Hello from London!
This is the last stop of BIQ 2010! The quarter ends June 4th, but Iยดll be traveling afterwards for 2 weeks in Eastern Europe, so you can keep reading if you’d like (assuming I can continue to find internet :P).
So, London…is crazy. I was not made a city girl, and this city makes Seattle, let alone San Jose, look like kiddie pools. There is no place to be alone: you share every single space, and I do mean EVERY space, with other human beings. Want to read a word-sketch I did of the Tube (London’s subway system)? If not, skip to the next paragraph ๐
a tube
filled up with
carbon-dioxide-breathing
sweating
exhaling
humanity
creating imaginary private space
in a jumble of
shoulders, bellies, elbows, necks
packed and sealed
just add tomato juice
then shipped off packing
hurtling through the
anonymous dark
without an inch of air
to call your own.
eyes dropped
to hide within
in a crowded world that would rather you fell out
to make room for more
on the daily train
to nowhere.
This is the next paragraph ๐ You can see why London makes me feel squished. Also, I think my lungs are revolting against the cigarette smoke of 7 1/2 million people. Everybody smokes here. After the idyllic quiet of the Quilt and Croissants in Stratford, I’m sorry to say I’m not such a fan of London. There’s good news, however: a) it’s an amazingly concentrated center of culture and history, b) the weather has decided to be Italian summer for the last 3 days, and c) I’ve spent the weekend outside the city ๐ I’ll describe all of the above in a bit more detail.
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midday on Friday, dumped our stuff in the cookie-cutter Nido student apartments (Alyssa and I entered our room to find forgotten construction tools all over the floor–apparently the handyman got a bit absentminded after tinkering with the baseboards…), and buzzed around town for 6 hours on a blitz of the history of the world: a.k.a. the British Library and Museum. The Library has to be my favorite place in London, and maybe one of my favorite in the world. It’s a treasure trove of the oldest, coolest books you could think of: from the original manuscript of Beowulf to Shakespeare’s First Folio to the Magna Carta to the Gutenberg Bible to Beatles songs written on napkins ๐ I’d been here before, so I didn’t die as much as last time, but having gone to college since then, I felt like I appreciated what I was looking at a lot more. I not only got REALLY excited over the handwritten copy of Jane Eyre; I was able to read some of the Greek on an ancient authoritative manuscript of the New Testament!!! There was also a cool display of beautiful old maps. And if that wasn’t enough mental overstimulation, then we booked it down the street to the British Museum–basically the whole world in one building (also a tribute to British imperialism–most of it was lifted when most of the world belonged to Britain, and never returned…) Nonetheless, it was awe-inspiring: from the Rosetta Stone (yes, the real one!) to the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon (including the one that inspired John Keats’ poem “Ode to a Grecian Urn”!!) and the oldest chess set in the world, the Lewis Chessmen from Scotland ๐ I went back today to see the Sutton Hoo artifacts; the 1939 discovery that unlocked Anglo-Saxon culture to the modern world.
Phew. London is insane. I might be a little insane after being here, too… Saturday, a bunch of us went on a bus tour of Stonehenge and Bath (!!!) with a lovely English guide who called us her “chickadees” as she was counting heads on the bus… Stonehenge was crowded on the hot, hot summer day, but WELL worth the visit: it’s just so majestic, standing there alone on the Salisbury Plain; these huge stones that got there so mysteriously. No one really knows what they were for, either, except that they line up with the sun at the solstices. Bath was really fun, too. The golden sandstone of the buildings practically glowed in the afternoon light, and touring the Roman Baths that have been there since the 1st century AD made me feel like I was in Italy, not western England…I also went into the Pump Room (see picture with me making a gross face)ย and tasted the water from the natural hot spring…it was nasty. Supposed to have curative powers; whatever. I did feel like I was in a Jane Austen novel, though, “promenading” around the streets (even though I missed the costuming memo :P) and watching all the Brits on holiday ๐
Sunday Alyssa, Hannah, Laura and I went to Oxford: the university town whose primary draws for me were a) the Bodleian Library (biggest university library in the world, I think; which holds a hard copy of EVERY book and magazine printed…they own pretty much the whole underground of Oxford for storage!) and b) Tolkien and Lewis stomping grounds. I actually got to eat lunch at the Eagle and Child, the famous pub where the Inklings would sit and discuss their work on Tuesdays (!!!) and walked around the beautiful Magdalen College, where C.S. Lewis taught (I even saw the windows of his old rooms!) Laura and I strolled down Addison’s Walk, where Lewis and Tolkien would walk and talk about their books and theology…we pretended to be them, and it was marvelous! There was a scent of wisteria in the cloisters that smelled like it came straight from heaven ๐
So, getting out of London for the weekend proved to be a very good thing after all ๐ Today I stayed in and had class, then met a friend and went back to the British Museum. I braved the Tube at rush hour (BAD idea–even though I think every hour is rush hour–the train was literally PACKED with people, shoulder to shoulder, squeezed into that little box. So many people, herded around like cattle…see above poem ๐ก )
But, aside from the Tube, there are some very amazing things to see in London. Alyssa and I are going to Spain for our long weekend this weekend (!!! Sevilla and Granada!) and are planning to fill up the rest of the time with such amazements as seeing Macbeth at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, visiting the Tower of London, and seeing Westminster Abbey. I guess you put up with the mechanics of a city in order to appreciate the treasures it encloses. Nonetheless, I would not live here for anything. Give me green fields and the river Avon any day ๐
Anyway, here are some pictures for you–hopefully they’re pretty self-explanatory, covering Stonehenge, Bath, Oxford, and London in that order ๐ Enjoy, and God bless!