Learning London City
Day One
Breakfast, tentative, tiptoing into a corner of the chatting room. I toasted bread, find peanut butter and quirk a first smile. I will spend the next two years oscillating between amusement and exasperation that the British understanding of peanut butter is full of sugar and very little of peanuts. But in that moment, I had peanut butter and it tasted sinfully homey.
I had a whole list called: Things I Am Supposed To See, with all those capitals of societal intention too.
The Plans
- Big Ben – Elizabeth Tower
- Westminster Abbey
- Piccadilly Circus
- Trafalgar Square
- Leceister Square
- Chinatown
- Oxford Circus
- Hyde Park
- Russell’s Square
- North Gower Street
- Baker Street
- and more…
As I learned over the years of travel, never try to do more than four things in a day. Especially if, like me, you insist on walking everywhere. One’ you’ll wear your shoes down as fast as me. Two, you’ll not have the most efficient travel experience.
Then again, I had two years ahead of me so I did not think much about efficiency. So there I was, walking. Even with the easy Oyster card for the Underground (their metro/subway), I tried to walk. I ended up wandering more than I hit major sites. I also had no UK phone yet but also insisted on not looking like a tourist more often than necessary. Particularly if that required whipping out a five page, face- covering map.
No, I told myself. I would walk like a local, take photos like a photographer and whatever happened would happen. I discovered at random street intervals London has useful maps of your vicinity so despite the inability to label streets clearly, if at all, I managed to see nearly half of the major sites and wandered into other corners besides.
I Had Shelter, Now for Food in London City
Hungry and not wishing to whittle down my few funds pre-job or brave enough to sit in a restaurant alone (yet), I wandered into a Sainsbury’s. In Canada we’ve got our fresh fruits and veggies generally stacked, piled or placed in bins for people to grab one or two of various items. Any containers or plastics used are for larger quantities of items like sacks of potatoes or carrots (unless you insist on putting fruits and veggies into the plastic bags instead of straight into your reusable, but that’s a whole other argument).
In the UK, you’ll get containers covered in plastic for two corns, four apples, two apples, sticks of celery, five carrots, one peach and all the larger quantities of things too. At least reusable bags are a thing and they have self-checkouts far more frequent than here, even two years later. (Yay, says my introvert side!)
Next up on the list of differences are the isles themselves, stocked to the brim with more than just those few brands that I recognised from the specialty isles back home. Now I got to see a speciality isle devoted to “American foods,” which contained £10 Canadian maple syrup and various fake peanut butters (the ones with all the icing sugar and very little peanut taste).
Then again, the UK does not sneer at sugar, they have full isles devoted to just biscuits after all. Their international foods also varied slightly which made for some fun evenings of trying various Caribbean foods and enjoying the fact the Indian food was still fantastic, even if anything labelled “Chinese” or “Japanese” came off full of too many preservatives, obviously frozen and defrosted and generally not at all fresh.
I discovered millionaire shortbread and ate hummus and carrots for that first dinner. That’s the introvert in me. But, on the other hand, Doctor Who was running and I was able to watch it real tim;, off the BBC iPlayer, up in my bunk at the hostel.
I also wandered the old “Apple Market” in Covent Garden, as in the above picture. These days it’s full of artists rather than apples or food and I never did bother much with photographing much of either.
Learning London City Continues
Day Two
The next few mornings went more smoothly as I gained confidence with directions. I ticked off all the main sights and much more. I got a phone, a bank account and all the paperwork sorted so I could start my job in the little village of Thurston in Suffolk.
I adored London and once I got over the reality of truly walking down London pavement, being surrounded by English accents of all varieties and breathing in air full of smog, smoke, petrichor and moss on bricks, I adored it more.
I slipped into this corner cafe full of students and construction workers that also happened to be the sight for BBC’s Sherlock. There, I finally indulged in proper food and got myself tea and a vegetarian English breakfast, egg, toast, tomato, canned beans and chips.
As I walked, stuffed full up, I saw fiction and story on every corner. Plaques denoting people of history, odd statues, hidden corners, graffiti messages and every person I had yet to imagine, walking past. I slipped into a basic cafe, into a back corner and ate eggs, toast and tea. I drank in the scent of grease, coffee and the odour of construction workers before they went to work.
London; the city of layers, had folded me into the mix like a book, or these book chairs I found around Russel’s Square. This one, painted for the titular character of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolfe. And so began a two year love affair with a country I had fantasized about endlessly. It had all the highs, lows and slows of one deep in love.
I would not change a moment.
So if you’re ever in the area of London, walk it. Go on and off the map. Run and sit. Drink and dream. Try new things. It’s the best place for that.
Up next: The train to Bury St Edmunds, the town near Thuston where I lived in for my first acquaintance with small town England. Some sheep and more walking.
