England Part One: The South

England. Essentially a network of place names you've never been to but feel like you know from literature. Practically every Tube station name in London is a little jolt of familiarity.

I flew into Luton Airport, which meant passing through London on my way to points further south. And since I was changing trains at St Pancras anyway...I hopped out to have a brief look around. Knew I was in London at the latest when a red doubledecker bus came around the corner!

St Pancras (where Eurostar trains arrive after crossing the Channel tunnel) is right next to King's Cross (Harry Potter? Hogwarts Express? Ringing any bells?) so I made a little pilgrimmage.

Luckily, I was forewarned that there isn't actually a barrier between platforms 9 and 10 - J. K. Rowling was thinking of a different station when she invented the magical barrier that leads to Platform 9 3/4. I knew there was a little monument - of a luggage trolley appearing half-way sunk into a station wall - elsewhere in the station, but hadn't bothered to look up where. On a whim, though, I walked a little ways down platform 8... and when I spotted a suspiciously large crowd of teenagers, I suspected I'd found my goal.

"There's just a wall... with a trolley in it... So he had to take a picture," an older woman was explaining to an older man near me. They were rejoined by a middle-aged man looking embarrassed yet pleased with himself - precisely how I figured I'd look very shortly, after photographing the thing myself.

Here's one of the Australian teens, pushing her luggage trolley into Harry Potter Land...


First stop was to visit Peter, a friend I made by chance in a cafe in southern India! I remembered he'd said he lived somewhere south of London (turned out to be Southampton), so I wrote to him when I started planning this trip and he wrote back, ever British, "Yes, you must come and stay if you're in the area."

Residents of Southampton freely admit that one of the best things about their city is how easily you can leave it to get to other places (people even commute to London from there, since the cost of living is so much more manageable) so I was surprised by how nice it was. Tidy street of semi-detached houses with gorgeous gardens out back, friendly neighbors who actually stop for a chat whenever they see each other.

Peter invited some of said neighbors over for a barbecue (the neighbors were more my age, while Peter is my parents' generation) and we hung out until late in the night, enjoying the lovely garden terrace and the summery weather. (And yes, since they're English, there were many of the requisite conversations about the weather!)

Here's the back yard crew:


Peter's only caveat about my visit was that he was categorically NOT willing to get involved in the endless discussions about royal wedding details (Prince William marries Kate Middleton tomorrow at Westminster Abbey in London, for anyone who's somehow missed this), but the rest of the country is in the grip of royal wedding fever.

Me, on opening the refrigerator: "...Why is your tonic water 'celebrating the royal wedding'?"


Peter also took me to Dorset, as a kind of compromise between Southampton and Devon (Dartmoor! Hound of the Baskervilles!), where I'd wanted to go, but which proved just a bit too far away to be practical for this trip.

In Dorset, we walked along chalk cliffs above the sea, amid rolling green fields and a profusion of wildflowers, then had a meal (and plenty of tea!) at a fish and chips shop, then checked out a castle and had a pint at a countryside pub, so I'd say I got my fill of Englishness for the day. This is a bit of countryside in Dorset:


Next I went to Brighton, a laidback town by the sea with a distinctive hippie vibe and a seemingly endless stretch of pebble beach. Here's my breakfast my last morning in Brighton: vegetable pasty, fruit and an unimpeded view of the English Channel.


In Brighton, I stayed with Dave, a friend of a friend who's a musician/producer/artist. Among the things I experienced: looking out the window of a pub to see a young man swallow entire inflated balloon (the long kind, the ones people twist into balloon animals), which never reappeared in any fashion; getting on a train and finding a book about fairy tales abandoned on a street, just as an odd, jovial man who cleaned the train came by and started asking me riddles, seeming rather like a fairy tale figure himself; playing guitar by the sea at midnight; finally trying a quintessentially English "cream tea" (which has less to do with tea and more with scones and a very large amount of cream) together with an Australian and an Irish guy in a cafe that seemed to be run by Eastern Europeans and frequented by Asians.

Dave also joined me for a day wandering the South Downs (rolling chalk hills dotted with sheep and fences), where there was picnicking and much photographing of sheep. I was practically asleep, dozing on the grass, when the farmer whose land we were on (we'd hopped a couple of fences, after the supposed path petered out) pulled up on his ride-on mower.

"You know, there's no footpath here," he said. (Translation from overly polite British to normal people speak: "You're trespassing on my land.") Oh, sorry, I said, we were trying to follow the path and couldn't tell where it went.

And the farmer said, Oh, okay, and wished us a nice day and rode off! Can you imagine?

The English are an understated people for whom the word "nice" is a high compliment (all foods they like are "nice") but who also say "Thank you so much" in response to pretty much anything.

Anyway, here are some sheep:


And one last picture: my "office" this week, consisting of my new netbook and wifi access at the inestimable Riki Tik in Brighton.


All part of a plan to try to use my freelance flexibility to do a bit more of this, working while traveling. It worked out well this time and I'm feeling pretty grateful right about now.

Next up: Part Two, London and the royal wedding!

Translating German in England

Delightful language fact of the day: "Hoernchen" in German could theoretically mean either "croissant" or "squirrel." It just came up in a translation I'm doing, but since the item in question is being eaten in a hotel suite by a pop star, I'm going to assume in this case it's a croissant.


I'm in England, having tons of fun and even managing to work part-time. Having too much fun, in fact, to stop and write about it, but more soon...

Next Week: England!

Going to England! I leave early in the morning, with stops in Southampton, Brighton and London. Plan is to work a bit from the road, travel, meet up with friends and acquaintances. I'm immoderately excited, because even though England is so close (both geographically and linguistically/culturally) I've only ever been once, and that only for a weekend and only to London.

Because I'm proud of all the (obsessively detailed) work I put into it, here's a shot of some of my trip preparation, including a custom map, schedule, notes on recommendations from various friends...

More Sights

Weird inflatable-ball-pool entertainment thing for kids at Alexanderplatz. They'd have the kid step inside the deflated sphere, velcro them in and pump the ball up with a big air hose, then roll it into the pool.

Giant chocolate Easter bunnies!
I can't believe this sign is necessary. ("Urinating forbidden – area under video surveillance")
Yes!

Sights Lately

It's an art vending machine! Adorned with two very regionally appopriate images: a Trabi - East Germany's state-produced car - and a stork nest - storks spend part of the year in the countryside around Berlin and their nests are highly protected and eagerly watched for. (On Rykestrasse in Prenzlauer Berg.)


Here's a new take on a common anti-nuclear logo - it usually reads "Atomkraft? Nein danke" (Nuclear energy? No thanks). This one reads "Atomkraft? WTF?!?" (On the corner near my apartment.)
I've been trying to figure out why I'm not more excited that the anti-nuclear movement here has received such an enormous boost after the disaster in Japan. (I mean, aside from the fact that "excited" is the wrong way to describe anything about a catastrophe.) Here in Germany, the issue has created even-huger-than-usual demonstrations, swayed an important state election, and even brought an about-face (albeit a less than totally credible one) from the chancellor herself.

I don't like the idea of nuclear energy any more than your average German (and believe me, your average German doesn't like it). Maybe this right now has a little too much of a bandwagon-y feel to it, something not quite fully thought out? I'm not sure. Plus, a healthy dose of skepticism is required when politicians suddenly start saying what people want to hear just before an election.

Still, it makes me smile when my socially and fiscally conservative friend (a German) calls up asking if I'll go to the anti-nuclear demonstration with him. His reasons are all utterly pragmatic and business-oriented, but he's anti-nuclear too.


Street art, Berlin.

And a typical scene in Mitte (central Berlin) on Sunday: People packed into every possible space on the sidewalk in front of a café, having brunch and coffee with their dogs and their laptops and their hipster clothes. And I mean that with love. Photo courtesy of Chad!

Garfield Minus Garfield

Also...this is awesome:

"Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle."

Wohnzimmer Konzert

This was the "living room concert" I went to a couple weekends ago with a few friends. It's a monthly series run by an Australian woman who brings together a couple of musicians and someone with a living room willing to host the event. In this case, the concert actually took place in the bedroom of a flatmate who happened to be away that weekend... Not clear if she was informed about the whole hosting-a-concert-in-your-bedroom thing! But the band was superb and the audience lovely.

Photo courtesy of Patrick! You can just see my knee on the left.

Grand Tour Addendum

The below article mentions Chinese tourists only ever going to Chinese restaurants while in Europe, which reminded me of this anecdote from my exchange year in Thailand:


My host father, an always-on-the-go businessman, went on a business trip to Italy shortly after I arrived to stay with him.

For the trip (a week long or so), he took along packets of Thai-style instant noodles, because, as he explained to me, "It's difficult for Thai people to eat bread all the time."

And I looked on in amazement as he packed noodles into the luggage he was taking to Italy.

The Grand Tour

A fascinating article, passed on by my friend Naomi.

Europe, as seen by Chinese citizens on a packaged tour, as seen by an American journalist who lives in China and books himself on the same tour:

"The Grand Tour" by Evan Osnos at the New Yorker.

The Most Interesting Place

I was recently working on comparatives and superlatives (like "big/bigger/the biggest" and "beautiful/more beautiful/the most beautiful") with one of my English students and the book we were using posed various questions for the sake of practicing these forms. For example: "What's the most interesting place you've ever been?"

What a question, actually. The single most interesting place? The student pondered whether perhaps New Zealand would count – beautiful, certainly, and they had a great time there, but is it the most interesting?

Then he said, "I think the most interesting place was the other side of the wall." (He's in his late 40's and spent the first half of his life in East Germany.)

He told me about friends of theirs who lived in a building directly abutting the Berlin Wall; going to the bathroom or the kitchen in their apartment was a particular highlight, because from those windows, you could look straight down on the no man's land along the wall and watch the soldiers marching back and forth on their patrols. ("I thought only Stasi members were allowed to live that close to the border?" I asked. "I thought so too," he said, but somehow he can't imagine that was true in the case of this couple.)

They used to sit on their friends' balcony, look out across the wall - looking at West Berlin, which was no further away than the other side of the street, yet completely off-limits - and say, Someday we'll walk down that street. Someday we'll go to that bar on the corner.

And then, years later, the wall came down, and they did.