Whether of Not the Weather will Stop Me.

After a month of dithering I finally got round to renting a London bicycle or Boris Bick, named after their creator: the blonde mop for hair, conservative, etonian Major of London Boris Johnson who enjoys shouting 'Lefty Tosser' at members of the Occupy movement (Take note Neil Kerwin). The weather played no small part in my decision, specifically the prospect of rain. Now, the stereotype that it always rains in England exists because it is true... just not as true as you think.

Warmth and sunshine, reminiscent of the family reunions I attended during the English summers of the 1990s, greeted me my first week in England. Next week however (when a lot of my friends from American University arrived), clouds and showers turned umbrellas inside out and London's uneven pavements into small ponds for ducks to swim in. Sadly, my nice long umbrella wouldn't fit in my suitcase (some things have to get left behind) and the cheapest umbrellas cost around £13. Forget that. One thing I'm glad I packed was my very heavy and windproof Barbour jacket with pockets that are bigger on the inside. Even if my hair got wet in the torrents of rain my body remained dry. It receives the Charles Merrick's endorsement (As well as the endorsement of Charles, Prince of Wales). Seeing the best of the English weather and the worst has lead me to draw some conclusions.

Firstly is the fact that rain in Britain is frequent, but is on and off. By that I mean when it rains, it rains, but very different weather follows when it's over. That may mean a 20 minute shower followed by sunshine or it may mean a week of sun gets replaced by a week of rain within the space of a few hours. The sun didn't appear for an entire week at one point and on another occasion this week no clouds were visible. As I write this blog the top of The Shard is completely obscured by cloud, but it still hasn't rained in three days. However, that could literally change at any moment. When it rains, it rains, but it doesn't more often than you think.

The other observation I have made regards my potential relocation here upon graduation. People recommend you spend a winter in a country you want to live in if you hate the cold (and summer for people who hate a very hot/humid climate). The thing is, the Gulf Stream that keeps Great Britain wet also keeps it much warmer than it would otherwise be. I mean, the country is on the same longitudinal plain as Canada and I know Boston is colder than London right now. Whilst I might have to give up a lot of snowfall, I do know that even if the temperature dropped a few more Centigrade (Which is a better system than Fahrenheit) I would be fine... partly because it isn't very cold, but mostly because it is stylish for posh men to wear jumpers (aka sweaters) under their sports jackets or put on three piece suits. This isn't a declaration that I will move to Britain later in life, but it is worth noting that it is possible to enjoy riding a Boris Bike in November and probably in December as well.

P.S. As I wrote my second to last sentence it started raining...great.

Being a Member of the Bourgeoisie

Those of you who know me know I am a capitalist and espouse the ideals of wealth and sophistication. In America that proved easy, sitting cross legged on a chair in a tweed jacket smoking a pipe reading a respected newspaper. In England, that image doesn't really come easily because practically no one does that publicly and you come across as an eccentric dandy with no place in this world or Tory Toff that the lower classes get angry at. You may find a man in a tweed jacket reading a newspaper, but that normally happens in Internet cafes nowadays that does not befit a member of the bourgeoisie. The fact is that Britain is not made up of cigar smoking, posh sounding, rich, wine tasting, members of the bourgeoisie. Most people in Britain are beer drinking, foul mouthed, fag smoking people who get drunk down the pub. These are all stereotypes so please take them with a grain of salt, but can be applied to the population at large. That said, just because the sophisticated bourgeoisie don't appear in public doesn't mean they don't exist. And tonight I found one of their unsurprising hideouts: The theatre (with the r before the e because that is the correct spelling).

Tonight I managed to grab a ticket for Hedda Gabler at The Old Vic Theatre with my godmother (Don't judge; family friends are important and provide free bubbly). I enjoyed the play itself and won't bore you with a review of that, but rather the atmosphere. Members of the lower classes could be found in their T-shirts, but never mind them; I was nicely dressed in a button down shirt and peacoat, a nice red paper poppy in my lapel. And when the lights went down I couldn't see them anyway. The fact remains I was not the only well-dressed person and all the staff were very sharply dressed to remind people that theatre is a cultural thing to be subsidized so the rich can enjoy it for less at the expense of taxpayers. Those were the days, when the rich governed in their own interest (I'm not saying those were the good days, just the old days). But there were also bars at The Old Vic selling overpriced drinks with nice tables and a posh, sophisticated atmosphere. You could even buy drinks for intermission before the show started that would be on a table waiting when you came out at half time. And I'm not talking about fattening pub beer, but wine and champagne in nice glasses.

I had been worried with only pubs and cafes in sight that the bourgeoisie would be gone from Britain. I knew the ideal Bourgeoisie Britain was gone (if it had existed at all), but I had been hoping for some vestiges of it. Fortunately for me, the world of wine tasting, well dressed, posh speaking people isn't dead, just hiding, only opening its doors to those with means and connections. If I do come to Britain in the future, it will take time, but I'm sure I'll find my way into Bourgeoisie at a theatre bar.

Culture Shock Part II: Chocolate

It has been a couple of weeks since my last blog post mainly because I've been busy with an essay and learning a new citation format. And in my last Culture Shock blog I talked about how the Americans did something better than the British and now need to rectify that. With this blog I hope to kill two birds with one stone.

 

One of the more tragic things about leaving the U.K. at the age of three was that I couldn't eat Cadbury's Chocolate, one of the best, if not the best, massed produced chocolates in the world. Now that I'm back I spend between £0.70 to £2.00 every day on Milk Bars, Twirls, Flakes, Crunchies, Wispas and a few other bars. And the simple fact is that they are better in every single way to the stuff I've been eating in America. To start there is the cost. A Twix Bar set me back $1.25 in the States if I brought it from the vending machine or a CVS store. Here a similar sized (and better tasting) Twirl Bar costs £0.70 ($1.13). Sometimes the phrase you pay less for lower quality isn't true. And that cost is including the 20% sales tax (Provided chocolate isn't under the VAT exemption for food) so really it's $1.13 English chocolate vs. $1.37 D.C. chocolate. That pays for itself in one working week for a chocoholic like myself.

 

The only complaint I really have about the chocolate itself involves the vending machines, which keep the chocolate bars refrigerated to stop them melting. If you eat chocolate then you know it tastes best when a little has melted onto your fingers. So whenever I buy vending machine chocolate I have to put it somewhere warm and wait. TORTURE! However, behind this agony lurks a reassuring fact. The first is that chocolate actually melts at room temperature so companies add a sort of wax so the chocolate keeps for longer. Clearly Hershey adds a lot of the stuff to their chocolate, which sits on store shelves for days on end. Cadbury must use some, but the chocolate sells faster here and when it doesn’t; it gets refrigerated in a machine. Any other complaints I have centre around me and how because I am no longer a child my heavy consumption of chocolate will affect my waist line and probably increase the acne on my face. But I blame my parents for that one (But they are the ones paying for my trip here so I can eat chocolate so they're still great).

 

So in comparison to U.S. chocolate the U.K. is better in both price and quality. A friend once said that Hershey is good for when you want a cheap but bad thing like a McDonald's hamburger. But why would I want a McDonald's hamburger if I could get a restaurant hamburger for less than the McDonald's one? Americans just don’t make good chocolate. The only good thing to come out of the American company Kraft buying Cadbury (A tragic moment in history) will be if they successfully launch the actual stuff in America (not the Hershey made stuff that sells for $2.37 plus tax in the states).

On that note an economics point (You knew this was coming). I have observed that the British don't really mind who makes their stuff or provides their services so long as they do it well. We don't mind Indians making their cars and Germans making our trains because they are good at it. However, we do mind Indians with thick accents providing help over the phone because their accents can make them hard to understand and we certainly don't like Americans making our chocolate because Americans are rubbish at it.

So, to my friends in the US I have this to say. When I return to the US I will have in my possession several bags of English chocolate. Get some before I give all the chocolate I don't eat first away.

King's College: Unorganised Order

So I've gone to King's College for a few weeks now and started to settle into my routine. However, I'm finding this routine needlessly complicated and confusing. Most of us have heard of "organised chaos" which involves a framework that leads to mayhem, but is meant to function that way, like a busy restaurant. Well the British university system is just the opposite of that: the unorganised system that produces a sense of order which I simply call "unorganised order."
 
Let's start with King's College as a location: it isn't one. Rather the campus consists of buildings few and far between one another. Some buildings are south of the Thames, some are on the Strand. My student accommodation puts me twenty minutes from my nearest class (And people at AU complain of the walk from Leonard Hall to Kreeger). And public transport takes just as long, so people should only use it if they are lazy or the heavens have opened up for the next twenty minutes. As for the buildings themselves well... King's Building has twelve other buildings attached to it and navigating between buildings makes the old McKinley building at American University seems as straightforward as a prison cell block. I guess that’s what happens when a university that educated less than 3,000 students a year adds 30,000 more over 25 years (and that is why the U.K. government had to raise the cap on tuition fees to £9,000 or $14,500).
 
Then we come to the classes themselves. Some classes do have a degree of structure like assigned readings, essays, and short answers. But those are the exceptions that prove the rule. In three of my four modules I have been presented with a list of books to read. One of these lists is twenty pages long and on day one my professor said we would be mad to try and read all of them. The thing is, I have no idea which ones to read and have no means of getting 95 per cent of these books. Maybe people can find some in the library (which is somewhere else in London), but again, that's the exception that proves the rule.
 
So how does this system keep order? Simple: have a strict policy about how to pass a module. In my case as a study abroad student, that involves handing in essays before their deadlines. If I’m late by 10^-9999999999 of a second I get a zero. For regular students the same applies, but the essays normally aren't graded. They need to be done so the students can sit the final exam which will be graded.
 
It's incentives like these that keep order in an otherwise unorganised world. This might prove the closest thing that we get to anarchism: no order, but very serious consequences for those who don't step up. So in this regard, I think I prefer the US academic system.

Sorry, but I'm not Apologizing for the Empire

Ian McKellen once said in an interview that whereas Australian's ask tourists if they are enjoying themselves, he says sorry to tourists about everything when they come to England. The moment I heard this I realized I do say sorry for quite a lot as do many of the people here. In fact, I was walking through the National Gallery (The British one, not the Smithsonian one) and I stepped on part of a woman's foot. The woman immediately apologized and elected to move a few inches so I could better see the picture. Whenever people bump into me, I often apologize as well (I think, you might want to challenge my humility on that one). So the question really is: Why?

Frankly, we do have a lot to apologize for: The food, the weather, drunken British tourists, the public transport, football hooligans, the supposedly fire proof doors that require twice as much force to open, etc. This habit of apologizing may just be due to manners being beaten into us as children. However, I have a sneaky suspicion that it may just be guilt over ruling a quarter of the world. Following the Second World War Mr. Hitler made empires highly unfashionable what with his Third Reich and mass murder. Over the next twenty years the British and other European nations got rid of their imperial belongings willingly or otherwise. And then following independence a lot of nations collapsed or failed to grow. And since blaming native rulers for their country’s woes has proven very politically incorrect, the blame falls on former masters. So really the British have developed this habit because they feel they mismanaged the world and are the root cause of most of the world’s woes today. And this explains why apologizing for America is very politically incorrect in the US, they haven't controlled other countries quite like us Europeans.

Whilst I appreciate the culture of apologizing for things that aren't their fault: I take beef with people who apologize for the British Empire. Sure there were terrible things done in the British Colonies (Hitler didn't invent concentration camps, just the gas chambers) there were plenty of good things the empire did such as enforcing the abolition of slavery and ending cannibalism in New Zealand (So “Lord of the Rings" could be filmed there). Plus, much worse empires have existed (cough, Belgium, cough) and some weren't even European (cough, Mayans, cough).

Discussing this issue in detail is too much for one blog, so I leave you with this fact: I will not apologize for the British Empire, but I will apologize for not apologizing.

 

 

Quick Observations

This has been my third weekend in London and I'm getting to know the place a bit. Since my blog in sinks was a bit Polonius and mundane, I thought I'd try my hand at quick observations about Great Britain. Here it goes... in no particular order:

Cigarettes: In.
Calling cigarettes "Fags": Probably not. I'll get back to you on that one.
Bankers Bonuses: Out.
Fast Food: Worse.
Chocolate: So, so, much better. I might need a full blog on this.
Flossing: What's that?
Concentrate Juice: In.
Public Transport: More efficient than I thought.
Pregaming: In, but it's called "Preloading".
Countryside: Very pretty.
Football: Actually involves feet hitting a ball.
Old white male professors: The stereotypes are true! I might need a full blog on this.
Fish and Chip shops: They do exist and advertise the fact that they have air conditioning.
Little Chef: Why does it still exist?
London Underground: Still haven't blown my nose to find black spots on my handkerchief.
The Church of England: Too many churches, not enough members.
Chocolate: I'll say it again. So, so much better.
Television: More adverts than I expected.
Accents: Cooler and more of them.

Pubs: A Good London Lite Draft

This blog will take a while.

The quint essential thing for tourists in Britain involves going to the nearest pub, ordering a beer and some traditional British food like “Fish and Chips” or “Steak and Kidney Pudding.” I personally like the idea of fish, chips, and a good lite draft beer, but it can be a little embarrassing behaving like a tourist when you have a British Accent. So, I took some Americans to the pub to make me look like a good person and to make them look like good tourists. I’ve now done that twice and to be honest, the first time wasn’t great.

Statistics show that since the century began around 10,000 pubs have closed down due to smoking bans, high taxes on alcohol, and an increase in the number of restaurants that serve better food for a lower price. The fact remains that the when an American (his name was Sam) and I went to a pub, our pints cost me £8 ($12.96). Thirteen dollars for two pints of Beer! Still, at least my American friend got the second round and we didn’t have to tip. We didn’t get a menu at this pub; we got a piece of green paper with overpriced food on it. The fish and chips we both bought cost £10.50 ($17.01) and bigger portions are easy to find. No wonder pubs are closing if they have to charge that much for so little.

The whole affair proved very disorganized to the point that a restaurant owner in the US would have had a nightmare of a time keeping track of everything. You could pay as you went or set up a tab (a handwritten paper bill that can probably get lost very easily). Pubs also lack any sense of uniformity. Servers sometimes look like customers and the tables and chairs are all different. Unprofessional might be an understatement… which is fitting considering this is Great Britain. I’ve been to three other pubs at this time (which had better and cheaper food than the first pub I went to with the American), but disorder was the order of the day wherever I went. And this theme held true when I started travelling through London.

Pubs are really just a metaphor for London: disorganized and quite possibly overrated by foreigners. Manhattan suits people with OCD very well, what with its perfectly straight and properly numbered roads. London probably wouldn’t. The city of London considers strait roads a novel concept. The roads enjoy twisting and turning and veering in another direction entirely at the nearest roundabout (aka traffic circle). And the straight streets like to change their names for no particular reason whatsoever, they just do. Albert Embankment turns into Lambeth Palace Road at a roundabout where you can also turn onto Lambeth Road and Lambeth Bridge. You can travel on the Strand, Fleet Street, Ludgate Hill, and Cannon Street without ever turning left or right. Who thought this was a good idea! Actually, no one really, which explains the state of London. Londinium may have been planned, but contemporary London just sort of happened. Buildings that once housed the British government and the Royal Navy now host the London Fashion Show. People built houses and palaces where they wanted and then roads were inserted in the leftover space as far as I can tell. And I think governance and culture has something to do with it.

The French are very proud of their large straight roads that were planned very well under Napoleon III, France’s last absolute monarch. But they only exist because the French government could do as it pleased without any opposition from the masses whose houses had to be destroyed to make way for the Champs-Élysées. The British Monarch would never have been able to get away with such stuff due to the nature of Constitutional Monarchy.  By modern standards, people would not consider British parliamentary democracy a democratic body, but rather a way for the rich to control the country and annoy the king or queen. If enough rich people didn’t want part of their constituency moved to make way for a new road then grand infrastructure projects didn’t get passed. And the rich didn’t bother with roads since parliament was much too busy running an empire to concern itself with London. That sort of thing got left to others. The one time they did get involved in London’s infrastructure in the 19^th century concerned the sewers and they only addressed that because no one in Parliament could stand the smell of the Thames. The result: London just grew naturally.

It is confusing and disorganized and I love it (in part because you feel you deserve a medal for getting anywhere). And that is why I am going to the pub this evening.