had yet, but hear is pretty good. We've done a variety of chicken - sweet and sour the other day, and this breaded chicken filled with various stuff (mine was garlic and butter). My first night here, we went to a pub owned by the Longs' daughter and son in law, and I had this huge plate of lamb, potatos, and peas, which was quite good, though I'm not sure about putting mint sauce on the lamb. There's also what I hear is a good Chinese place (called "Eat Well" of all things) down the street. So I'm definitely not going to starve.

Also, I'm going to be talking about a whole bunch of people, so I suppose it's only fair I list them:

Paul and Jan - The Longs, my host family.
Prof. Garfinkle - Western Washington prof, teaches both Roman Britain and Ancient Near East Literacy.
Rebecca and Jacob - His kids, twins, who are both 5 and have all of that cuteness we all lose when we hit 10 or so.

Mike - My roommate, sometimes known as "blonde Mike" or "other Mike." Goes to Western Washington.
Mike - Another Eastcote student, "tall Mike" or "other Mike"
Alden - Other Mike's roommate
Dustin - Lives with the program director. Our resident "computer nerd" as he calls himself. Recently decided on Guiness for his second and third beers ever.
Jeremiah - Dustin's roommate, and another OSU student, who I've apparently known for like three years since he worked at Parkside Grill, but who I didn't recognize until he actually told me.
Laura - My Tower travelling buddy, who goes to U of O and is currently having lots of fun with host family kitchen remodeling.
Katie - Goes to I think U of W, one of the London travelling group of Friday.
Maggie - One of the two Maggies, I remember nothing else about her.
Margalyn - Western Washington student, the other Maggie, one of Prof. Garfinkle's students.
Ella - The most outgoing of us all, quite the party animal.
Robyn - Goes to Southern Oregon, and happens to look EXACTLY like a certain friend of mine.
Debbi - One of the people I barely know, and who I've seen about three times.
Allison - May or may not be one of the OSU group, since I can't actually remember.
Kerby - U of O girl, who I shared the cab ride in with, but haven't talked to much.
Kara - Our only actual degree holder, in Agriculture. Another of the OSU group.
Tara - Another of our really outgoing folks. I forget where she goes to school.
Zen - A girl who's full name is Zenocrite St. Clair, which is one of the single most unique names I've ever heard on a real person.
Andrea - I think another of the OSU group. Pretty quiet. Among other things, she has this really nice henna design on her hand right now.
Lindsay - Actually a returning student, she's been here a quarter already. She also doesn't hang out with us a lot, so I don't really know her.
Olivia - The other returner, she's the outgoing one, and has really taken to the group.

And that's the lot of us. It's a good bunch of people, so far. As you might except of a bunch of Americans stuck in London, we've bonded pretty well for our first week, and it's bound to get better. As it is, I feel I've known them all quite a while, and been in London even longer. Strange feeling.

And, it being lunchtime, I believe this is the end of my narrative for the time being.

Posted by Dwip at April 4, 2004 4:02 AM