Random Snapshots of Life in London

St Paul's, or at least the top of it

The very small portion of the London Wall that's still around

Camden Town market

This is what Londoners do to their cars

Only in London...

Perhaps my favorite place in the city, a garden inside a church bombed in the Blitz. Graced by my friends Gabe and Lena.

A typical street. : ) It's so narrow you have to turn sideways to get through

St Bride's Church - served as inspiration for the first wedding cake, or so they say

A view of London from Hampstead Heath

...and the Heath itself

Buckingham Palace is at the end of the trees

Gabe, Jennifer, and I went to the Italian Gardens in Hyde Park - too bad it was raining

The remains of a full English breakfast: sausage, blood pudding, grilled tomato and mushroom, bubble (mashed potatoes with cabbage), baked beans, toast, and tea

A real live Banksy graffiti. If you don't know who Banksy is, he's an extremely famous London street artist. Look him up NOW.

Cardiff Pictures

The view from the bus window...looks lovely, doesn't it?

Some Welsh, with English translation. I'm not sure exactly what building this is...

Cardiff Bay

The traveling troupe: Gabe, Nami, Monique, Elaine, me, Dana, Martin, and Marta (not pictured: Jan)

The view from the top of the castle: out over the hills to the north

The Welsh love their dragons...

You can see the Millenium football stadium in the background.

See the dragon at the top? A University of Cardiff building

A Typical Day

I think the picture uploading system on this website is ridiculous and I don't even want to try to put pictures in the midst of text, so here, in a separate post, are the pictures that belong with the previous post. Enjoy.Frances Gardner House, my hall. Very attractive, I know.

Gordon Square Gardens, across from the anthropology building and where I live on sunny days

The main building, called Wilkins. The bus is not usually there; it's a museum exhibit.

Our dear friend Jeremy Bentham, perfectly preserved (except the head, which is wax) for you to see.

The distinguished (hrm) anthropology building. Despite its lack of beauty, I love it deeply.

The Egg: what a London club looks like. Seriously, even when you're there you can't see much more than this.

Classes

I think it's about time to say a little about my school life here. Because I am actually here for school...right?

I guess the first thing to say is that here, if you say 'school,' everyone looks at you funny. 'School' is all your education until you go to university, that is, primary, secondary, and A-levels. 'College' is the school you'd go to if you're not doing A-levels; I think it's roughly equivalent to a vocational school. 'University' is where I'm at. (To avoid confusion, I always now refer to Whitman as a university, which sounds so wrong to me.)

We have so few hours of class time here, usually one or two hours of lecture per week per module (course) plus one hour tutorial. I have a grand total of nine hours of in-class time per week. Though the rest of my time is not 'free' per se, it is 'empty,' and I get to decide exactly what portion of this time should be allocated for schoolwork, and what portion for exploring and going on adventures. Lecturers are pretty impersonal, are hard to find if you have any questions, are not very good at responding to emails, and don't make any effort to learn names or even to recognize who is in their classes. This is a huge change from Whitman, and kind of odd to get used to.


The anthropology library is my favorite place to study.

My first class of the week is Political and Economic Anthropology, which sounds absolutely fantastic, but doesn't live up to my expectations. The lecturer has put all his lectures online as (painfully boring) podcasts and has asked us to watch them before coming to class, so that we can spend that hour asking questions. Needless to say, attendance at these classes has dropped precipitously. The content of these lectures mostly revolves around gypsies in Hungary or Romania, with an occasional reference to other parts of Europe. I once emailed him and asked if some of the things we'd been learning could be applied to societies in Africa, for example, or Australia. He never responded.

Next is West African Ethnography, taught by an older professor who came the first day with a map of Africa that had been in the department since it was founded, and who takes a break in the middle of class to smoke. He's certainly grown on me since the first day, and is quite friendly, though painfully not technologically savvy. He is the only lecturer who does not put the readings for his class online (we have to actually use the library! gasp!) and recently one student told me that she'd emailed him over the summer and didn't hear back for three months.

Third class is Theoretical Perspectives in Social Anthropology and Material Culture (a bit of a mouthful). This is probably my favorite class because both lecturers (they tag-team it) are extremely clear and concise. This is the class that teaches us all the names we can later throw around to impress other anthropologists at parties: "I'm more of a Weber person myself...can't stand Durkheim's way of avoiding the individual" or "The way Levi-Strauss modified and built upon the foundations of Radcliffe-Brown's theory positively fascinate me" or "Oh, that is such a Geertzian 'thick description' way of describing Molly's pudding" etc.

Last is Anthropology of Media and Consumption, taught by a lecturer who must have published about fifteen hundred books already. We talk about such diverse things as coke consumption in Trinidad, second-hand shopping in London, yuppie coffee consumption in the US, domestic foods in Russia, grocery shopping in London, and Christmas everywhere. We're only just beginning media now. I love a class that take grocery shopping and TV watching as serious markers of social life.

A Typical Day in London

I wrote that title, then remembered that there is no such thing as a typical day in London. Even when you think that this has got to be the most normal day so far, you'll see something crazy, like a man walking down the street with a huge fishbowl in his hands, full of water and a plastic plant but no fish. Or a man carrying a swivel chair upside down above his head to protect his face from the rain. Or a little girl in a unicorn costume riding a bike. Even without these sightings, no day is like any other, because there are so many places to go, so much to see and do, so many people to cook food with. However, here is my attempt to make sense of it.

Wake somewhere between 8 and 10 am, depending on how late I was out last night and how early my first class is. Make peanut butter and nutella toast and a cup of tea to enjoy as I pack my bag for the day's adventures. If I have class, I walk the mile or so to campus - past five parks. The sidewalks get more and more crowded with students the farther I get, until I actually reach campus, where it's a good thing that cars are banned, because they wouldn't be able to get though anyway. I head to either pharmacology, medical sciences, biochemistry, or the anthropology building for my anthropology classes. Almost all of them take place in miniature lecture theatres (yes, they call them theatres) that hold about 40 people. I take copious notes during a lecture or I participate in the random, scattered discussion of a tutorial. Between classes, if the weather is nice, I sit in the park to eat my sandwich or do some reading. If it's rainy, I head to the anthropology library and try to snag a table where I can get some work done.

If I don't have class on this day, I plan an adventure: visit a museum, explore a new park, find a coffeeshop and people-watch, pick a destination out of my guidebook and try to find it sans map, do some errands, get some schoolwork done. These adventures always include long walks and almost getting run over by a motorcycle or cab, and usually also include picture-taking and getting slightly lost in London's mess of streets. (I'm finally getting the hang of it, though, and I've even given directions to people!) Sometimes I have a companion or two, sometimes I don't.

After my last class or the end of my adventure, it's time to head back to the hall - stopping at Unique 24, our neighborhood convenience store, if I need anything for dinner. On Tuesdays I go to The Arc to meet friends for 2-for-1 pizzas (plus a football match on the telly), and on Thursdays or Fridays I usually go to Marta and Monique's flat for dinner, where we are guaranteed good food and lots of people. It ends up that I rarely eat alone - even if I'm back in the hall, I'm cooking with flatmates and friends from elsewhere.

After dinner, I try to get some schoolwork done, but often end up surfing the web for cheap plane tickets to far-off destinations, and talking to my friends about where we should go next weekend. Of course the majority of these plans never happen, but it's good to dream.

On weekends, after dinner, we head out to a pub or, occasionally, a club. Clubs in London are Not Cheap, but they are famous - think Ministry of Sound, Fabric, etc. Last weekend we went to Egg, because it was German techno night and my two Germans friends are diehard fans. How to explain the club? Huge, with lots of staircases running in different directions connecting different dance floors, fog, lights that made shapes in the fog, laser disco balls, hundreds and hundreds of people dancing, a floor that vibrated with the loud music... Fun night, but definitely not something you can do all the time, especially if you routinely stay till 4am.

I hope this gives you at least a vague sense of London - but it doesn't include all the other odd adventures, such as eating a traditional English breakfast, visiting a friend in a hospital that looked like a hotel, going to a Russian film at a film festival, going to a play about fairies getting entangled with members of parliament...

Caerdydd

We thought it necessary to travel through the British Isles, visiting each separate part of it in turn. Of course, living in London we've already knocked off England. The next closest is Wales, so last weekend, nine of us hopped on the coach (Britspeak for a long-distance bus) at 8 am and found ourselves in the center of Cardiff three hours later. Being the smart uni students that we are, we all neglected to actually learn what there is to do in Cardiff - but no matter. It turns out there isn't much. A stroll from the bus station to the bay took us through a neighborhood of apartment blocks and wide, empty streets. Was the lack of people due to the fact that it was a Sunday morning, or because we've gotten so used to the packed crowds of London? In any case, the bay greeted us with a modern building adorned with a Welsh phrase, a fountain, Roald Dahl plaza, several bronze statues, and lots of overpriced tourist food. We were hungry; we ate the expensive food and grimaced at the waitress who laughed when we told her we were from London. Yeah, we all have foreign accents, but we LIVE in LONDON.

Our next stop was Cardiff Castle - reached by walking through what the map said was a green park, and what our senses told us was an industrial park, complete with chain-link fences, warehouses, and evil-looking dogs. The castle grounds are in the center of the city, surrounded by a high wall from the top of which you can see the city spread out below. Once upon a time, you could see the sea from the walls, but there are too many buildings in the way now. In the other direction, to the north, rolling hills extend to the horizon in typical Welsh fashion (that is to say, adorned with castles and sheep and horses). There is an ancient keep in the middle of the castle grounds, built first as a fort by the Romans - from the top of a steep spiral staircase here, too, you can see across the countryside.

What else is there to see in Cardiff? The civic buildings, all with dragons atop their domes and columns, the University of Cardiff, devoid of any sign of student life, several old but otherwise unimpressive churches, Millennium football (soccer) stadium... But by this point it was dinner time (cheap pub food) and time to board the coach back to London. Wales: check.

Museum Crawl, part 1

I don't have class from noon Tuesday until noon Thursday, which means that I spend the middle part of every week (and sometimes the weekends, too) exploring markets and museums. (If anyone ever needs to find me, there are three places I could be: a park, a market, or a museum.) Here is a first list of museums.

Museum of London A very large museum currently undergoing renovations to make it larger. They attempt to describe the history of the London area since the very first inhabitants until the Great Fire of 1666. This means that along with the normal exhibits of Roman mosaics, Saxon jewelry, and Tudor regalia, they also have the largest collection I have ever seen of swords, all recovered from the Thames. They play music appropriate to the exhibit in each room, which means that standing between rooms can be slightly confusing. Outside the museum is the last remaining section of the London Wall, originally built by the Romans in mid first century to protect the city after Boudicca burned it to the ground. It was rebuilt many times over the next millenium, but now is hardly more than a pile of stones. A very old, very lovely, pile of stones.

Sir John Soane's Museum A very cluttered museum. Sir John Soane was an architect and collector who built his house as a museum for his artifacts. It's a lovely house, full of nooks and crannies, with secret doors that open to reveal paintings, stairwells into church crypts, and skylights in every room. His artifacts are all unlabeled and more or less randomly thrown together. They range from paintings by famous British artists to pieces of sea coral to a bust of Shakespeare to bits of statuary (such as elbows or feet) and chunks of marble facade. There is even an Egyptian sarcophagus for which Soane personally outbid the British Museum. The house is kept exactly as it was when Soane lived in it - which makes me wonder, where did he sleep? In the sarcophagus? Leaning his head against a marble shoulder?

Tate Modern One of the highlights of London, they say. It was certainly informative - it taught me that I don't particularly like modern (and especially contemporary) art. Let me give you a few examples of "art": Silver objects, flattened by a steam roller, organized into thirty circles and hung from the ceiling so that they float three inches above the floor. Several hundred used bars of soap strung onto a cord. A large piece of latex covered in red sawdust and stretched out from the gallery wall. A video of a woman pouring blood over her naked body and rolling around in feathers and down. Canvases sprayed with blood and cut with nails. A huge table and chairs tall enough to walk under. An animation of a woman reading a book out loud. A collection of Soviet propaganda posters. Two pieces of scrap metal precariously balanced in a corner. An uprooted palm tree lying on the floor, surrounded by collages involving miniature lace dresses, palm fronds, and dirt. A replica of an artist's messy studio, with all items (paint cans, a tire, a milk carton, cassettes, brushes, a rubber duck, etc.), all meticulously carved out of polyurethane and painted to look like the original. Many of these were very profound if you were to read the commentaries. But shouldn't art be recognizable as such without a ten-sentence (or more) explanation?

Musuem Crawl, part 2

National Gallery Forming one side of Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery is huge. Housed in a lovely building with tall ceilings, this art collection takes you through paintings from the fourteenth century to the 20th century. Not only British artists have paintings here. It is much like any art museum in any large city, but this does not mean that it's not an excellent place to spend an afternoon (or three).

National Portrait Gallery Just next door, this gallery is all portraits. Much of the collection is old portraits from the Elizabethan era (and even a few from the 15th century), but they also have a growing gallery of portraits of modern artists, actors, scientists, literary figures, politicians, etc. The gallery commissions portraits of people it would like to honor. Each artist has a very unique way of presenting their subject; one artist even collected about a gallon of his own blood, chilled it, and molded it into the shape of his head. It is on display in a glass climate-controlled case.

Tate Britain Devoted to commemorating British artists, or foreign artists who lived and worked in Britain. This is my favorite art museum in London, I think, because of its collection of late19th and early 20th century art. Also, they have on display some massive paintings, filling entire walls of the museum, depicting the apocalypse - imposing, I must say. One gallery is modern art, not as extensive as the Tate Modern, but still impressive. They also always fill the main hallway with a piece of installation art; when I visited, there was a huge, airy, angular, black, metal structure wrapped around the smooth, rounded, white pillars of the hallway. Beautiful.

Victoria and Albert The V&A, as it is commonly known, is the museum of design. With entire galleries of Indian textiles or silver platters or jewelry through the ages or Chinese porcelain, I could spend days and days in there. As it is, I did not see nearly as much as I would have wanted to. By organizing their collection by material and not by era (and not always by geographic location), it's easy to see how the production of one item has changed through the ages, and compare different artists' styles. An absolutely overwhelming and inspiring museum.

UCL - the best university in the world...

...or so they keep telling us. Everyone is very proud that this year, UCL passed up Oxford in The Times' list of the best universities in the world. We're now number 4, after Harvard, Cambridge, and Yale. I hear someone spout this statistic probably once a day. Also, they like to make it known that 20 Nobel laureates have gone to UCL, including Gandhi.

But UCL is awesome for other reasons, too. The main building on campus is an exact replica of the British Museum - so exact, in fact, that it was used in the Mummy movies instead of the museum. (Also, don't forget that campus is a five minute walk from the museum, too.)

Bentham, the philosopher who developed utilitarianism, asked for his body to be embalmed after his death, and now he sits, fully clothed, in a glass case in the main hall. His real head is in storage because something went wrong with the embalming process, so a wax head is on display.

UCL has a huge collection of rare books, including, my friend Gabe excitedly told me, one of the first copies of Newton's Principia. (He got to touch it. I think it was the highlight of his week.)

UCL was the first UK university to accept people regardless of religion or social class, and now it calls itself "London's Global University." Over a third of the students are international.

The anthropology department at UCL is incredible. It is pretty big (200 undergrads), and we get our own building, called Tavistock. We also have our own library with a huge collection of anthropological books, journals, and films, and we get to use the Center for Anthropology at the British Museum any time we want. Departments here are pretty cohesive units because students rarely take classes outside their department - which means that everyone knows each other well. Anthropology is known for being especially social.

Campus boasts 15 libraries, 5 museums, 4 bars, 3 cafes, 3 gardens, 2 theatres, several hospitals, and over 20,000 students.

Is that enough bragging about my school?