Shortest Day of the Year (Photos)

I have to admit, the short winter days have been getting to me.

But rather than getting depressed about the darkness, I thought I'd get creative about it instead. Yesterday, was the winter solstice-- shortest day of the year (The sun started setting at around 3:15 or so... ). I went around by the Thames with my camera and captured the light dissappearing in the afternoon. Using a camera always helps one see things in a different way-- this time as always. The beauty of the scene made me see the darkness a bit differently.




3:40 pm -- Full Sunset over Houses of Parliament




Another shot, with London Eye in foreground




Me with a characteristically silly grin...

Overheard in...: A Sauna

The "Overheard In..." category for the blog recalls snippets of conversation I happened to stumble across that for some reason stand out as indicative of cultural differences, or cultural issues I'm trying to understand. (And all subtly prove that reality is stranger than fiction.)

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Overheard in... a Sauna

The Setting:

The sauna, in my gym, in Swiss Cottage, London. Also known as the Swiss Cottage Leisure Centre, it's run by Camden Town Council and is actually quite nice and new... and subsidized, thankfully.

Scene One:
The dry sauna. Small, compact wooden planks.

The Characters (4):
(1) Me, wrapped in big blue towel. (2) A very skinny African woman in her late twenties, wearing a bikini--every muscle shows in her physique, particularly in her legs; (3) a slightly pudgy Korean woman in her thirties, also wearing a bathing suit, very round face; (4)and a boisterous fifty-something ostensibly working-class English woman with leathery skin on her face, as if wrinkled from smoking, but smooth skin on the rest of her body. She is wearing only a bikini bottom. Died brown hair, lots of makeup, heavy black eyeliner; breasts sag down to a bit above her waist.
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Korean Woman:
Don't make it too hot in here, bad for the skin. Dries out oil.

English woman: (boisterously, thick London accent)
Oh, this is good, this is good. I like the heat. Gorgeous.

(African woman silent, staring straight ahead as if no one else is in the sauna.)

Korean woman:
Weather here horrible. London weather awful.

English woman: (Thick makeup bleeding down her face from sweat)
Well, could be worse, love. Where you from?

Korean woman:
Korea. Where I from not like this, no. This awful, sad, weather.

Me:
Yes, I was really looking forward to the dry heat in the sauna, given how wet the air always is in London.

English woman:
Does it get cold there? You from North Korea or South?

Korean woman:
(GASPING) No!!!! I from South. SOUTH!!!! Of course, south.

(African woman still staring straight ahead silently.)

Korean woman:
I very religious. Christian. Pray every day. Pray for the North. Situation there awful. Just awful.

English woman: (to me)
The sauna's downright healthy isn't it, love?

Me:
Is it? Certainly feels good.

English woman:
Well yes, they used to prescribe whole courses of medicine that were just about sweating things out. Your skin is an organ, you know, an organ of purification.

Korean woman: (Shaking her head)
No get this cold in Korea. Cold, but maybe not this.

(African woman still staring straight ahead silently. English woman leaves to take a cold shower and announces she will see us all in the wet sauna)


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Scene Two: Steam Sauna

Characters (5):
(1) Me; (2) the Korean woman; (3) the English woman; (4) a young Russian woman who looks like a professional and has smartly cut blonde hair, wearing a swimsuit; (5) a Chinese middle-aged woman, naked, laying down lengthwise on a towel.
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I enter, the rest are already sitting there

English woman:
So you decided to join us here, eh? It's cold. When is the heat coming on?

Russian woman: (thick accent)
It's warming up, don't worry.

English woman: (to me)
I do this a few times a week. Dry sauna, a cold shower, wet sauna, a cold shower, then dry one one more time. It's lovely. (Then to the Chinese woman)
Do you think you're taking up enough space?

Chinese woman: (thick accent)
I sit... yes. Nice. (then some words no one understands.)

English woman: ( bemused smile on her face.)
Yes, you're taking up a lot of space, dear. (then to me again). Not that I understand her, mind you.... (pause.) It's tropical in here, doesn't it feel like a tropical rainforest?

(I'm wondering why I'm the only one she's directing these comments to-- perhaps because my accent isn't quite as foreign as the others?)

Korean woman:
I move here only three month ago.

Me:
Myself as well.

Korean woman:
I not like London. Not weather.

English woman:
Well, but wherever you go it's bad. In the east coast of the States they have hurricanes,no? Least we don't have those. We've got it mild.

(I hear this a lot-- English describing their weather as mild. Seems to me a somewhat strange description of a place where it rains nearly every day, and sunshine is a precious commodity-- but I suppose it's true that it's not Siberia. And then again, few places have weather like California.)

Korean woman:
Yes, but hurricane come and go. This every day.

(after a few minutes pass)

Me:
I think I'm done...

English woman:
No, no, try a bit longer. Go take a cold shower and come back in...

Me: (smiling)
Yeah, I actually really think I'm done. Enjoy, though...

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Scene Three

I am showered and in the main foyer to the leisure centre, talking on my mobile phone. The English woman passes me, fully dressed, on her way out. She sees me as she is about to pass through the door, stops, smiles a huge smile, and shouts over to me...

English woman:
Be sure to drink a lot of water, love. Lots and lots.

(I nod as I briefly interrupt my phone conversation. I think this may well be the first time while living in England that a complete stranger who is actually English has been so outwardly friendly to me.)

English woman: (waving broadly and smiling)
Bye-bye!

What is Cynicism Good For?

A friend of mine here in London--we'll call her Sarah-- is a corporate executive.

Sarah's firm recently merged with an American one, and she relayed to me the story of an email she received from an employee in the US. He was retiring after having worked with the firm for more than thirty years. The farewell email he sent round to the firm, she told me (with a disdainful smile on her face) was openly gushy... saying how much his years at the firm had meant to him, how much he would miss his colleagues, etc.

Sarah rolled her eyes as she recounted this to me. "Isn't that ridiculous?" she asked. And then she added, "That would never happen here in England."

I was a bit surprised by her reaction. I don't think I would have done any differently than that employee if I'd been at a firm for over 30 years. You develop relationships-- with people, with the institution. It shapes your life.

We then got into a long argument about how, in her eyes, Americans define themselves too much by their work (fair enough); how they constantly say how wonderful everything is without really meaning it (also mostly true); how they feel a need to paint everything with a "you-can-do-it" rosy tint (true again).

Sarah has a point about the way in which the cultural pressure to look and be happy distorts our behavior in the US (See for example, my friend Guy's American phrasebook for a humorous take on this). But I can't help but think that there is something equally peculiar about the energy and passion with which Sarah felt the need to attack her colleague's email.

Just like our American "you-can-do-it" stereotypes, cynicism is also a lens through which to see the world. I find it quite a lot here in London. It's often dressed up in sophisticated, even charming manifestations. My Rough Guide to London speaks of a nation-wide standard for journalists in which extreme cynicism is first quality on the checklist before getting a job as a writer or newscaster. Combined with the fact that the British, on average, have way more knowledge about what's going on in the world-- it makes for far better news coverage than what we get at home.

But like any point of view, cynicism has it drawbacks. It's fine to question things, fine to be smug about those who don't see the irony and sheer ridiculousness of everyday life... But at the end of the day, what's wrong with getting attached to one's workplace, as long as it's held in healthy balance? More fundamentally, what's wrong with believing that it's possible to live the kind of life you want to live?

I ask that rhetorically, of course. But I'm finding more and more that not everyone would see that as a rhetorical question. A realization unto itself.

Same friend tells me the story of a party we went to last weekend. She apparently met a lovely guy, also well educated. He asked her what college she went to at Oxbridge but first revealed his own college-- one of the most prestigious in Oxbridge. She tells him her college-- and, as she recalls-- he pauses for a moment, and changes the subject, as if to underline how much of a higher status he has.

Now, this isn't my culture. I've only lived here for less than six months. Sarah would be able to read his reactions better than I would.

...Except, I was at this party too. I met this guy. He seemed perfectly nice, a bit softspoken; indeed, even a bit diffident. Not the type of person, in short, who would go around averting his nose to different colleges at the most prestigious universities in the country.

I began to wonder. If I'd been in the exact same conversation, I would have read his reaction differently. Where she saw arrogance, I would have seen awkwardness. Where she saw discussions of status, I would have seen a simple exchange of facts.

Perhaps this is the exact meaning of culture-- that you can take the same exact set of inputs and interpret them completely differently. Perhaps I'm naive to not want to focus on what might rightly be a bit of status-flaunting by this guy at the party. I suppose, though, at the end of the day, I'd want to err on the side of interpreting life as fairly good, and people as fairly decent. Are the two interpretations equally valid?

Which brings me back to the question I posed as the title of the post. There's nothing inherently inferior or superior about the American tendency to celebrate heroic individualism and optimism. It's good for certain situations and distorts others.

But what is cynicism good for? When is cynicism the right lens to take to the world?

That, I might add, is not a rhetorical question.

Poppies and Pride (a late second post)

In early November, I found myself in King's Cross station, London, sitting on a crowded bench, waiting to board a train to Newcastle.

Cops were walking around with dogs to sniff our luggage and make sure we had no explosives. People were milling about like mad, buying their last minute baguette sandwiches and coffees before heading on the train, talking on their mobile phones... and generally not paying any attention to each other.

But scattered around the station, I noticed a few people wearing red paper poppies in their lapels-- women and men alike, of all different ages.

For those of you who have lived in the UK, you will know that November 11th is Remembrance Day, a huge holiday to honor war dead. But I had no idea. (And at this point, it was still over ten days before Remembrance Day, when many more people would be wearing the flowers.)

The young woman sitting next to me on the bench was an African immigrant-- she looked about 18 or 19. She had braces and was wearing bright silver eyeshadow. I asked her if she knew what the red poppies were all about. She looked at me absent-mindedly and shook her head.

Meanwhile, another woman (who I assume was native-born English) had overheard my question and intervened. She appeared to be in her early thirties-- conservatively dressed, a bit overweight-- and told me she was a primary school teacher from the Midlands. She explained, beaming with pride, about how the British celebrate Remembrance Day ( ...In the 11th month, on the 11th day, in the 11th hour...), how the red poppies symbolize the earth upon which soldiers in Europe fell, disturbing the earth enough for huge fields of these flowers to spring up around their bodies.

But this wasn't just a technical explanation. Her eyes started to well up as she explained how her grandfather and uncle had served in World War II and how she always made sure all of her students took the holiday seriously. Her passionate explanation went on for almost 30 minutes; she almost made herself late for her train.

I was struck by the depth and sincerity of this woman's convictions-- the sheer upright conviction and morality which seemed to lay beneath them. For better or worse, it's hard to imagine Americans feeling a similar pride today about any of our past or present wars-- WWII included. Most people I know spend Veterans Day as just an extra day off (if they actually get it off, that is...which is a topic I shall have to save for another blog post.)

As the days wore on, I was up in the NE of the country, in tiny villages, and saw more and more people wearing these paper flowers in their lapels, which they bought from a national charity whose proceeds went to benefit war veterans. Birmingham had huge poppies decorating the city center (see photo below). Some people even wore 'alternative poppies' (see below)-- white flowers meant to symbolize a pacifist response to war-- but one that still acknowledged the sacrifice of war victims all the same.

Now I'm a human rights practitioner. I've spent years studying nationalism and patriotism in all its forms and tend to have a love-hate relationship with all of its many manifestations. So one would think I might not be super excited about witnessing other countries' forms of patriotism. And of course, there's an element of performance about the whole practice, also. BBC TV announcers, for example, are told they must wear the poppy in their lapel in early November; no choice about it. There's plenty of people who wear the poppy just because they can't be seen not doing so.

But somehow, still, the whole poppy practice struck me as a good and honorable thing. Perhaps the deep recognition of the debts we owe to those who came before us and their struggles. Perhaps the sense of gratitude that the freedoms we enjoy were not just dropped in our laps pricelessly (do I sound like a politician making a speech?).

There are many reasons one could postulate about why Americans don't take their war history quite as seriously. Perhaps that our land has never been physically threatened to quite the same degree, 9/11 notwithstanding. Perhaps just that our sense of history is so much less keenly developed-- given we have so much less of it to look back on.

It's understandable. And I'm the last person to glamorize war.

But, I have to say, I admire the way the British celebrate Remembrance Day. I think we've got something to learn from it.

Birmingham town centre with poppies

White poppies symbolize pacifist commemoration