Report from Mile End

(please forward this to everyone not on the list-i don't have my address book)

Hullo to all from the merry land of the Angles and Saxons!! I am having a great time here in London staying with my friend from high school, Nick Petersen, who went to the U of M before coming here for a year. We have been all over much of the city already.

Arun, you should get the hell over to this school, Queen Mary University of London (http://www.qmw.ac.uk/) because it is *mostly* British Indians. (although apparently the London School of Economics has a lot too) It also has the largest medical school in England. There's a canal which runs all around north London and goes right in front of Nick's hall. There is a little lock and dam and canal house right here. They look very old.

The neighborhood, Mile End, has a lot of Punjabis and Pakistanis as well as East Enders. It is ironic that the British partitioned India then the Indians and Pakis came around and partitioned the neighborhood!

You have to be very careful about the Pakis on Saturday night, as there are *a lot of fights* but little serious crime in this neighborhood, as they say. If not for the heavy traffic on the main road I might have had a bad encounter on Saturday night. They want to fight, so Arun, I think you would fall in love on the first day and then get knifed on Friday!

There are a lot of police cameras here and also a huge number of very polite instructions all over. In particular "mind the gap" i.e. the yellow line is written on the subways. The Tube is one hell of a piece of engineering. A weeklong pass for zones 1 and 2, the heart of town, is about 20 £.

When i arrived at victoria station downtown from the airport, i went into the tube and asked this little old guy in a traditional red station attendant outfit with brass buttons if the train before us with its doors open was the "district" line. He glared at me and sort of jumbled said "Yarr don talk ta me i'm not with the railway!!!" and i quickly backed off and jumped in the train. It turned out to be the right one. I think i've heard of this guy before. He may be sort of like the Wally the Beerman of the London Underground.

The pubs close at 10:30 on Sunday nights, which is extremely lame. Pints are about $3. Most things seem to be cost about as many pounds as dollars at home, so in other words dollars don't get too far. Nick and his friends and flatmates know how to stretch their money so it hasn't been too expensive too far.

We saw Starsky and Hutch at the movie theater in Canary Wharf last night and it was excellent, I highly recommend.

As a student of the geography of cities i have to say that the street layout is incredibly weird here. The main street in Mile End is called Mile End road here, but that name only runs about 2000 meters and then it becomes something totally different, and of course its sort of bendy. I feel that the roads are so convoluted so that A-the postal addresses rarely get above 100 B-because they didn't want to redraw the midaeval street system and divvy up property after the great fire C-it keeps people from trying to cut through neighborhoods because they know its impossible. In this sense the topology is a more like Woodbury than minneapolis, but there is far more mixed development and pedestrian walking paths between everything.

When i got here on saturday morning somehow the horrible winter weather completely ended and the sun came out. Everyone was happy and it must have been about 60 degrees fahrenheit. We went to a number of places in the middle of town by Trafalgar Square, then we went over the Millennium Bridge to the London Eye, a giant ferris wheel-type device that takes you above the whole city for 30 minutes, right in front of Parliament and Big Ben, the iconic part of the river. We had dinner with another friend from high school, Victoria Simmonds (who is in Wales instead of the U of M this semester) and her mom, little bro and sis who came to visit her for a couple days. Vics mom bought us dinner, the Eye tickets and nice wine. They were staying at the top suites in the County Hall Marriott, which is right across from parliament. The room on the 6th floor had this amazing little balcony with a perfect, basically textbook view of the whole night-time Parliament/Westminster Big Ben tower scene. That was awesome but it was too dark for pictures to work. :( But incredibly memorable!

I would like to complain that in this advanced part of western civilization, telecommunications is expensive and hard to get at. There is no internet in the dorms and no phones either, since flat rate local service doesn't exist. The library is inexplicably closed at like 7 on sundays and the computer lab won't let you in without campus ID on sunday. Yes this computer lab has Novell, too. It seems to be configured better than ours though.

Yesterday (sunday) i went to the Tate Museum of Modern Art, http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/default.htm which is in a former power plant across the river from the famous St Pauls cathedral. (apparently the plants smokestack, which is a huge brick tower, cooled the smoke and made it descend right on top of st pauls, polluting it very rapidly until the plant closed) there was this marvellous installation of a giant orange neon sun disc in a centralgallery several stories tall, with jets of fog making an all encompassing warm orange glow. There were wobbling mirrors on the ceiling that intersected the midlevel of the sun, so everyone laid on the floor looking up at the mirrors. One free gallery upstairs called 'ideals' or something started with classic Soviet propaganda, moved on to a Warhol room with Jackie Elvis and Marilyn Monroe pieces, art on Northern Ireland, the classic 'The Kiss' and other works by that sculptor. What a sequence! I might go back on a weekday to get into the pay galleries when it's quieter. The millennium footbridge which goes between the Tate modern and St. Pauls was very windy.

The weather reminds me of the north shore of Minnesota in the summer although its a little windier and the rain comes in very short bursts of fine mist. It was far better than this blustery snow we've been getting. It actually felt cleansing and refreshing to lean in the wind and get a little bit of water instead of that cutting cold.

|It is quite disturbing that apparently al-qaeda has been tied to the train bombings in spain. I saw news that said there was heightened security in the underground here, but i don't really see it. There certainly aren't cops around with M 16s like we feel we need to have in the US. If i get hit in a bombing please tell the news media that i blame richard perle for it.

Nick's friends and flatmates here are very nice people. Some of them are from MN, some from california and Whitman college, one from India via London and another from Kazakhstan.

Well i have to roll on now. I am trying to see Greenwich, the incredibly named Imperial War Museum (when will we get one of those in Washington?) and the National Art Museum today.

I hope everyone else is having a really nice break!!! I will be flying back Friday but probably won't be in until Sat. Afternoon around 6 or 7, i think.

Dan

Posted by HongPong at March 15, 2004 07:23 AM
Listed under From Abroad .