I’m nearing the end of a brief, but enjoyable trip to London. I’d experienced the city several years ago after a legendary New Years celebration, called Hogmanay, in Edinburgh, Scotland. On that particular visit my friends and I spent most of the time recovering from excessive drinking and ice rain exposure, though I did have the chance to see a couple sites, like Big Ben and the Tate Modern.
My return trip has been about filling in the blanks—visiting friends and getting a sense of the different neighborhoods. Oh, and seeing more sites, eating great food, and catching the end of a design festival.
The city doesn’t contain too many structures that are always in view above the horizon—like the Empire State building in New York City or the Rocky Mountains in Denver—so taking to the streets and knowing them seems to be a key way of getting a sense of the scale and location. I took walks that connected me from point A to B. One day I walked from the funky store fronts and markets of Camden to the more mainstream shopping establishments in the West End. Admittedly I still don’t really know my way around, but I’ll use that as an excuse to come back for more one day.
Other highlights included catching up with American friends who in one way or another, have managed to stay in the UK for an extended period. If I were able to make that happen for myself somehow, could I be content living over here? On the downside, London seems very reserved and stuffy. If Americans have a problem of being blindly ambitious and not minding their manners, perhaps Londoners have the opposite problem of holding back too much? On the upside, maybe this tendency to be prim and proper when it comes to social protocols, has caused Londoners to become more exploratory in their inward expression—refining and trusting their own music taste over that of the masses in a record store environment seldom found in the US, or appreciating more sophisticated humor around wordplay and so forth. In conclusion, Londoners are alright.
