Money (Retrospective)

Money

Then there was the matter of money and prices.

The exchange rate was basically two to one, pounds to dollars. And I was a graduate student, making my way on grants that would have barely been enough to scratch by had I been in the US. They were about half as much as I needed to scratch by in London.

I distinctly remember my first evening there. I had gotten in in the afternoon, taken a nap, drugged myself up with coffee, and wandered around to find somewhere to have a reasonable meal for dinner. The flat where I was staying was right on the river, not far from the Tate Modern and the Globe Theater. For some reason I mistakenly concluded then that the restaurants near these institutions would be catering to tourists and therefore more expensive than usual. Little did I know that they were in actuality standard prices for London. I wandered around side-streets past these bigger attractions to try to find someplace smaller and more reasonably priced to eat.

I ended up at a gastro-pub not far from London Bridge. I ordered chicken and a glass of wine, no appetizer, no dessert. No bread on the side. It was around 14 pounds total. While I was waiting for the food to come, I felt both a bit self-conscious about sitting and eating alone—and nervous and overwhelmed at how foreign this city felt and how downright intimidating the prices were.

Twenty eight dollars for dinner for one— not an upscale dinner, a pub dinner. A tube pass for zones one and two for a month: close to two hundred dollars. Rent: A thousand dollars a month for a tiny little room in someone else’s flat. Add council tax, and utilities and it would be a few hundred dollars more. Mobile phone: given that I needed to use it for work and interviews, at least a hundred dollars a month, probably more. My budget: less than two thousand dollars a month. Which meant I had only a few hundreds dollars left for food and entertainment. Was I going to be able to afford to eat?

I spent the entire evening trying to work out a budget for myself, using a pencil and scratch paper to work out sample spending plans. What if I spent fifteen pounds a day or so, on average, on food and entertainment? Could I keep to that?

I started out with the strictest of budgets, staying at home as much as possible, cooking for myself, eating in, only going to shows or events that weren’t free very infrequently. But it didn’t take me long to realize that this altogether defeated the purpose of being in London. I was only here temporarily- and moreover, as an anthropologist, I was here to experience as much as possible of it… to really get to know the culture and to write about it. I found that it was really rather miserable to stay home all the time, in a city I didn’t know, in a place where I had few friends and little social contact on days that I didn’t go into an office to volunteer.

I began easing up—figuring that there was a reason for credit cards and savings. I’ve spent my entire life as a relative spendthrift, so I could probably afford to supplement myself a little bit here to make the year enjoyable. That was the first step down a very very slippery slope.

The second step, which pushed me into a mini landslide, was the fact that I actually needed to travel for my research. I had interviews to do and fieldwork to conduct, all over the country, not just in London. Amongst the list: two visits to Newcastle and environs, visits to Kent and Gloucestershire, and too many visits to Birmingham to count. Thanks to privatization, train prices were often more expensive than flying across to continental Europe. But what choice did I have? I didn’t have the money for it, but I needed to do it.

I don’t remember exactly when I stopped mentally translating prices into dollars. It probably happened about four months after I’d moved there. It was a self-preservation technique—it was too depressing to keep calculating what this was all costing me in real terms. There were still things I didn’t do- I never went shopping for clothing, for example, and I very rarely went to remotely upscale restaurants (although I was so amazed by the range of great food- Turkish, Lebanese, Italian- that I did try some of these places.) And I had to stop myself, over and over, from the urge to treat people to lunch or dinner when I went out. As much as I wanted to, as much as it would give me great joy, I couldn’t afford to be as generous as I would like.

And this, to be honest, is what most Londoners have to do, not just someone like myself, living on dollars. The cost of living, relative to salaries, is far higher in the UK than the US. To this day, it remains a bit of a mystery to me how ordinary people (who don’t work in finance and earn six figure salaries) can have any kind of a life. I remember seeing an advertisement on a bus boasting that bus drivers could make 500 pounds a week plus overtime. Twenty four thousand pounds a year. Subtract hefty taxes, high rent, and high food costs and there’s not much left to raise a family or do anything fun. This was worth boasting about in an advertisement? I asked people over and over how people managed to make ends meet here—and the answer was always the same. They squeeze by. They don’t go out much.

But at the end, I had gotten so used to life in London that I’d all but forgotten to be offput by the ridiculous prices. One of my last evenings there, I went out to dinner with a friend, and it was my turn to treat. We went to Belgo, a Belgian restaurant, not known for being expensive—and had a huge plate of oysters, appetizers, bread, and beer. The bill came to 45 pounds.

“45 pounds, how reasonable!” I thought.

And then I pinched myself. One year ago, I would never ever have considered ninety dollars for dinner “reasonable” or affordable.

I had obviously gotten way too used to London… now to the detriment of my bank account. It was time to leave.

Food (Retrospective)

Food

Okay, let’s talk food. The UK has a poor reputation when it comes to food. Does it deserve it?

My Time Out guide to restaurants and pubs for London was not incorrect in noting how much things have changed in recent decades. As globalization increases its heady speed and as dining out becomes more and more in fashion, the English palate has changed dramatically, nowhere more so than London.

So you do get a dizzying array of just fantastic, amazing, diverse restaurants in London – of the highest quality. Hungarian to die for. Indian cuisine that rivals the best restaurants in India. Not to mention, Italian food that actually really is served liked it is served in Italy—not the overly cheesy and fried American-Italian food we mostly get in the States.

But all of this is if you can afford to eat out in a sit-down restaurant, and the prices are really not cheap at all. What if you just want to grab a quick lunch? Or an affordable quick dinner? This was what really mattered to me, since I definitely could not afford to do the former very often.

Here old habits were more durable. At Zara, the corner café on the block near my house, the array of lunch selections were plied with mayonnaise: prawn salad sandwich, loaded with mayonnaise, tuna and corn loaded with mayonnaise, chicken and bacon loaded with… you know what. (It was also popular to have English breakfast for lunch- sausages, beans, eggs, and bacon… or simply bangers and mash.) Same thing at the Juggler, the slightly more upscale café across from my office. Big sandwiches with tons of bread, a little protein, and a lot of butter or mayo.

If you just wanted a salad- that is an American style salad, one with lots of vegetables primarily, and not loaded down with mayonnaise, you were pretty much out of luck. And forget about finding a salad bar, either. That concept had obviously sunk somewhere in transit across the Atlantic ocean. Generally, I could get a couscous salad or a rice salad, or even a potato salad. But a big green leafy salad with tons of veggies and maybe a little protein, but not a lot of starch – forget it. Out of all the food dishes one inevitably misses when one is far away from home, a big leafy salad was what I missed most.

Still, English food in general has a lot to commend itself. For one, it might just be my imagination, but I think the produce in general tasted better, even supermarket produce. It just tasted a bit less genetically engineered. Same thing with the dairy products and cheeses: closer to Europe and hence closer to the original styles of production. And the array of prepared food in the supermarkets- to die for. Great great prepared meals of a much healthier variety than in the states—vegetarian moussaka, salmon with veggies to steam... Lots of great, reasonably priced fish.

England is also way ahead of America when it comes to labeling and socially conscious food. All of the produce is labeled to indicate whether it is conventional or organic, and more significantly, where it was grown, so that you have a better sense of its carbon footprint. And the selection of fair-trade products was far bigger than in the US. For example, most supermarkets had all of their bananas as fair-trade bananas, which I thought was significant.

All in all, a fairly big thumbs up on the food—if only they could lower the prices just a tad….

Finding My Way Around Town (Retrospective)

Now back in sunny California, and spending several hours a day writing down details and impressions of England. Here's the first, taking off from where the very first post left off:

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Finding My Way Around Town

My first evening in London, I was jet-lagged and miserable. I had gotten in the late morning to a temporary accommodation in the form of a small room in a very lovely (but compact) flat near Blackfriars. She lived right on the river Thames, in a flat stuffed with antique furniture and knick-knacks from all over the world. There were African statues alongside old tea pots that had been so well used they were permanently stained dark brown inside.

I remember the keys: old style keys- with a long straight body and knobby handle and small chubby part at the end to unlock the door. These were the kind of keys that had probably been around for many decades—if not approaching a century or more. The porter at the apartment block gave me the keys to the apartment (since Trisha, who owned the apartment, was off on vacation). It took me about fifteen minutes to figure out how to open her door—which way to turn the keys and which way to push.
…Not to mention that it also took me about twenty minutes to figure out how to find her apartment. It ought to have been simple enough #27 River Court: River Court was the apartment complex, 27 the flat. Second floor, right? Wrong. I went up the elevator to the second floor only to find that those were flats 10-14 or something like that. So I got off on every floor until I found hers on the fifth floor, if I remember correctly.

This was but a foreshadowing for how difficult it was going to be for me to find my way around town. An American, I was used to a very sanitized system of numbering for addresses: even numbered houses on one side, odds on the other side of the street—such that the numbers went up and down at the same rate on either side of the street. Not so in London. You could have houses #50, #54 and #60 across from #5 #7 and #9—so if you were looking for #20 you wouldn’t know whether to walk up or down the street. (Theoretically, it should be on the same side as the even numbers, but then it could be that the pattern changed at the end of the block…. Not to mention that the street names themselves changed about every other block.)

I remember at some point telling a few friends, facetiously, that I thought the confusion of London streets was intentional and somehow in keeping with the legacy of a class-based society: the city was designed so that you had to be an insider to find your way. It didn’t help at all that I was basically born without the part of my brain that would have governed navigation. As my parents often teased, I could get lost walking around my own home block.

My initial method for finding my way when I had appointments was to find my destination on google maps before I left home--—and then I’d write down the directions on a sheet of paper I’d take with me. For example: tube to Bond Street, right on Oxford Street, a right two blocks down, etc. But that method inevitably got me horribly lost, and most of the time, asking people on the street to help would just exacerbate the situation. My first day at work—volunteering at the Jubilee Debt Campaign to get started with my research—I was trying to find my way to their office building in Charles Square near Old Street. Trisha had pointed out the route to me that morning on a map. But five minutes out of the tube, I was completely disoriented. I asked person after person if they knew where Charles Square was, but not a single person did: not shop owners, not businessmen, no one. At one point, I was standing right at the corner of Charles Square asking passersby, and they all shrugged their shoulders. They weren’t being impolite. There were just a lot of small streets around and if you didn’t happen to work or live on Charles Square, you wouldn’t know where it was.

After enough pitiful apologies to friends and colleagues for being ridiculously late (even though I got lost literally only a few blocks away from what I was trying to find), I realized I needed a better solution.

Then, I was finally able to get a cell phone contract (which first required a bank account, which in turn required all kinds of documentation about employment that was basically impossible for me to provide, given that I was a graduate student in the United States… but that is another story altogether.) So my second attempted method to find my way around town was to get a mobile phone with a GPS system on it, so that it could literally tell me how to find my way. That would have been a brilliant solution if it the GPS system actually worked. In most cases, it took ten to fifteen minutes to find my current location via the satellites- if it ever did at all. I was so frustrated that I stopped trying to use it. In retrospect, since I was usually far more than fifteen minutes late, I probably should have at least turned it on.

Finally, my options exhausted, I broke down and bought a mini “A to Z” book (called an “A to Zed”) which if memory serves I bought in the kiosk at the Green Park tube stop one day when I knew I was about to be very lost heading to a very important interview. The book was filled with small maps of every neighborhood in central London, and was literally a life-saver. Or at least a career-saver. And friend-saver.

And from thence on, I never got lost.

Okay, okay. I still got lost. I just didn’t get super ridiculously laughably lost.

goodbye grandpa.

you were a miracle of a human being.

The Chap Olympics

Stumbled upon yesterday while on a walk with my friend Annette in Hampstead Heath: A huge group of people dressed in 1920s costume, men and women, assembled in a huge meadow, playing some kind of series of games.

We asked one of them who walked our way what on earth was going on.

"Oh, it's the Chap Olympics," he said.

"What is that?" asked Annette.

"Well, basically a celebration of all things gentlemanly." he explained. "And we have contests. Right now it's a cucumber-sandwich-tossing contest."

God bless London for having some of the most diverse cultural communities on earth-- but this seemed to take the cake. We watched for a while, bemused, as people streamed in. They were all around our age. Young women wearing fancy 20s style dresses, men with suspenders and 20s style hats...

As we walked away Annette commented how it used to be the case that telling someone he isn't a gentleman was considered a huge insult-- a way of claiming rank in a classist system.

"So the chap olympics," she continued "are a sort of celebration of classism. Fascinating, really, this country we live in."

Personally, I thought it was pretty damn amusing.

Traveling While American

On a recent trip to Turkey, I took a few days with my friend Denise to see Cappadocia, a fairytale like landscape of strangely shaped mountains with houses and churches built into caves in the mountain walls.

In the evenings, we'd hang out with Halis, the manager of our small hotel and a really nice guy who has worked as a tour guide for many years. One evening, we stumbled on the topic of America and whether Americans need to be careful about disclosing their identity when traveling abroad. Denise and I were pretty open about saying that we were from California- a place we love and are proud of. But we could understand why some people prefer (in some instances) to pretend they are Canadian.

Halis completely derided that practice, saying that it's offensive to assume that the people you talk with abroad aren't open-minded enough to judge you on your own merits. I could see his point. The vast majority of people anywhere are pretty reasonable.

But later that week, on the subway in Istanbul, I faced the same dilemma. A guy sitting across from me asked me where I was from. (Denise, meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, was thoroughly entertained by a cute young man who was telling her about his Turkish music career.)

"California," I told him.

"Oh, you're American," he said. "I'm Iraqi."

I wasn't sure how to respond. It was one of the only times since the invasion that I'd met an ordinary Iraqi who actually lives in Iraq, not the diaspora.

"Where are you from?" I asked. I found out he was from Mosul and that he was in Turkey on business. Except- he didn't seem to be dressed for business. His clothes were rather plain and I kept looking at his eyeglasses, which had a crack in the corner and were missing one of the side handles that would have kept them attached to his ear.

What do you say to an ordinary Iraqi you meet in the subway? Like it or not, when you travel abroad, meet a stranger, and tell them you are American, you automatically become a representative of America as a whole.

"I'm sorry," I said, "for the state of turmoil your country is in. I apologize for that. I really hope things will get better."

"Thank you," he replied. He had a kind look on his face.

Three days later, as I was preparing to go the airport to return to London, the US consulate was attacked. Gunfire. Several dead. Lots of confusion and turmoil. Lots of worrying about people we knew at the consulate. And it wasn't the first time for me. I lived in Kenya and worked for USAID about a year before that embassy was attacked.

I texted Halis from the airport. I asked him if the event had made him change his thinking at all about whether Americans should be careful about disclosing their identities.

"No, I still think the same," he texted back.

I'm not sure I do. I'm really not sure what I think on this particular topic anymore.

The English "Bye"

Back from NY where grandpa is thankfully doing better (thanks to so many of you for your lovely good wishes) and where I experienced reverse culture shock the first few days. ...Only to experience reverse-reverse culture shock back in London.

Amongst the first thing I (re)noticed, chatting with my friend Paul on the phone yesterday, was the peculiar use of the word "bye" by so many English people. It's not that they use the word incorrectly. It's that they somehow, no matter how husky the voice, now matter macho the persona, can only utter the word with their voices floating up about three octaves above their normal range. It's something I've never quite gotten over.

There is also usually a little bit of sing-songiness involved. It's not just "bye" (sung at a high-high-C note). It's "bye-eee." A two syllable word, with the second syllable sung one or two notes lower than the first.

For example, Paul ending the conversation on the phone yesterday where we made plans to meet for dinner:

"Okay (normal deep male voice), so I'll get on the road now and call you when I'm in the neighborhood. Talk to you soon. (Immediate switch to high, falsetto voice about three octaves higher.) Bye-eee!!" He then hangs up.

Or today on the bus, a girl ranting angrily to her friend on her mobile:

"Yeah, it's rubbish. (angry, forceful, deep tone, coming from the chest) Absolute fucking bullocks. They're imbeciles. ...Oh crap that's my stop, gotta go. (Immediate switch to falsetto sing-song, even though she's still mad as hell) Bye-eeeee!!"

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I suppose we all have our cultural blind spots-- words or phrases we somehow distort without really knowing we're doing it. In New York, I heard people over and over in coffee shops and lunch places saying to the service people, "Thank you *so* much!" Basically the service people were just doing their job, not going above and beyond. And it's not that the customers looked tremendously grateful either. A simple "thank you" would have done just fine.

But, someone, please explain-- what's the deal with the English singing their goodbyes in falsetto?