Genny's blog

 I'm staying in London next semester, so it's kind of strange trying to get together my " final thoughts". There's no sense of finality to leaving London- I'll be back in a month.  Actually, that's not really true. January will bring a whole slew of new people, and the people I've come to associate with my time in London will be leaving.

There are still a lot of things on my to-do list.  Go to a burlesque show.  Go to a punk show.  Make out with a guy with a cockney accent.  Go to the tate modern.  Go to Hyde Park. 

My best friend from NYU's coming to visit me, and I can't wait to show her around.  I know we'll tear this city up.

I've also made friends ( actual friends, not just random acquaintances) with a group of British kids these last few weeks, so hopefully they'll introduce me to some local places I otherwise might  not have known about.

This class has been a good opportunity to put thoughts that have been floating around my head some structure.  It's kind of like being forced to keep a journal, which is a good thing because I've never been much good at keeping journals.  I always write one or two really long entries and end up with a notebook that's half empty.

Academics:

If you’re a Journalism major or have any interest in the theatre, I highly recommend “Reporting The Arts”.  The  guest speakers vary from actors ( including, this semester, the very handsome and charming Jonathan Groff), to newspaper and magazine editors to bloggers to directors.  The professor is a Yale educated theatre critic for The New York Times.  So basically, he knows his shit.

“Writing London” is another really intellectually stimulating class (with pretty minimal coursework), so it’s ideal.  I worship the ground my professor walks on. Every sentence that comes out of her mouth strikes me as the most intelligent observation I’ve ever heard.

Avoid The British Novel Of The Nineteenth century like the plague, unless you like learning nothing and reading a huge novel a week.  Trust me on this one.
 
Nightlife:

The pub thing gets old fast. Don’t stay in the Bloomsbury area.  If you miss New York, East London ( Shoreditch & Brick Lane, specifically) is your best bet, even though it’s  a pain in the ass to get home.  The Ministry Of Sound is a long trek and grossly overrated.

A few of my  favorite drinking/dancing/overall funtime spots:

Close/ Cheap Pub- Fitzroy’s Tavern.
Close/Cheap Bar/ Open Late (Even On Weekdays) – The Court
Close Club/ Good Music/ Cider Specials/ Nice Bartenders- The Big Chill
Mind-Bogglingly Hip/ Awesome Rooftop/ Live Music- The Queen of Hoxton ( also the location of the picture, curtesy of my freind Simone0
Hip/ Huge/ Open Late/ DJs/ Live Music- Proud

Food:
London’s incredibly expensive, and buying your food from the supermarket is by far the easiest way to save money.  Plus, you’re not missing out on much.  Delivery takes forever.  Hare & Tortoise, an Asian restaurant at the Brunswick, is really incredible, with big portions and reasonable prices.  They don’t take reservations, and unless you go at 4pm on a weekday, there will be a line.  But it’s worth it.

Misc Tips:
Start your nights early. Everything closes early: The tube, the restaurants, the bars.  Get used to British people making fun of your accent, but make friends with them anyway. Don’t let the weather dictate your mood, or you will always be miserable.  London’s a big city: explore.

           Reading the first section of De Botton's on habit, I almost did a double-take.  His account of returning to London after a trip to Barbados gave me an overwhelming sense of deja vu.
                 I spent my fall break in two paradises: Amsterdam and Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida.  I had been looking forward to Amsterdam for as long as I knew what Amsterdam was, and it far surpassed my expectations on every level.  I barely slept- I didn't want to miss one canal, one piece of street art, one joint, one nightclub, one patisserie.  I found myself in tears when I had to leave.
                From Amsterdam, I flew to London, packed my bags, and took a twelve hour trip to Florida.  Oh, the sunlight! Pure, unadulterated, 85-degree sunlight.  It’s difficult to describe, exactly, how utopian this place is.  It’s a university, sure, but really more like a resort for college kids.  It’s on the beach; the campus is scattered with hammocks.  The entire student population is composed of hippies, hipsters, and punks.  Nobody wears shoes.  Everybody has pets.  Everybody is everybody’s best friend.  You can have a huge party on the beach and nobody will stop you.  I spent my time there drinking, smoking, swimming, eating, dancing, reading The Rules of Attraction, and making friends.
                Then I flew back to London.  I was hungover, burnt-out, exaughsted  and heartbroken ( Oh, I forgot to mention, this whole trip to Florida thing was for a guy.) The night before I had stayed up until four am drinking rum and breaking stuff at a punk show.  It was forty degrees colder in London than in Florida.  My room was a mess.  I hadn’t started homework that was due yesterday. 
                It took a few days, but I got back into the swing of things.  Funny, De Botton found release from London by seeing it in a new light. I found comfort in my daily habits.  The guy at the security desk.  My David Bowie poster. The bartender at The Big Chill who knows my drink order.  My reliably senile Wednesday-class professor.   I find that I like London more when I don’t try to see it as a tourism sight, searching for meaning and beauty everywhere I go.  I like when it feels like a home.  A cold, damp, depressing home with bad food, perhaps.  But a home nonetheless.

What I love about Thanksgiving is that it doesn’t have any pretentions.  Unlike, say, New Years or your birthday, you go into Thanksgiving knowing exactly what you’re going to get: stuffed silly.  It’s a strange phenomenon, how somehow Pilgrim-Native American relations became inextricably associated with food comas. 
Luckily for me, my family flew in from New Jersey to come visit me for Thanksgiving.  November is always a rough month, what with crappy weather and finals. It’s even worse in London, where a glimpse of sunlight is a rarity and I’d been wearing my winter coat for a month and a half.  After a few months without blue skies or fresh vegetables, it’s easy to get nostalgic for home and your loved ones.   
                A professor of mine, an American whose been living in London for ten years now, told me about a restaurant that serves “traditional” Thanksgiving dinner.  I was skeptical but intrigued, and my family made reservations. The meal was tasty, and we left full, drunk and happy- just as it should be on this most glorious of holidays. There were a couple of flukes in authenticity (since when does clam chowder qualify as a component of Thanksgiving Dinner?), but all in all it went above and beyond our expectations.
  It was kind of weird going out to eat for Thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving to me is my Mother’s cooking, messy and delicious and available in copious quantities.  It’s sitting at my massive dining room table with every aunt, uncle, cousin and grandparent we can get to make the trip.  It’s the men watching football while the women drink too much white wine and gossip.  It’s fun and wholesome and stereotypically American, and no matter how great a formal five-course meal served by a waiter is, it still doesn’t feel quite like Thanksgiving.

Supreme. How did this unassuming fast-food joint would become my second home? Its dirty yellow sign is hardly inviting: much less are the baggy jean, hooded sweatshirt donning teenagers that loiter around outside. Maybe it was the smell that got me. I have a soft spot for the scent of fried food and mayonnaise. No, it as the meal deal offer: 2.95 pounds for a chicken sandwich and a soda. And did that sandwich look good. Fried chicken, crispy lettuce, toasted sesame seed bun… The reality of a supreme fried chicken sandwich proved to be even better than the poster. Every bite is sinfully delicious in a way that I can only compare to a big mac. Quickly enough, I discovered that the coffee is also the closest thing to deli coffee you can get your hands on in London. Before long I was a supreme addict. Soon, the man behind the counter began to recognize me. Short, friendly, and distinctly foreign, he asked my name. Now every time I go to Supreme for a sandwich or a coffee, he greets me and asks how I’ve been. “Where is your friend?” he inquires, wondering why I haven’t brought my (equally chicken sandwich addicted) roommate. One day while I was waiting for my coffee -one sugar and milk, they know it by heart- he came and sat across from me with a bowl of soup and two spoons. “Eat,” he said, digging in. “Oh, no thank you” I responded, not wanting to intrude on his meal. He passed me a piece of pita bread. “Please.” I took the spoon and we shared the bowl. “Your coffee is ready”, he said. “ Thank you. That was delicious.” I replied. He smiled, big and toothy, as he wiped off the counter. I noticed that he has dimples. “See you tomorrow!” He said, and I waved good-bye.

“I’d like to propose a toast.

First, to Tanya, for screwing up our flight plans, inadvertently landing us in this amazing city instead of the tourist death trap we anticipated.

Second, to the overwhelmingly favorable setup of Glasgow being filled with sexy men and ugly women.

Third, and most important, to Simone.  Happy birthday, girl.  May your night be filled with cheap alcohol and attractive gingers.”

I wasn’t supposed to be making this speech; I wasn’t even supposed to be spending the weekend in Glasgow.   The city of choice for Simone’s birthday weekend was green, hilly, castle-filled Edinburgh. I had researched the city’s sights, where to go out at night, where to stay.  Two days before we were set to leave, just as I was about to book a hostel, I checked our boarding passes to see when we would arrive in Edinburgh.

Arrival: 10 AM.  Glasgow International Airport.  I summoned Simone.

“ There’s no way Tanya bought tickets to the wrong city.  Are you positive there isn’t a Glasgow International Airport in Edinburgh?”  she asked me.

“Yes.”

None of us were initially too happy about this last minute, accidental change of plans.  But a half hour of googling later, it seemed that Glasgow might actually be more what we were looking for.  Vintage shopping, crazy nightlife, thriving art scene… Edinburgh? Where’s that?

A few things you should know about Glasgow up front. It’s not pretty.  It’s cool looking, in an Edgar Allen Poe-ish, something-eerie-might-occur kind of way.  It’s definitely not picturesque, unless you like your pictures grey and misty with a Burger King in the background.

But  it is really fun. The first night that my friends and I went out in Glasgow, at the recommendation of the Euro Hostel  concierge, we paid ten pounds to see  DJ Adam Beyer at a venue called “The Arches”.  We were the only Americans, and (so it seemed)  the only people not rolling on ecstasy.  It didn’t matter at all. We spent at least five hours right in front of the stage, dancing our brains out.  The next night we went to a few bars, one of which was apparently 80’s themed.  We befriended a group of Glaswegians wearing leopard print spandex and crop-tops.  I can’t imagine a more amusing way to spend one’s birthday weekend.

During the day, we checked out the West End’s cafes and boutiques. On Ruthevall Lane, a little cobblestone street filled with vintage stores and record shops, we found a gem of a used clothing store called Glorious. The shop is tiny, but filled with a huge selection of inexpensive clothes in great condition. It is because of Glorious that when we left Scotland, our bags were twice as heavy as they were when we got there.

Sometimes, it felt like Glasgow was a weird, damp, hedonistic parallel universe.  Getting drunk is far too cheap and easy in this city, with a double shot of vodka and cranberry juice only costing about two pounds, as compared to five or six in London. Bars and clubs open early and close late. Moreover, eating healthfully is nearly impossible . These people love their fast food.  Every time my friends and I got hungry in central Glasgow, we would end up wandering past KFCs and Wendys’  for a half hour before finally settling on a Friday’s-like restaurant as the most responsible choice.

A warning: just because you are in an English speaking country does not mean you will understand a word anybody says.  The accent of a born and bred Glaswegian can be nearly impossible to decipher, especially if you’ve been drinking. I can’t tell you how many “conversations” I had had that weekend was comprised  simply of me repeating every tenth word the person I was talking to said and nodding my head vigorously.   

Glasgow might not be Scotland’s most scenic or well known city. If you want to take pictures, see the sights, and take walking tours, this isn’t the place for you.  But if you’re a young person looking for a good time, you won’t be disappointed.

Amsterdam doesn’t do traffic lights or stop signs or crosswalks. Instead, trams, cars, bikes, and people traverse down the roads unregulated. It should be anarchy, chaos, accidents everywhere. But no. People simply learn to look out for one another, and treat their fellow commuters respectfully.

So it goes in this Dutch Utopia. The government lets people do what they want, within reason. Gay Marriage is legal, prostitution is legal, Marijuana is legal (hard drugs aren’t). And yet Amsterdam is hardly an amoral hellhole. Not only does life manage to go on regardless of these personal freedoms- it thrives.

The city itself is physically gorgeous. Every building is different, charming in its own way. Trees frame the canals, white swans drifting along. During the day, the streets are full of markets, boutiques, patisseries, specialty shops. Colorful street art is a feast for the eyes. As the sun goes down, red lights, loud bars and coffee shops lend a sense of mischief to the night.

Amsterdam is obviously a tourist attraction, but it’s also a living city: I never got the idea that it’s dominated by visitors, as sometimes happens in cities like Venice or Rome. One of my first nights in Amsetrdam, my friends and I found ourselves in a bar completely filled with locals. Every person in the room except us spent the night singing along to Dutch songs, and yet not once did I sense any animosity. This kind of thing wouldn’t happen in say, Paris. The fact that people from all over the world come to visit Amsterdam isn’t intimidating or defining- it’s a fact of life, and has become a part of Amsterdam’s cultural fiber.

“ Family Friendly” might not be a phrase that comes to mind when the average person thinks of Amsterdam. But during the day, parents and their kids are everywhere- grocery shopping, riding their bikes, hanging out in parks. Not surprisingly, Amsterdam is an astoundingly clean and highly environmentally conscious city. MTV has Pimp My Ride: a feature in an Amsterdam magazine is called “pimp my bike.”

It’s this combination of factors that led me to sitting on a bench one Sunday, the last day of my trip, having a smoke, looking up at the sky, nearly in tears. I’d found Shangri-La, and I was leaving after three days? Was it possible that I could ever be this happy again?

One things for sure. I’ll be coming back.

* this picture was taken by my friend layla at the particular moment referenced here

London Fragments, by Rudiger Gorner, toes the line between memoir and literary criticism- and, I would argue, falls slightly short as both.

In this text, Gorner uses analysis of some of London's most famous authors, combined with first hand observations, to try to gain a fuller understanding of London as a city. It's a big task for a small book, especially when you consider the fact that many of these author's perspectives of London aren't simply diverse, but sometimes contradictory of one another. Woolf's London is not Stevenson's London is not Dickens' London.

That's not to say that the points Goriner makes aren't legitimate. On the contrary, they're often very insightful. Perhaps the problem is that he assumes his readers are as well-read as he is: sadly, most of us are not. I'm lucky that this year I'm taking two courses on British Literature, or else I would be extremely confused.

For example, in one paragraph he summarizes Edgar Allen Poe's short story The Man In The Crowd (17), comparing the story's narrator to a "flaneur". Do you know what a "flaneur" is? I didn't until I learned its definition in one of my classes ( it's a person who walks about a city, observing his/her surroundings.) It's because this same class that I had the opportunity to read The Man In The Crowd. This kind of term needs to be clearly explained to the reader or else there's the definite possibility that a. they aren't going to have any idea what you're talking about, and b.they're going to think you're a pretentious prick. Goriner doesn't provide the reader with a suitable definition; the best he can do is note that " the flaneur is typified by a leisurely, pleasurable gait" (16).

Those charming, shiny red telephone booths. What could be a more quinissential british icon? They're classy, charming, old-fashioned...

And full of ads for prostitutes. In England, they're called "tart cards".

The first time my friend and I saw this, we squealed in delight.  How perfectly counterintuitive and deliciously tasteless! We immediately decided these incredibly trashy, often misspelled ads of half-naked chicks would be our main source of decoration for our dorm room.

Now every time we walk past a telephone booth, we grab all of the ads (avoiding repeats).  Most of the telephone booths even vaguely in the NYU London area have been emptied.  I think prostitutes are actually losing business because of us.

Every morning I wake up to seventyish pictures of  fake boobs staring me in the face.  We have quite the collection; everything from "red hot sexy muma" to "yuko Japanese model" to " sexxy black".  It can be a little embarrassing when somebody from NYU in London has to come and say, fix our windowpane.

Who needs a Princess Diana postcard or a miniature double-decker bus as a souveneir when you've got all the tart cards one could ever desire?

* Picture courtesy of my lovely, obliging roomate

" An attitude that turns man against man in a they-are-the-tourists-I-am-not equation." ( Macanell, 602)

Funny enough, an article about tourism makes me think more about Manhattan than it does London. Or rather, the reception I've gotten whenever the fact that I'm from New York City comes up in conversation with Londoners. " Ugh, I hate New york. It's so commercial" they say. "Well, where have you been?" I ask. "You know, Times Square, Rockefeller Center, Central Park. The big places." These exchanges make me appreciate the effort of the tourists to enter the "back regions" of the places they visit. It would be so exciting for me to hear that a Londoner loved Luke's Lobster Shack in the East Village or Brooklyn Bowl in Williamsburg .

This is the one aspect I would argue against Macanell: he claims that locals have a fear of outsiders penetrating their back door regions. Maybe that's the case for other people from other places, but from my experience ( and that's really the only thing any of us can judge based on, isn't it?) it makes me happy when people who are visiting New York take the time to get past The Empire State Building, The Met, and The Statue of Liberty to go explore on their own- to be "travellers" rather than "tourists".

Indeed, the "tourist" and the "traveller" are both merely visitors to a foreign place. The way Macanell talks about it, the only difference between the two is snobbery- both are outsiders, whether they attempt to enter " back regions" or stick to "front regions". But I think that attempt is crucial. I'm proud of where I live, and when outsiders take the time to get to really know the city they're visiting, I can tell.

And so when I visit a new place, I'll continue to eschew museams and monuments for restaurants, bars, and local shops. Maybe that's just me flattering my ego with disdain for fellow tourists. But i've always thought the best way to get to know somewhere I've never been is through food and drink- and this article hasn't convinced me otherwise. There's something humurous about bus tours and fanny packs,and I stand by my view that walking your way down random streets and avenues is more... authentic? Well, I'll try my best to avoid that term for the time being.

It's been thirty five years since the punk rock movement; forty five since "Swinging London". So why did I have the idea in my head that this city was going to be a hotbed of youth culture, bursting at the seams with underground fashion, music, and art?

Not that London's a dull city by any means. There's no lack of sights to be seen or fun to be had. It's just that compared to New York, it seems like a relatively conservative town. There are more pressed khakis than skin-tight skinny jeans, more prestigious museums than downtown galleries, more old-school pubs and mega-clubs than live bands at dive bars.

There are pockets of trendiness. East London's Shoreditch and Brick Lane attract throngs of belligerent hipster kids, dancing to dubstep and drinking red stripe (London's PBR, apparently.) Camden Town is like a never ending St. Marks, all street vendors and posturing punks holding up posters for their respective head shops/ record stores/ tattoo parlors.

It's just that I had such high expectations. The word London to me, in and of itself, evokes The Sex Pistols, Alexander Mcqueen, Damien Hurst. Something exotic and distant and cooler than I will ever be. But the reality is that everywhere you go is going to be different from the idea you had of it in your mind- whether that idea has negative connotations or positive ones. 

The title really says it all. This is a picture of dead birds and a hare, flanked by fruit, with a monkey and dog in the periphery  . Though this painting is by a Dutch late 17th-early 18th century artist, Jan Weenix, it resides at The Wallace Collection in London. It's one of many paintings in the collection that's subject matter is hunted animals and food.

I went to the Wallace Collection with a class, blessed with a well-known art critic as our tour guide.
Both the class and the guide seemed to be appalled by the violence of said paintings; however, I found myself oddly intrigued by them. They are vibrantly painted with rich autumnal colors, with incredible attention to detail. That something so inherently gross could be depicted in such an aesthetically pleasing way seemed counterintuitive, and I think the best art gives one that feeling. Moreover, the contrast of the fruit- which is made to look unbelievably appetizing- and the bloody carcasses is striking.

The overall impression I got looking at these paintings is that they were a reflection of what imagery aristocracy associated with wealth and indulgece in the early 18th century. These paintings are lucid and tactile, presenting the fruits of a hunt proudly. Perhaps the modern viewer might find " A monkey and a dog beside dead game and fruit" weirdly morbid, but to the intended audience, it represented a cornucopia of earthly delights.

How is my life in London different from my life in New York?

It's definitely more expensive.  It's hard not to start thinking of pounds as dollars, because everything's priced that way- until it hits you that you just spent nine bucks on a drink that in New York would have cost four. Thank God nobody tips here; not in cabs, not in restaurants, not in bars... even if I spend twice as much money in London, that at least helps ease my burden. In America, I'm a gross over-tipper; if people did tip here, I'd be one embarassingly stingy mofo.

I drink WAY more here than I do at home. I think part of that's the culture, part of its that my roomate's Russian, and part of it's that I don't have class on thursday or friday.  My drink of choice as of late is a bottled cider, available at Tesco, with an 8.3% alc per volume content.  That means I'm drunk after only three drinks and five pounds. Excellent.

There's a movie theatre here called the Curzon where I've been spending a lot of my time.  My best friend in London's a cinema studies major, so she's always showing me trailers for independent movies I would never know about otherwise.  Some are amazing; some are terrible.  But it's always a fun way to spend a saturday afternoon; grab a macaroon and a coffee, watch the movie, talk it over at the bar after while you have a drink and people-watch.

I'm taking a class called "Reporting The Arts" which entails going to the theatre every thursday, then writing reviews of what we've seen over the weekend.  It's great because that's something I would never do on my own time, and it's really opened me up to a new interest.  My proffessor always chooses incredibly different performances to attend from week to week; one thursday it's a Noel Coward Play, the next a West End Musical, the next an avant-garde Icelandic theatre troup's rendition of Faust.

Speaking of classes. They are once a week, but are also three hours long.  This would be much more tolerable if it was easier to find a decent coffee in London; sadly, I've yet to find one in the vicinity of my classes. I made the mistake of taking two literature classes, The English Novel in The Ninteenth Century and Writing London.  Writing London's a misleading title; it should be called Reading London.

Anyway, that means its not uncommon for me to have to read two novels per week. My English Novel in The Ninteeth Century proffessor's idea of a quiz is reading aloud random quotes from the text and asking us to identify who said this to who when in the 300 page novel. Speaking of which, Dickens is calling my name. Cheers.

( The picture above was taken by my roomate one frumpy sunday afternooon when I was doing laundry, eating cereal, and reading Wuthering Heights.)

I've never considered myself a stereotypical, obnoxious American- not when I'm in America, and especially not when I travel abroad.  I keep the map stashed as much as possible, talk a few octaves lower than normal, and eat whatever's put in front of me.

This friday, all that cultural self-conciousness finally flew out the window.  It's been a long time coming; slowly but surely, for the last few weeks I've stopped really caring what locals might think about me.  It started on the tube, where Londoners have the tendency to stare silently, straight ahead, without any acknowledgement of those around them ( even if those around them happen to be  friends, family, or romantic interests).  Now, I could spend every tube ride trying to fit in, being bored out of my mind.  And for the first five or so, that's exactly what I did.  Until I realized I'd rather be talking to my friends about a movie I saw last week or asking them where they bought those gorgeous earrings.

But it wasn't until my plane ride from London to Glasgow that I truly realized how badly my friends and I stuck out- and I was suprised by how little I minded.  It was my roomates birthday, our first trip outside of the city,  it was 5AM and we were already two drinks into the vacation.  We were excited, and you know what? Excited, slightly tipsy Americans are loud!

So there we were, the three of us.  Laughing loudly, cursing loudly, eating loudly, dressed loudly.  It's funny, though.  For every expected eye-roll you get on the tube or the bus, you also get a friendly chuckle or interjection.  At the airport, my friends and I met an entrepreneur  from Canada in the process of starting a cider-making business who heard us talking and joined the conversation. On the bus, we were complaining about how straight men can't seem to figure out how to make themselves presentable, and a gay couple interjected their opinions on men's clothing.

When you visit a new city, you have to absorb your surroundings, and often the best way to do that is by not making a fuss and trying to avoid anything touristy as much as possible.  But once your fairly familiar with said city, the best way to meet new people and enjoy it fully is by being yourself.  And what I am is a person with a foul mouth who laughs too loudly and has god awful table manners.

“However absurd the intense reactions provoked by small (and mute) foreign elements may seem, the path is at least familiar to our personal lives. There, too, we may find ourselves anchoring emotions of love on a way a person butters his or her bread…”

Before I came to London, I thought my main criticism of the city would be that it’s too closely similar to New York. We travel to experience something different, something that makes us feel out of place, and from time to time I still find myself wondering whether I should have chosen a more “exotic” or “foreign” location; somewhere I don’t speak the language, where I’ve never been, where the customs are nothing at all like my own. And yet somehow, in a city that’s by all standards very much like where I’m from, I've found myself chasing after what seems like the only cab in East London screaming at the driver to please take my money, thinking about how much I miss New York.

I’ve spent the greater part of my life genuinely believing that Europe had it all over America. Never once did I think that the things I detested about the states- huge department store/ corporations, a money-driven mentality, the fast paced daily grind- would be what I found myself complaining about the lack of in London.

Yes, I feel a bit like a petulant child complaining about such petty things. And there are plenty of “small (and mute) foreign elements” of London I find myself falling in love with every day. But the experience of actually living abroad- not just visiting for a week- has shown me that perhaps I’m more a creature of comfort than I’d like to think. As much as I’d like to will myself to love every cultural difference, I just can’t. I don’t find anything quaint about having to do back-to-school shopping at six different stores, all scattered throughout various areas of the city. It doesn’t seem so interesting that the tube station closes at midnight and the cabs refuse to stop for you when you’re freezing and drunk and tired and just want to crawl into your bed, which is located about an hours walk away.

I found a 24 hour deli about a week ago, the first I’d seen since I’ve arrived in London. How glorious it was to buy and Orangina and a Kit-Kat at four in the morning! I actually gave the guy behind the counter a handshake and told him he should be proud to work at such a fine establishment.

The truth of the matter is, London’s not New York. And I don’t want it to be- if I did, why would I study abroad in the first place? But perhaps living abroad is as much about learning what you love about home as it is learning what you love about where you happen to be.