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.