Lucy1111's blog

For the last blog entry of the Art of Travel course, I am offering some final thoughts and evaluations. 

I’m happy I took this online Gallatin blog-based course. When I was in Paris over fall break, I had an entry coming up about place and as I was walking down the cobbled streets with my good old friend, I was going over the several ideas I had of what to write on. In my opinion, I told my friend, a blog is somewhere in between a diary entry and a short essay. It’s about the same length as a diary entry and they both have a sort of informal feel in how they read, but like a short essay I pointed out, blogs usually come full circle- what you start out on and explore for a few paragraphs ends up having to do with the message you walk away with. Why is this a satisfying course to be in? It’s satisfying because the material is relevant to our everyday musings, while for me at least the format challenged me to think about the significance or the message underlying the menial everyday thinking trails. 

I really took advantage of some things the city had to offer like plays and musicals and concerts and all the rest. I realize here, I had two or three things like that going on each week. I grew up in a city that has just as many great things to offer and I rarely take advantage of them. I want to go out to discover this side of my city and take advantage of these sort of events more than I have in the past when I’m back home. 

I think years from now I’ll remember how scared I was when I got here and thought “Oh no what am I doing?” despite how sincere my decision to come felt. And I’ll remember how not only did I survive, I thrived. I’ve made some very close friends that have made my day to day life in London what its been. I’ve done better in any premed course that I’ve taken so far and I’ve established a pace to my life that feels like my own. 

I hope in the future NYU will make low cost housing options and include my room which is a fifth of the size of everyone else’s as one of them. 

Photo by me.

If you are planning to study in London, I would recommend it. This post, however, is meant to give some advice, some things that would have been helpful if I had known in advance, some things I discovered and some tips about preparing for the months ahead in your study abroad adventures. 

 

Take advantage of the virtual cash. NYU gives fifty pounds per semester for students to partake in a wide range of cultural activities from exhibitions at the Tate to winter carols and The London Eye. 

 

Take a class in the theatre arts discipline. Every week each students will get a ticket to a different theatre production, which are great in a city whose arts are so central. 

 

Buy a 10 pound bicycle the first week you arrive from a dumpy old antique shop. Especially if you are Traveling in the Spring semester. The tube is expensive and NYU in London’s campus is central enough that everywhere you’d want to go would be a perfect biking distance away.

 

Save money before coming. The pound is valuable and like any great city, London is expensive. 

 

Don’t rely on Netflix or any movie streaming websites because they are not accessible here. 

 

I didn’t do this and I am grateful so don’t plan to go to five or six different countries over fall/spring break. Go to one or two. Getting to know a place is a valuable experience, it’s not nearly as exhausting  and so what if you can’t say you went to 100 places overnight. 

 

If you go to Paris for break, go to Angelina’s for hot chocolate and Monte Blanc. 

 

If you want a part time job on campus, make sure you apply weeks before you anticipate being here. There are not many jobs available and they fill up fast.

 

Make sure you know how much foreign fees you banks and especially your credit cards charge for purchases over seas. Usually it’s a percentage and can sometimes be as high as 30%. On that note, call your credit card companies before you arrive to tell them you’ll be traveling. I did this but some people who didn’t had all their cards cancelled and it was a big mess trying to get new ones activated and in their hands again. 

 

When you plan to go home, pocket the perspective you’ve gained from being abroad and it will be yours forever. 

On Thanksgiving day, I had the chance to see the Philharmonic with “The Planets” playing at the Royal Albert Hall. The music was lovely and as I have recently taken to classical music, buy “50 Greatest Classical Music Hits” on Itunes, the evening was most enjoyable. A young lady in the tightest white floor-length dress had a solo violin part in the first couple songs. As I was watching the musicians do their thing, I began to wonder where in fact one is meant to be looking as the concert goes on. Maybe since this type of an event, unlike an art show, is auditory sensation oriented, one may be just as well with their eyes shut. I realized though that something was happening that didn’t seem sensation oriented, but which very much did happen to me when I was at the Louvre over Fall break; thoughts that I had while in class or in a conversation with a friend weeks before were making their way into some spontaneous stream of consciousness.

It wasn’t at all a boredom-induced brainstorm though, maybe I could describe it as enlightened- though still, the mechanism, in which these seemingly random musings were making themselves to the forefront of my thinking motor, is baffling in hindsight. The things was that the thoughts were not so random. They had this in common: each consideration had before the enlightened moment been conclusion-less. The original moments in which the ideas had entered my brain was not accompanied by some satisfactory click in which it could leave most comfortably. Each though had essentially been left unfinished and what I found miraculous as I sat listening to “The Planets” play, was that the stream flooding in found its way through logic bouncing back and forth until finally it had been solved. Most of these thoughts had only been missing one or two steps too. When I told my mom, she said “Maybe that has something to do with why people do cultural activities”.

Still though, what both the string of reflection at the Louvre and the string I had sitting in the audience at the Royal Albert Hall, had in common was that I was alone. In the galleries in France, I had mostly been with my high school friend but at the moment I specifically remember where things started clicking, we had been separated- not in a frantic way, simply we had wondered our own directions and I was looking at art alone. My roommate meant to come to the Philharmonic but something came up and I went alone. When I came to London I wanted to figure out a pace to my life that was void of pushes and pulls from outside myself and maybe while I will have to figure out a new sort of pace to my back-in-NYC life soon, I have realized the importance of my independence.

(Photo by me)

At first when De Botton introduced Maistrian’s Journey around the bedroom I imagined what that would be like in my tiny little dorm room. Our window looks out onto Mecklenburgh Square and is picture perfect from the outside. It is tiny though. I thought it might mean shifting through my bookshelf and reading a paragraph on Renaissance art and picking up my journal to brainstorm from where I left off last time. Maybe I could even get a chance to shift through my filofax and remember a friend who I haven’t called in too long and schedule to work on this blog.

I guess I imagined wrong. De Botton had the same issue with his bedroom being too small and he decided to supplement the assignment by using his neighborhood as grounds for traveling. It was also mentioned that some critiques of Maistran’s found his exploration of his dog and partner cheap. Maybe exploring a book inside my bedroom would constitute the same cheapness. When I first walked into the bedroom here, I noticed right off the bat how pretty the white light looked bouncing off the bleached sheets NYU set up for us was. I’m working right now illuminated by the same light source.

I understand that the assignment bring to light “the notion that the pleasure we derive from a journey may be dependent on the mind set we travel with than the destination we travel to” but I would also want to ask, isn’t there an element of that mindset that derives from pure emotional reaction in reaction to new environments. In De Botton’s journey around the neighborhood he picked up on a Gravy billboard, which originally made perfect sense to me. When I first arrived, I was always doing a double take when it came to billboards. The idea of a billboard is something I am so comfortable with, having spent 22 years in NYC. Somehow the image or the way it was presented here and I can’t quite put my finger on just what it was but it was different and it made me look twice. There was really no mindset in the case I’m bring up about myself here- I expected to see billboards but was disoriented by some subtle and most likely cultural difference that was represented. I think part of getting to the bottom of why we react to new stimuli leads us to interesting cultural conclusions but I also think the initial hey that’s surprising is a genuine physical reaction.

He told me he was going to the British Museum to see an exhibition on the Book of the Dead and explained a bit about the Ancient Egyptians’ journey to the afterlife. That was today after recitation when my elderly Organic Chemistry Professor taught me how to identify molecules by various experimental techniques... Infrared, Mass Spectroscopy, and NMR.

Prof. U is something else. I’ve never met anyone like him, although the closest I could come would be my English Grandfather, Roger Charlesworth. They both wear hearing aids, dress modestly and call me young Lucy. My relationship with Prof U has developed over the semester as I worked increasingly harder on mastering the work. The class here is small- smaller than any premed class I’ve taken before and this helps build familiarity between classmates and between us and him.

In Monday night class, Contemporary Politics and British Culture, our Professor told us the first day that the English say exactly what they don’t mean. Translation: If a Brit said “Don’t you want another two minutes with the guest?”, he or she means, “I know you couldn’t stand another second with our guest”. I had to get used to Prof. U’s use of sarcasm before I could follow the whole of lectures and since I have, I know I’m going to miss his style very much.

In Anna Quindlen’s “Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City”, she describes English as the type who will be happy to give out direction, when asked, but who do not offer them automatically and who do not pry for further conversation after the deed’s done. Prof U, like Quindlen’s illustration of the average Londoner, is extremely polite. Where I would say he did something (anything- like use the smaller atom to bond with C) because he’s experienced and therefor efficient, he would say he did it because he’s lazy. I hope the idea I’m portraying here is not that he’s apologetic, but that he’s witty and self-deprecating.

Either way Prof. U has made my time here more full. When I came I wanted to do well in Organic Chemistry and by that above all else I mean do what ever it took to learn the best I can. In the past premed Professors have seemed unapproachable. Prof. U on the other hand is as welcoming and unlike many American science Professors I had in the past. He is unlike most actually, but he sure has his English streak loud and clear.

The first day, September 1, 2010, when I arrived in London, I went to the Brunswick center to buy lunch. Gail the student accommodation’s manager lady told me to walk to this ally way to get there and to take a different, more popular, route at night. Through the ally I went. Before October it hadn’t been trimmed, so at that point the ally way was brimming with leaves and twigs which made the narrow path even harder to get through.

Brunswick center it sort of like a tiny outdoor mall in an American town. It’s about ten steps above ground level and has all sorts of American labels being sold from Starbucks to the Gap. Waitrose, the better-than-Tesco (quality-wise) supermarket is the main attraction. On my first day to the center, I bought my phone here, as well as my lunch. On the weekend all my roommates were traveling and I stayed back, I treated myself to a candle from the houseware store there. Super-drug sells fine toothpaste and is also where I can go to refill some money onto my phone. To get to the gym which I’ve grown so faithful to, I walk through Brunswick on the way.

The whole time I’ve been here, I’ve traveled up and down the stairs past French connection (which is definitely better here than in NY) and along through till the exit, which situates itself in front of a small theatre called Renoir. When I first arrived, "Toy Story 3" was playing , which made me really happy since I missed it in NY before I left. Everyday I would walk by the theatre and think, “oh I really want to see that”. I could never work up enough umf to go alone and I ended up missing their screenings of it all together.

When my friend Mary Charles, who is with me in Paris now, came to London last weekend I showed her the little theatre and we worked together to memorize all the names of what was showing. Later we looked up our options online and decided to attend at 10pm showing of “Another Year”. The theatre also sells DVDs and their options are quite great. Even though “Another Year” was super long and pretty strange, I’m glad I figured out what Renoir is like because having an artsy movie theatre in your neighborhood is the best.

Just arrived in Paris. I’m sitting on a dinky little bed in a dinky little hotel called Belfort. I’m with my friend Charles who is an old high school friend and currently attends university at St. Andrews in Scotland. She met me in London three days ago, where we spent our tie together at museums, galleries and the library. Basically I was doing all the same things I’ve up until now been doing in London except with this friend of mine that is from New York.

We took a train down to Paris early this morning. The Eurostar felt very fast and it might be because I slept. When we got here, the time went forward another hour, which means my best friend (who is in california) and I are now nine hours apart! When Charles and I got on the tube I noticed myself doing something similar to what I was doing so often when I first arrived in London. I was looking down, almost to avoid all the information coming in so fast, instead of looking up to try and make sense of it.

I remember after a few days of being in London, I was starting to notice new things on old walks. I would walk towards Bedford Square (where school is) and even now but at a much lesser rate than before I would find aspects along the walk that I hadn’t picked up on. It’s as if my body knows how much information it can process at a time like it knows how many alcoholic beverages it can. And when it’s had enough for the moment it avoids more or even when it may even decide to hold off on more because it has something its saving up. You can’t write an essay if you’re drunk the same way you can’t navigate to your new hotel in a foreign place if you’re too tired form processing all the new information.

I’m excited to be here with Charles too. It’s so convenient that we have the same fall break. We both don’t know the city very well at all so it’s as if we’ll be getting to know it together. It was nice hosting in London but this week will have a different character to it which I’m also looking forward to. If anyone has any suggestions of what to do while we’re here, bring ‘em on.

I am reading Imagined London: A Tour of the World’s Greatest Fictional City, written by Anna Quindlen, for my second reading for the tutorial. The non-fiction work is semi-autobiographical as Quindlen steps foot in London, physically, for the very first time. She is there to promote a new book of her own and she is already in her forty’s, but she has been there many time before through her imagination and by reading all the lovely fictions written by Londoners in London.

I was quite inspired by how well read she is although she makes herself out to be a bit antisocial as a consequence. The book opens up on Shaftesbury avenue which is in SoHo and which I’ve come to know pretty well. It’s quite a busy place and its where I went to see FlashDance with my aunt when she was in town a couple weeks ago. Even though I’ve never been there in the early morning on a sunday, the way Quindlen describes it, as “tired and slightly disreputable look” which goes very well with what one might imagine it would. It’s kind of like times square on January first at 10am might look- but a lesser version. When she takes us through Bloomsbury, I was so excited, relating the images she elicits of the parks and garden and squares that I walk passed every day. She goes in and out between describing her experience there and her knowledge about the literary history. I want to read Dickens, Doyle, and Galsworthy now.

I may not get around to it before I leave in December but after reading about Quindlen’s magical experience, I realize how nice it is to discover what you’ve already seen in fiction, especially in a city like London. Quindlen also mentions how the blue circular plaques outside historical buildings where important individuals used to live when she brings up the Bloomsbury group and the Woolfs. Just the other day I was having a conversation with my Organic Chemistry Professor about chloroform, one of the original anesthetics, and he mentioned that the blue plaque on the block where I go to school everyday commemorates the man who first used chloroform on patients going into surgury. Quindlen pays special attention to the signs and can tell a lot from them, I’d be curious what else I could learn by paying more attention to them.

Instead of going to Bobst, the place I normally would with a ten page paper to research and write in forty-eight hours, I got a chance to head over to the British Library instead. I registered last weekend and told my mom later that night which she replied to by saying, “The British Library is a big deal”. I can tell it’s a big deal because it looks halfway between a library and a museum. It also has a gift shop where I bought my mom an original copy of “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground: A facsimile of Lewis Carroll’s original manuscript” which I thought she’d enjoy.

What’s up with the British Library though? You know you cannot take backpacks into the “reading rooms”!? It’s not a loan library either. This is how it works... You come in and go straight to the underground level. There you can either check your coat and back or “rent” a free locker. I’ve done both, but I would recommend the locker because the people working the coat check are miserable. I mean I would be too, but still. You have to put your bag mainly away, but also pens, and any drinks or snacks too.

On the ground floor which you will pass on your way up to the reading rooms, of which I would recommend “Humanities one”, one will pass an interesting exhibition. Currently it’s “Inventing the 21st Century”. Then straight on up, you will find the cafeteria next to the humanities reading room one and you to go in here to check out and read your books. Next you’ll have to sit down at a computer, open the integrated catalogue and request them. This next part is really different actually. Once you’ve requested the books, you get them to pick up either in seventy minutes or in two days. two days if the books are off sight.

This is why planning strategically makes sense because otherwise you’ve brought all your stuff and your ready to do your research and then you just have to wait for over an hour to even get started. You can do the requesting bit online if you’ve registered (which you can also do online) so this part can be done and in the works before you get there. Upon arrival then, you would go to the pick up desk, give them your “seat number” and take the books you’ve just checked out over to wherever you’ve chosen to work. If you get thirsty there is a way to drink. They have hidden cup dispensers to the right of the water fountains just outside the reading rooms. Just stick your hand up and you can grab a triangular cup out.

Enjoy!

It is true and it make perfect sense too that the back region of any space would be the place where things “really” go on. If you want to get to know a place, which could be assumed in the case of the traveler who invested their resources in going there, the back is the best place to be to do that. I like very much that MacCannell quoted anthropologist Margaret Mead although it is also ironic, in that he is a sociologist. Before Malinowski, a founding father in the anthropological discipline, fieldwork wasn’t the “deep immersion” that it came to be and which distinguished the field from the former “armchair” anthropology. One of the reasons Malinowski’s work, in particular Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), was so influential was because it got rid of the idea that true understanding could be achieved through mere observation and instead his unprecedented theory instilled a sense that to know a culture, one had to live it.

It’s funny too because as I was reading “Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings”, I started to have this creeping feeling of embarrassment and here is why. Two weeks ago I met my Renaissance art class outside of Hampton Court Palace for an exploration of  one of the sixty palaces that belonged to King Henry IIX. We where met by guards dressed head to toe in costume and my teacher remarked, “let’s stand over here, we don’t want to get in those guys’ way”, as he refereed to one and his eight footed spier. When I was reading the article, I laughed at the bit that described the tactics tourist attractions use to insight this sense of “insider-ness” but not once did I think I was guilty of the tourist consumer behavior. This is why I am embarrassed to admit the satisfaction I felt at seeing what I did that day at Hampton Court Palace. Although satisfaction did quickly turn to disgust when I arrived at King Henry IIX’s bathroom stalls. The toilet seat was adorned with a royal green velvet cushion, but what got me was the royal poopy aroma that lingered. If the museum curators purposefully and appropriately scented the toilet room, that would be taking the whole insider thing way too far. If they didn’t, I guess I would say, once again, that the power of my imagination never ceases to amuse me.

note: The irony comes from my relating sociologists to armchair anthropologists.

I sometimes see British people that look like people from back home and it makes me think about them. After I realize my third grade babysitter definitely moved to Florida, not the UK and after realizing that the man in the trench coat is not my boyfriend paying me a surprise visit, I think about whoever came to my mind in the quick and visual misunderstanding. Sometimes I will even go so far to imagine that the British person who brought the quick image up, really is that person I am remembering. I do this for a thought exercise.
    
When you see someone you know in way that you don’t know them at all, whether it be the clothes, the swagger or just the place, it’s easier to remember what it is you do know about them. Something about this game though, besides being sort of unfair to the poor person that’s modeling for me, is that my person ends up feeling like a ghost. It’s like I’m  looking in on their world and they can’t look back, not only because they are not who I am imagining they are, but because I’m making them into this doll. The strings are sort of arbitrary. Part of the way they seem has just to do with the style of the actual individual that happens to be walking in my path.

Maybe it’s the light that made their hair that reddish brown. I mean I could remember that reddish brown anywhere though. It is the exact same as my godmother’s. What I wonder in retrospect is if the stranger really had a sneeze the same pitch as my Nancy (my godmother) or if it was just my desperate desire to make sense out of the people in my life that made me believe it was that because if enough hadn’t come to mind to make this navy-blue-sweatered-stranger seem like Nancy I probably wouldn’t have thought about her for the next ten minutes.

It is not though that I desire to reminisce for the plain old sake of reminiscing. It’s not that I’m desperately home sick. I’m just curious about what comes to mind while I dwell on the people that are touchstones in my life. I like my distance. And I think this thinking process for whatever its worth is not crazy. I think it’s a healthy way of finding inside myself what I will eventually be coming home to.

In chapter seven of Alaine de Botton’s The  Art of Travel we are introduced to Province, a region in the South of France, Van Gogh and how the two of them effect his own stay abroad. This is not all Botton does in “On Eye-Opening Art”; he also connects the experience of being where Van Gogh loved painting to a bit of what all artists do. I agree with Botton on many levels, for instance artists do create a window for the rest of us to see what they have and also we see them differently or more importantly as a result of the artists’ depictions. I also think that what the artist doesn’t depict and what art isn’t made or in other words, what’s not there tells us a lot if not just as much as what is.

Botton sort of addressed this in emphasizing the importance of the individual choice of each artist, but this idea of what’s not there or negative space has been so much a part of my experience with and understanding of art and history in London. One of the day trips I went on a couple weeks ago, was to Cambridge, where the famous university is. When there, an official tour guide tour guide showed a group including myself around and made absolutely sure we got to Kings College, where we spent a third of our whole sightseeing time. What made this bit so vital, was the chapel. Erected in the time of Henry the Eighth, there had been an enormous amount of money put into finishing it including all the stained glass windows.

During the Protestant reformation in England tons of religious work was ruined, including almost all of the stained glass windows that are pervasive in other regions of Europe, like France or Italy. No one really knows why the beautiful stained glass windows in the Kings College Cathedral at Cambridge survived but it is one of those great mysteries. The windows stretch up to the tippy top of the vaulted ceilings. The tour guide said that there were soldiers who had been able to camp out in the cathedral suring the time that most stained glass had been destroyed. It had been so cold that winter that some say the reason this stained glass hadn’t been destroyed was because it helped keep the wind out and the soldiers warm.

That would seem like a fine stroke of luck for the Art in England, but wither way it’s interesting to think about what survives, what doesn’t and why.

Bronislaw Malinowski, a founding figure in the field of anthropology, ends the first chapter of his book Argonauts of the Western Pacific1 with this quote: "The final goal ... is to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world." (p25) Malinowski is particularly well known for his contributions to fieldwork. Fieldwork is to anthropology as talking is to psychoanalysis. In other words, being on sight and working hands-on with the people who are from your place of interest defines the work in a subject which the study of human kind and comparative societies consists.

I can’t say I’ve done all this in six weeks, however I can say what I have. I’ve lived in a dorm room the size of a tea kettle with my Polish roommate and a mouse. The walk to school isn’t more than twenty minutes and along the way I buy a candy bar. There is also a post office which I’ve visited and an intersection so busy I don’t dare pass it; I’ve learned to go the long way. If I weren’t poor I’d have more of a sense of humor about it, but I am and quite frankly when people say Tokyo is the most expensive city in the world, they’re down right lying.

Actually I’ve never been to Tokyo, but I’d still find it terribly hard to believe it trumps this city. In London everything costs the same as it does and then you multiply by 1.7 (which is the current exchange rate). For example an iced mocha is 2.60 and a magnet is 1.99 and a taxi is 10 but in pounds! You wouldn’t mind spending 99 pence on the candy bar on your way to school if it didn’t really translate to almost 199 US cents.

Once at school, I don’t have to worry about being broke because I’m just there for recitation and to buy a reduced-price theatre ticket that Ruth announced in her last e-mail. Faust today!? Oh great, except how do I get to her office? In the NYU in London townhouse there are way too many staircases and floors and secret portals and I’m justing taking the elevator, even if I will get a look or two when my fellow passengers realize I’m only riding up one flight. In all seriousness the townhouse, which I might say, is a lovely place to meet for class, has two stairwells and only one goes down all the way to the basement. Once upon a time “the help” I presume may have found these stairs practical towards the commute from the basement kitchen to the even the top most floors.

Some interesting history there? More to come...
              

I read most of the book Small Island recently and it has been a really fun one or what I’ve heard some call it, “readerly”. Anyway, it’s a novel written by Andrea Levy and happens to be part of a reading list for this required class called “Issues in Contemporary British Politics and Culture”. Try saying that three times fast!

London is one of the most diverse cities in the world. Andrea Levy was born in London to her Jamaican immigrant parents. Her book was published in 2004 to great acclaim and BBC even serialized it. That’s the first  historical context and it says something about the ways in which Britain became a multicultural society.

The historical accuracy of Levy’s book makes for quite an interesting depiction of what it might be like for a young Jamaican lady- Hortense- journeying to London in post WW1 Britain. She goes to meet her husband, Gilbert, who is also from Jamaica where he resides in a white women- Queenie’s building. The novel ends with Gilbert leaving and the Jamaicans having established their own state. They go from being lodgers to where they are a part of their own all-Jamaican community. The novel is not about assimilation, It’s about integration. This is accurate.

After the emancipation of slaves, and perhaps counter-intuitively, racism began to get worse. The British economy was having a horrible time compensating for the sugar industry that up to that point had been powered through slavery. The black people were blamed for the sad state of the economy. Queenie was herself from a place pretty far outside of London and she is made to represent the white’s racist ideals. This goes to show how the empire generated racialized attitudes. There were also particularly bad attitudes towards romantic relationships between black men and white women. Black men were depicted as animals and white women were either depicted as helpless or involved as a result of their own moral inadequacy. The book addresses these fears as well in it’s illustration of a biracial affair.  

The book may feed a sort of nostalgia. Up to a certain point, 1971, most of the immigrants were from common wealth places. There was a law stating that the citizens from former colonies- such as Jamaica- were allowed free entry to Great Britain. In 1971 London was said to be 3 to 4% immigrants; in 2001 it was said to be 8%. Many of the immigrants to Britain in the last 40 years have been seeking asylum and are from various parts of Europe.

When I first arrived, I was shocked at realizing how very much automatic my life is in New York City. I said once before that I’d been born and raised there and really never left so all in all it makes sense, but still it feels unreal to admit. When I cross the street for instance I look left and then I look right.

Here, that automatic safety precaution I’d developed in order to cross the craziest intersections very well for years, has almost landed me in the emergency room several times.  In doing my research for this blog entry, I found that the ancient Romans “drove” on the left just like the Londoners do now. I don’t know what they were driving, but another interesting fact i found is that there is a Savoy street in London where the right-side rule applies. The site says that the rule was “instituted sometime after 1929, so that vehicles queuing to drop people at the theatre would not block access to the Savoy Hotel” (http://www.brianlucas.ca/roadside/). Despite that one small street that I haven’t seen yet, England is essential a left-side rule country in terms of right of way.

Maybe this is some unsaid rule but I’m realizing that people walk on the same side of the sidewalk than their cars drive in the street. I’ve gotten into seventeen and counting awkward rite of way disputes on the side walk in the last four weeks.

Why then they have their car seat on the right side, I don’t know. This last bit has given me a few heebee jeebee moments too. I mean imagine looking to the driver’s seat and there being no one there and the car is moving! I laugh at myself when this surprises me because I know better, but still it shows how automatic these ways of being are and I don’t even drive.

One last insignificant difference that I’ve found through my bodies reaction to it is the way people say hello in an informal situation. “What’s up” is the most common way I know and depending on what part of town you’re in... maybe “What’s good” too. You know what they say here? “Are you all right”! Are you all right? It’s so funny to me. I once said that to my mom at the wrong time of the month when I was a kid and got sent into time out for the day.