2 posts tagged “england”
3 September 2007
Jo woke us this morning for breakfast (toast and jam and stewed apples and blackberries, oh my!) and I couldn't figure out the shower to save my soul (idiot), and we settled our laptop bags and suitcases into a corner of Marthe's room and got our backpacks ready to travel. Jo continued to be brilliant and dropped us at the train station, and we trained it in to Waterloo. It was a nice ride; I love watching the row houses and lines of chimnies and aerials pass by. It finally felt like I was in London.
Fifteen to twenty minutes later, we pulled into Waterloo. All I could think of was Mom singing that stupid song with the lyrics "Waterloo, Waterloo baby" whenever we used this train station when my family was in London years ago. After a quick jaunt through the train station and security, we hopped on the 10:43 Eurostar train to Brussels, and boom, here we are now, on the train making its way through France on the way to Belgium. The woman across from us is having a conversation in rapidfire French; the pair behind us are talking in what I'm pretty sure is Mandarin (the things you learn from A) half your friends taking elementary Chinese courses and delighting in speaking the language to everyone who will listen, and B) Firefly). I love this whole language and accent thing. It's so much more interesting than what I hear on a daily basis in Portland and in Amherst.
It's cloudy and overcast in France today, and we've already passed a few classic-looking French villages (cluster of little houses surrounding a tall church spire) set back among the fields. Nothing more to write about until we've actually gotten somewhere; time to try to learn some French, since it would be nice if at least one of us could say 'hello,' 'thank you,' and 'where is the toilet.'
/ 1300 (French time!)
* * * * *
We're in Brussels. I had a little too much to drink with dinner, I think. Legally. In a restaurant. So fun to say! I probably won't be making a habit of the drinking, though; even the littlest bit tends to make me feel sick. But I'm getting ahead of myself, as usual.
We got off the train at Midi Station in Brussels, and immediately hopped the subway for a few stops and got off at Boutique de Kr...outon (I can't spell this name to save my soul). We wandered, lost, for a little while, which wasn't a great time; heavy backpacks, hot hot heat, hard to breathe, harder to read the signs in French (and you can forget about the Flemish), middle of the city, me wanting to stop and look at maps, Andrew wanting to walk til we found the right direction. He got his bearings and found the hostel, though, after a detour through a local park and this huge, old, abandoned building that used to house botanical gardens. The hostel isn't so bad; 30 Euro for two nights, small dormitory-style room with eight beds and a sink, free breakfast and a bar and a patio. We checked in, dumped our stuff, and headed out to explore the city.
We walked through a large park, first. It started to sprinkle. I immediately cursed whatever had made me agree that no, I didn't have the space to bring a waterproof jacket and yes, I'd be completely fine without it. Suddenly, over the sound of our voices and our feet crunching on the gravel, we heard a woman's voice, singing. Andrew and I exchanged a glance. He asked if I wanted to see what it was. I said something to the rough equivalent of "fuck yeah," and we followed the soprano to an open-air gazebo deeper within the park, where a young woman dressed in black stood, singing opera in Italian. This is the part of today's notes where I geek out singing-style, because she was amazing. She had a full-bodied, rich voice, incredible pitch, the high and the low in her range, and damn but her voice carried. People wandered in, two or three at a time, to sit on the rows of benches in front of the gazebo and just listen. The singer stood with her hands clasped in front of herself, seemingly oblivious to the couples sitting with their arms around each other, the four twentysomethings paused with briefcases in hand, the guy playing with his dog.
Impromptu opera in a park on a rainy afternoon in Brussels. Not such a bad way to start off the Grand European Adventure.
Brussels is this fascinating mix of old and new. I tried to reflect that in the pictures that I took, but we'll see how they come out. The heart of Brussels' Lower Town is the Grote Markt or Grand Place, this town square surrounded by incredible, huge buildings (baroque and Gothic architecture) on all sides, spires reaching to the skies, with statues and shining gold embellishments, all surrounding the wide, cobblestone square. Flags fluttering in the breeze, narrow cobblestone streets leading off in every direction, the tourists were swarming. There were tons of Asian tour groups, like everywhere else we've been so far; I have to wonder, do you see big groups of Western tourists like that in Asian countries? The buildings were guildhalls, built over what was once marshland. There was the Gothic Hôtel de Ville (the town hall, built from 1401-1459), along with La Maison des Boulangers, La Maison des Ducs de Brabant, La Maison du Roi, and a number of buildings named after animals; Le Cornet, Le Renard, Le Cygne.
We wandered the streets after that; there were such random things. A Tin Tin store, cartoon-style murals here and there, the "iconic" Wee Manneken Pis (30 centimeter-high statue of a little boy peeing in the street; underwhelming, and surrounded by tourists) -- like I said, random. We stumbled across Cathédrale Des Sts Michel and Gudule, an astonishing (Brabant Gothic architecture) cathedral named for Brussels' male and female patron saints; tall, graceful, reminded me of Westminster Abbey. My favorite part, though, was the building next door. We could not figure out what it was, but it had corporate logos on the front and the sides. It had clearly been built with its neighbor in mind, from the long vertical lines running up the building to the metal spires crowning it. It's the best example of Brussels' old-new aesthetic that I've seen.
Directly in front and across the small courtyard and the street, on a huge screen covering the face of a building that was being renovated, there was a huge drawing of a human fetus. Significance? We couldn't figure it out. We wandered a little while longer, though similar streets (old connected buildings, windowboxes in upper stories, cafes or little stores on first floor), searching for a restaurant that Andrew wanted to go to, called Chez León. We found it eventually, and had dinner--turkey steak, fries, and the cheapest beer on the menu, something called Maes. Andrew ordered first, in English, and then I tried in piss-poor French. The waiter responded to both of us in fast, flawless French and went off. When he returned with the drinks, I managed a pretty decently accented 'merci,' and Andrew said 'thank you.'
The water kindly chose to speak to me in English from then on.
It's been very interesting to me, seeing how we're received. We got pegged immediately as English-speaking, and maybe even as American, everywhere we went. I want to see what happens when Andrew wears a plain T-shirt, rather than one covered in English writing extolling the virtues of some beer. When I went one or two places by myself and didn't say much besides s'il vouz plait and merci, I don't think I got pegged; the shopkeepers were friendly and easy-going, and spoke to me in French. It was nice. I've never especially liked feeling like a tourist, peering in at other people's lives with a bucket hat and a fanny pack and a camera, and I know how I feel about tourists at home (I loathe them), so I do try to be polite, courteous, quiet, and generally unobtrusive while in other places. It's nice to be mistaken for a local once in a while.
After dinner, we walked back to the hostel and, along the way, found that not only do the Belgians apparently not believe in street signs or predictable driving patterns, but they also don't believe in grocery stores. We wanted to make dinner tomorrow in the kitchen, but we couldn't find any food. While I've mentioned wacky driving, there aren't many Brussels drivers, especially compared to London or New York, but the ones who are on the road? Well, they drive--permit me this one obscenity--like motherfuckers. It's nuts.
At the hostel, there were a couple of guys sitting in the courtyard with drinks as we came in; two Canadians, an Australian, and an American. Andrew got a beer and me a water, and we sat down just inside. It's been sort of fascinating to watch the gender separation in here. First one guy sat along at a table, then two more started talking to him and joined them, then Andrew joined them, and then another couple of guys sat together. They flock together. Meanwhile, there's another table of guys drinking and playing poker, me sitting alone writing, and another girl sitting alone reading. All the other girls staying here? They're out in Brussels, or inside the rooms. Out here has become a kind of boys' club, with smoke and beer and pool and poker and loud voices raised about 'in America' this and 'in America' that. So far, I've already heard conversations about a whole lot of things that I never needed to know about these strangers and their sex lives.
That's all, folks. Bruges tomorrow.
/ 20:30
* * * * *
It actually turned out to be fun. I got dragged over to Testosterone Land by Andrew and Ben, the Canadian ballet dancer, where a good portion of the table was fairly trashed. Ben told me all about how studying evolutionary biology is cool because the way that the apes communicated was like the first dance. Drunk Irishman was very nice to me, despite the drunk part; he was the one who had insisted that Andrew stop 'abandoning' me (it was less that Andrew abandoned me, and more that I was writing up my notes and thought it'd be easier without a lot of beer and smoking guys) and come to fetch me, and he commended me for keeping travel notes. He also said I reminded him of my cousin, which was when things got a little weird.
Ben told a story about how the girl he loved had moved to Rotterdam from Toronto when he was in New York, so he'd been unable to say goodbye. After his show in Berlin, given the choice between eastern Europe--which he and his friend really wanted to go to, and where he had family--and Amsterdam, he chose Amsterdam because it meant that he could go to this girl. He went to Rotterdam, saw this girl, told her he loved her and he'd come to the Netherlands to say goodbye -- and she said she didn't believe him.
So he went to Belgium and was getting drunk.
The conversation, at that point, devolved into whether or his his buddy could have had sex with an Israeli girl in Rotterdam. I felt like I was in a raunchy teen comedy.
Two other guys, Brett and Nameless from Colorado, got to Brussels by hitchhiking from Slovenia, speaking nothing but English. They were full of praise for eastern Europe and Prague in particular. They said it looks like "a fucking fairytale. Like Cinderella's fucking castle, man." They were traveling for six months, and were offended that Andrew and I were spending only two or three days everywhere that we were going. Of course, they were also drunk and stoned out of their minds, so I didn't pay too much attention to any judgments that they passed.
Testosterone Land, minus Andrew, migrated to a bar, and I went to our room and met two new arrivals -- Rob and Marissa of New York City. They were funny and personable, in their mid-to-late twenties. Andrew and I had a drink with them and talked to them for a while, and then went back to the room to get ready for bed. I introduced myself to the two roommates who'd been in the room all night, speaking Spanish to each other and thwarting all attempts to go to bed. I did so in Spanish and was immediately answered in flawless English; I felt very inadequate.
Made new friends, made people laugh, dropped my purse multiple times on Andrew's head ("That's the Belgian way of saying 'I love you' ") -- all in all, successful night.
My name is Lynne, I'm a college student in the northeastern United States, and I'm studying in London for the semester. Those are the basics. The other important thing to note is that I'm horrifically slow when it comes to doing things that ought to be done, sometimes, which is why I'm setting up this blog a full month after I regained internet access, and two months after I left home. This first flurry of entries is going to be made up of material from my notebook, covering 1 September through 17 October (look at the way I wrote those dates; I'm assimilating already!), with the eventual goal being that I catch up with current time so that I'm not blogging in the past anymore.
1 September, 2007
And we're off! Or I am, anyway. Months of planning, weeks of frantic packing, and hours of teeth-gnashing while on hold with Virgin Atlantic have culminated in this: me sitting on an Amtrak train on my way to New York City.
Maybe I should start at the beginning.
I applied to Goldsmiths University in February of this year, and found out in late April/early May that I had officially been accepted as a visiting student for one semester. My friend Andrew also applied and was accepted, and the second that we found out that classes don't begin until October, we knew what we had to do. The summer was spent e-mailing back and forth about hostels, airfare, train tickets, and general plans for a three-week Travel Extravaganza around continental Europe.
Today, I'm finally on my way.
My parents woke me at the crack of dawn (okay, 5:30. that sounds dawn-cracky, right?) and we piled my suitcase, backpack, and laptop case into the car. I promptly put a pillow up against the window and slept the whole way from Portland to Boston. We sat in South Station for a few hours, until I could finally board my train around 9:15. Hugs were exchanged, goodbyes were said, and I bolted for the train and my reserved seat.
Once the train had left the station, I settled down to serious business: taking notes from Europe for Dummies (thanks, Mom! your confidence is appreciated, as ever) and watching my fellow travelers. A number of people (including a group of women headed to Foxwood's, a girl who looked like a college student, and a blind man) got on in Boston and off in Connecticut, but I'm still holding down the fort. Or the car, as it were.
I've made friends with my seatmate. He's an older gentleman who got on in Connecticut with no visible luggage and a book in hand; it's fun to see someone who actually dressed up to travel, in the day and age of the yoga pant and flipflop. He sat down beside me with a nod, and he saw my Europe book and asked if I was going. It turns out that he's flying out of New York later today, headed for points Prague and Vienna, where he'd been stationed when he was in the service as a young man. We had a pleasant conversation, and chuckled later over fellow passengers, as a little boy tried to shove past a man waiting for someone else to pass in the aisle. The man made the most hideous 'good GOD' sort of put-out face at the kid.
We laughed. "People in this world need to learn to tolerate each other," my seatmate said.
"Or learn to be patient," I added. It's a nice thought, a world where people tolerated each other and each other's differences rather than causing conflict because of them.
About an hour out of South Sation, as I raised my head and looked out the window for the first time, it finally hit me: I AM OUT OF HERE! I'm on my way to Europe. It's a crazy feeling. I couldn't stop grinning at the window. We were crossing a bridge; the blueblue water sparkling as far as I could see, a number of small boats zipping past underneath, a Coast Guard sailing vessel in the distance in front of several islands, sea grass -- beautiful.
New York, here I come!
P.S. - Writing on trains is an acquired skill.
I don't think I've acquired it yet.
/12:30 PM
* * * * *
I reached Penn Station early in the afternoon. I said goodbye to my charming elderly seatmate, whose name I never caught, and he kindly helped me with my overwhelmingly heavy luggage, and we wished each other safe trips. Andrew met me at the station, and we took the subway back to his aunt's apartment in Soho. I knew the second that we stepped onto the subway car that we weren't on the subway I'm most familiar with, Boston. The trains and stations looked the same, sure, but when you sat down in a car -- I've found that in Boston, a lot of the time, all of the other passengers are white. That certainly wasn't the case in New York, unsurprisingly, given the city's diversity. This entire trip is going to be a serious departure from my norms, which I'm very happy about. I've lived my whole life in Maine, the whitest state in the nation, and study at a college where the student body is largely white. It's incredibly unfamiliar for me to be in environments where I'm not in the racial vast majority, and it's -- This is difficult to articulate without coming off as A) really weird, and B) sounding like I'm saying I HAVE BEEN OPPRESSED I TTLY UNDERSTAND RACISM NOW, which I'm not trying to say; I haven't been oppressed or anything of the sort. I feel like being in the minority somewhere, even if it's only for a short time, is something that people who are used to being in the majority should experience at least once in their lives. It makes you a little more conscious of how you conduct yourself when you're back to the environment that you're used to, and it's changed my point of view in some ways. More on that later, though.
Once I'd dropped my things at his aunt's apartment (tiny, adorable, and covered in all kinds of fabulous world travel souveneirs), Andrew and I met up with his friend Jessi and her friend Tal, and the four of us walked up to Washington Park. We wandered around and took an incredibly long walk through Soho toward the financial district. I don't know how long we'd been walking in the sun and the heat when we saw a huge, fenced-off construction site, and an Asian tour group standing on the steps of the Brooks Brothers store across the street, taking pictures.
It wasn't a construction site, of course. It was Ground Zero.
I didn't figure it out until I turned to Jessi, puzzled, and asked why the tourists were swarming all around us. She told me that it was the World Trade Center site, and I belatedly understood why there were enormous American flags flying. It left me with a funny taste in my mouth. This is how we memorialize? Fence it in and drape it in the flag? And all those people taking pictures of the site where people died, where people spent their last horrible minutes having to decide whether to burn or to leap from a window -- it felt vulgar. It felt disrespectful. [Note: Looking back at this is both strange and hypocritical, after I took pictures at Sachsenhausen. More on this when catch-up posts reach Germany.]
We continued on, and I wished I'd brought my camera. It was so strange to be fenced in on all sides by buildings, to have to crane my neck to see the sky. It was strangely beautiful, shafts of light streaking through gaps between buildings. We wandered past a few New York University dorms, where students were moving in. I was and remain very excited for Europe, but I was jealous that they got to have their stuff, their friends, get settled, while I was leaving behind all of my things, all of my friends, the possibility of a fall in my favorite place in an apartment with my favorite people. We made our way through the university section to South Street Seaport.
New York was something of a surprise, in that I was expecting diversity, but I wasn't expecting to hear so much not-English. It seemed like every other conversation was in another language. I heard Spanish, French, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and multitudes of others that I couldn't even place. We walked through the Seaport, me listening to the conversations going on around us, watching the tourists watch the street performers and duck in and out of shops. The Brooklyn Bridge was visible from that street, and we walked to and onto the Bridge.
The view was absolutely incredible. I can't believe I didn't bring my camera. Brooklyn ahead, Manhattan behind, the harbor and Governor's Island and the Statue of Liberty to the right, the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building rising out of the skyline behind us, the setting sun reflecting in the shining city, the iconic spires and cables of the bridge surrounding us, cars below -- amazing. We walked all the way across and back. It took an hour or two, and by the end, I hurt from my hips to the soles of my feet, but it was worth it. We hopped the subway back to Soho, and the four of us and Andrew's dad went to dinner at a tiny Cuban restaurant. It was set down just below street level, with low lighting, the windows and doors thrown wide open, the hip regulars at the bar. After dinner (the best chicken soup I've ever had in my life, chosen thanks to how sick I was feeling by that point), we said goodbye to Jessi and Tal and went back to the apartment to sleep.
It was strange, listening to all that noise in the street below, when the only thing I'd heard all summer at night was the sound of my own breathing, the fan, the crickets, and the occasional car coming down my eleven-house dead end street. Laughing, shouting, music, cars -- it was fascinating, but also not conducive to my headache and nausea. Sleep didn't come easily, and it was fitful.
2 September, 2007
Woke at 4:20 AM, got dressed, gathered my stuff, came very close to puking my guts out, sweated out the ride to JFK International Airport and again came very close to throwing up, but didn't. My 'almost got sick but didn't' skills are getting a serious workout. New York City at four AM on a Sunday morning is a strange place. There were lots of drunks, lots of people still staggering home, carrying bottle in paper bags. We said goodbye to Andrew's dad at the airport, got inside -- and boom. I immediately felt better. Maybe it was nerves.
Either that or the aspirin I took at the apartment.
Either way, happily feeling better, I got all checked in with Andrew, checked our bags, and got into the line for security. There were big groups tearfully hugging and waving goodbye. The saddest was a young woman, tears streaming down her face as she kissed a baby in a stroller on the head, and then let a woman who looked to be Grandma wheel her away. Dignified and heart-rending.
Once we (finally; it took ages) cleared customs and were onto the concourse, we were home free! Early morning in an airport always feels like home to me. I am eternally grateful to my parents for having given me the opportunity to travel early and often, and for having taken me on planes all the time. I'm really comfortable with flying, whereas Andrew is (and was) a little more nervous. We didn't have long to wait before boarding, and off we went on Virgin Atlantic flight 26 from JFK to Heathrow. It was a good flight. It took off late, but the flight was smooth as glass and the seat backs had those mini TV monitors. I watched Hot Fuzz (forgive me one moment of capslocked incoherence but OH MY GOD SO GOOD) and the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie and The Office, and the time flew, forgive me the pun. The adorable four-year-old girl sitting in front of me and the games of peekaboo that we played between the seats also helped pass the time.
Upon landing, after circling Heathrow for a while and making me increasingly nervous about the amount of fuel left, Andrew and I spent an hour in the longest ever customs line from hell. Adding insult to injury, it took approximately 15-20 seconds for the people at the desk to deal with us. How was the line possibly that long if they were moving people through that quickly? It was interesting being in that customs line; there were only a handful of other whites (this is going to stop being weird to me eventually, I promise) and we were the only two Americans, from what I could tell. I haven't heard a single other American accent since I've gotten here; it's fantastic. Post-customs, we got ahold of our bags and I spoke to my friend Marthe's parents, Tom and Jo, and worked out where we would meet Tom. We moved on to the Underground.
I love the London Underground. The 'way out' and 'mind the gap' signs are iconic to me, and I love how huge it is, and how cool and cosmopolitan I feel being on it. (Also, 'mind the gap' makes me smile every time, now that I've read Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, with the gap-monster that lives down there and grabs people's legs when they're too slow getting on trains.) We hopped on the Picadilly line and in a few stops were at Acton Town. Up a few flights of stairs--and seriously laboring, at this point, as there had been enormous stretches of ground to cover in Heathrow, and my bags were heavy--and Marthe's dad was there with the family van. We introduced ourselves and piled our stuff into the car, and zoomed off through London. The family lives in an area that isn't in central London (and while I know how to get there on the Tube, don't even ask me where exactly in London it is), and it was night. But I still grinned madly for the course of the entire ride, watching Tom drive on the left side of the road and the lights streak past on either side.
The family house is fantastic. It's been in the family since the '30's and it's literally right on the Thames, so much so that the river comes up to the top step at high tide. There's a nearby railroad bridge over the river built in the 17th century. The view from the back of the house is stunning, especially at night, as Tom showed it to us. The area didn't feel like we were in London. It was gloriously quiet. Tom and Jo were great; they fed us, talked to us, set us up to sleep in Marthe's empty room, and were generally amazing. As for the house, as I was saying before I distracted myself with discussions of how much Marthe's family saved our lives, it just -- it's one of those houses that feels like it has history to it.
Andrew and I repacked for the trip, and crashed hard and happy, because -- finally in London, baby.
