So I realize that you thought that this blog was finished, and for good reason—I haven’t written in months. At first the time and effort involved in settling back in at home kept me away from the computer, and thus from the blog, but after I settled back in (and despite hearing horror stories to the contrary settling back in to the states has been surprisingly easy) I still didn’t write. There were practical things that kept me from writing: I was looking for a job, which took up most of my time, then I was busy re-connecting with my high school friends who were too lazy to read my blog and had to be brought up to speed on every little detail about the past six months. But I know I could have found time to write if I truly wanted to. The real reason I haven’t written is that I was frightened to.

Not frightened in the sense that I have developed an over night phobia of technology, or an unreasonable paranoia that this blog might be used by serial killers searching for their next victim, and not even frightened because a final blog would mean that my London adventure was finally and truly over. No, what frightened me was the knowledge that my final blog would have to contain some form of advice. I would need to share what I learned after living abroad, and then tell all the prospective traveling learners out there why studying abroad was a valuable experience. And, if indeed I do give advice, it implies that I have some form of wisdom, which I am not at all sure that I possess.

You see, I had a lot of fun studying abroad. It is exhilarating to meet new people and discover new places, (and of course by discover I mean visit for the first time places that have been there for hundreds in some cases thousands of years but didn’t actually exist until I stumbled upon them with my guidebook and compass), and it is impossible to do these things and return unchanged. And it is from this change that I am supposed to garner a font of knowledge that I can then share with my friends and readers. But such changes are not like dying your hair or growing a third arm. Their marks are imperceptible, and so subtle that I am not even sure what they are. I know for instance that the experience of reading E. M. Forster’s Maurice was made much more enjoyable because when Forster tells us that the hero and his lover meet at the British Museum I could picture them exactly in one of the rooms, knew which exhibits they were looking at, and understood what they had to walk through before they could take off their hats and shake each others’ hands. This is a concrete result of my time spent in London, and it is not the least reason to study abroad. Simply seeing the Mona Lisa on the canvas or standing in the desert in front of an actual pyramid are valuable experiences that enrich your day-to-day life immeasurably.

Such knowledge is knowledge that I feel lucky, even blessed to have gained, and it is the most palpable result of my time spent abroad; the closest to a third arm that I will ever get, but I know that this type of knowledge is the knowledge of the tourist. Though valuable in its kind, it does not require six months on foreign soil to obtain. And indeed, I spent little more than an extended weekend in Paris and about ten days in Egypt. I’m glad I went (and even more glad I got the chance to go) but the lessons learned there are not the lessons of study abroad; they are instead the generic lessons of travel.

So what are the lessons of study abroad? How has living on foreign soil changed me? Well, I’m not sure. In my first entry I wrote that I hoped studying abroad would help me obtain some sort of career goal, that it would stop me from being feckless and give me some sort of ambition. I can categorically state that it has done none of those things. I’m just as ambivalent about my future as I was in January. What it has done, however, has made me a little easier with my own ambivalence. Career plans are all well and good, but now I know that if I’m plunked down in the middle of an unknown city I can probably order lunch, find the bathroom and make it to the train station without knowing the language. You’d be amazed the amount of confidence that sort of ability can give you. But more than merely dazzling myself with my own competence, the knowledge that I can go somewhere I’ve never been before and make friends, learn the public transportation system and eke a pleasant day to day existence out of nothing is tremendously comforting. I may not know what I want to do, but I know that I will be able to make myself happy doing it. Studying abroad has taught me that my ability to make myself happy is not dependent on my surroundings, but on myself. And that, dear readers, is all anybody can ask for.

So after all of that, what advice can I give you?

Only this: Never eat chocolate and chew gum at the same time. The chocolate will make the gum fall apart, and then you’ve wasted a perfectly good piece of gum.

I prepared for my trip to Florence by reading EM Forsters A Room With A View, but the book, however much fun to read, was misleading because it implied there would be rooms to sleep in in Florence. We’ve had a lot of trouble finding places to stay, with views or otherwise. The original plan was to spend a day in Sienna after Pisa, and then go on to Florence. But Lindsay was supposed to book the hostel in Sienna, and apparently the computer connections aren’t too reliable in Mali, so she asked her mother to do it for her from her US computer. Apparently her mom forgot to make the booking, so we decided rather than spend a single night in Sienna, it would be best to go straight to Florence. We showed up without a place to stay, however, and after a quick consultation with the guidebook decided it would be best to go to tourist information in the train station and get a room for the night.

The woman in tourist information took one look at us and said “Cheap cheap cheap?” and we said yes, we needed a place to stay for two people, one night at the cheapest possible rate. She smiled and nodded and made a lot of phonecalls in rapid sucession, speaking in breathless Italian, and finally after several tries found us two hostel beds for the night. We thanked her, and received the map she gave us and made our way through some very unpleasant and unseasonable rain to our hotel room. With the room taken care of, we decided to brave the wet in order to do some sight seeing, and found ourselves outside Saint Croce Church, the church where the hero and heroine of A Room With A View have their first real conversation. We planned to duck our heads in and take a quick peak, but we soon found out that that was impossible.

The church turned out to be the burial sight of Galileo, Machiavelli, Micheangelo and others, though not, interestingly enough of Dante. Dante is buried in Ravenna, but that didn’t stop Saint Croce from building a huge garrish monument in honor of the Florentine poet. I’ve never been a big Dante fan despite slogging my way through three different translations of the Inferno. When I saw his monument I think I understood why. He always looks incredibly dour, as if he was having bad indigestion; I think it comes out in his writing.

The next day we had to move to our hostel that Lindsay had also booked from Mali (the deal was that she would book Florence and Sienna, I would book Venice and Pisa). Rather than head straight to our Hostel, however, we decided to do some early sight seeing, and made it to the Duomo in time to be first in line when it opened. The guidebook was not too enthusiastic about the church, claiming it was “chilly and austere” on the inside, but I enjoyed it immensely. The inside doesn’t feel cluttered the way some of these churches can be. After the Duomo we headed across the way to the Baptistry to gaze at Ghiberti’s “Gates of Paradise,” which was obscured by a sea of tourists. I’m short enough, however, that I eventually wrangled my way to the front, and I’m glad I did, the doors are truly breathtaking.

The Piazza was beginning to get absolutely swamped with tour groups, so we headed back to our hostel to collect our bags and carried them through the wet and cold to the hostel we had booked for the next five nights.

The hostel looked amazing, it was up a steep flight of stairs, but had large windows and wooden floors as well as offering free internet. There were signs all over in broken English reminding guests that “The waisting of the energy was a crime against the enviroment” and other helpful hostel hints. When we got there, however, the woman couldn’t find our booking. There was much sturm und drang, and the management was called, while we nervously looked over the reservation and tried to decipher the rapid Italian the receptionist was shouting into the phone. Eventually we realized that the reservation was for May, and we were here in June. The hostel was booked solid all five nights, and we had nowhere to stay. We asked the receptionist if she had any suggestions of places to stay, and she said that as far as she knew the entire city was booked solid. It turns out that the next day, the second of June, was a national holiday, and meaning it was a popular time to visit. She wouldn’t let us use the phone, but she was nice enough to let us store our bags while we found a place to stay.

We returned to the street with absolutely no idea of what to do. We found a phone and began to call all of the hostels in the guidebook. All of them were booked solid for the next two nights, but we finally found a place that will take us for the last three nights of our stay. Lindsay went off to find an internet cafe where she could confirm the booking, and I headed in the other direction to find us a bed for the night. My plan was to head to the tourist office, but I realized that the streets on the way to the train station seemed to be lined with wall to wall hotels. I stopped into a few of the cheaper looking ones, all of which seemed to be booked solid for the next two nights (I even encountered a panicky couple whose reservations had also fallen through screaming at an unfortunate receptionist) Finally I found a one star hotel with a single room left. It was little more than a broom cubbard, but breakfast was included, and the room had a TV. Grateful to have a place to stay I headed back to collect both Lindsay and the luggage. I’ve learned two things from the whole experience–the first is never have anybody make a hotel booking from Mali, and the second is that commercials are more entertaining in Italian.

Greetings from Pisa. Everybody I spoke to while I was planning this trip wrinkled their noses when they heard I was stopping in Pisa for three days. “Pisa is a hole,” one of my friends put it bluntly, “there’s nothing there but the tower and that takes fifteen minutes.” With all of the negative press that Pisa had gotten I was not exactly excited to spend a large amount of time here, and probably would have skipped it entirely having no real interest in towers leaning or otherwise, but I was meeting a friend in Italy, and the cheapest airfare she could find was from London to Pisa, so Pisa it was. And after all of the dread, I’m really glad I came.

Pisa is a university town and, according to my faithful guidebook, the university here is one of the best in Italy. The “tourist sights,” which include the Tower, the Duoma, a Bapitistry that looks like a wedding cake, and the “camposato” are all contained in a grassy piazza to the north of town, which means that most of the tourists are also confined to the same grassy piazza leaving the rest of the city free of interlopers. The rest of the city is lovely, the streets are narrow and winding in a way that is beginning to become familiar to me, and there are plenty of cheap cafes, restaurants and museums that the university students frequent. The river Arno runs through the center of town, and it’s great to stand on a bridge in the evening light with gelato in one hand and watch the sunset.

And there are tourist sights beyond the single grassy piazza. I learned that the tower in the Palazzo dell’Oraglio is the infamous “Tower of famine,” mentioned by both Dante and Shelley. According to my hazy recolections of my medieval literature class, the story goes that Ugolino della Gherardesca was locked in the tower with his young sons and left to starve. I forget exactly why he was condemned to such a fate, but I think he was a traitor of some sort. Left to starve the young sons died first, and were then eaten by his father and older brothers. I’ll take that over a leaning tower any day.

The other thing that has been great about Pisa is meeting my friend, Lindsay, here. Lindsay has spent her semester abroad in Mali, and it’s been wonderful to hear her stories about life in Africa. Her experience has been the polar opposite of mine, she was on a home stay for one thing, and I like to hear her talk about her Malian family. She said she had an unusal amount of crazy people staying in her house. Thinking she was speaking figuratively i asked what she meant, and she went on to describe the various states of mental imbalance of the members of her Malean family. My favorite is an elderly boarder who thinks he’s running for President of Mali, and takes any opprotunity he can get to talk about his platform. He’s perfectly okay otherwise, she said, but he really believes he’s running for president. The whole thing reminds me of Arsnic and Old Lace, where the crazy cousin thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt, but is perfectly harmless otherwise.

Today we did the “tourist sights,” which only took the moring. We didn’t go up the tower because it cost fifteen euros, and we didn’t take one of the photos that everybody seemed to be taking where you stand a certain distance away and hold your arms out so that it looks like you’re supporting the tower, but we did go into the Baptistry, the Duomo and the Campisato. The Baptistry was kind of dull, and more fun to look at from the outside than the inside. It did feature an amazing echo, though, which an Italian singer demonstrated for us once we were inside. The Duomo was great, however, according to the guide book it is “one of the most important romanesque churches in existence,” and features some amazing carvings and paintings. Before leaving for Italy my friend in London told me that she had heard somebody say Europe’s art is in her churches. I took the statement to mean that Europe’s churches are works of art, but after touring Italy I’ve come to realize that that statement should be taken literally. I will duck into a church just to cool down (churches are always several degrees cooler than the outside, I’m not really sure why,) and notice that the fairly anonomous looking building is filled with gorgeous paintings and sculpture. Aside from the amazing carvings and mosaics, the Duomo here also featured several relics, including the entire body of a Saint whose name i forget, but it began with an R.

By far my favorite sight, though, was the Camposato. It is a long building with ornate arches that houses frescos and carved sarcaphogi. It is said to be built on earth taken from Golgotha, and once rivalled the Leaning Tower as Pisa’s most popular tourist destination (in about the nineteenth century, I think,) Badly damaged in World War Two, it has been well restored. The sarcaphogi were interesting, but Lindsay and I really liked the frescos. There was one cycle that was designed by an artist known only as the “Master of the Triumph of Death,” which you have to admit is a great name. The frescos tell the story of the plague in Florence, and there was one passage I loved that showed the souls escaping from the dead bodies being fought over by devils and angels. There were also frescos depicting judgement and Hell, and one that neither Lindsay nor I could figure out.

Tomorrow we move on to Florence, which I’m told is as over run with tourists and the like as Venice was. Not that I should complain, being a tourist myself, but it was nice to have a stop in Pisa and take a break from all of that. Here we could cook our own food, and shop in a supermarket and spend large parts of the day stopping to chat and catch up with our various semesters in Europe and Africa. Perhaps the plains fly here for a reason.

Writing from Bologna, where the keyboards are erratic at best, much like the busses. My hostel is located slightly outside of town, and there is a special bus that runs to the center of the city every two hours. When I took it this afternoon I was the only person on the bus and the driver kept trying to make friendly conversation with me. I appreciated the sentiment, but as he didn’t speak any English and the only Italian I know comes from a passing love of Opera and four long ago years of Latin, we need to resort to pantimime to communicate. He kept turning around so he could look me in the eye, and I divided my time between trying to parse his sentences and looking nervously at the road, which he was completely disregarding.

So far Bologna has been great, but most of the sights were closed by the time I got to town. I have a full day tomorrow, though, and plan to make the most of it. The train ride here was fun, though, I shared my aisle with two very nice Indian men. Neither spoke much English, so we communicated with sentences that went subject\verb\hand gesture till I asked if they were here for holiday. One man said yes, but the other said he was coming here to live. He had to flee India because his brother was in trouble with the Indian mafia, and he feared retribution. This was shocking to find out, but even more shocking to see in pantomime.

And now for something completely different.

Verona was lovely. A small town compared to Venice and Bologna, but it had two things that Venice lacked: Cars and Italian People. I was not as productive as I might have been in Verona, choosing to skip the Opera arena in favor of sitting in cafes with a book and watching the people go past. I did manage to make it to the Casa Giulietta, however; a seventeenth century Veronese house done up as the house where Juliet Capulette lived. To tell you the truth I thought the whole thing was a little hokie. I appreciate that Shakespeare set his play in Verona for a reason, but there’s no way Shakespeare could have ever seen a postcard of Verona, let alone the city itself. Still I had to respect the city’s love of the play. The walls of Juliet’s house were covered in graffitti from young lovers writing their names all along the outside, and the love lorn would write messages for Juliet which they would leave on the walls or by her statue. I much prefered the piazza outside the casa, which was an old town square and was covered with vendors selling fruit, food and souvenirs. In the center of the piazza there was a raised platform where I sat to eat my panini and coca light. I noticed a pair of ominous chains hanging from the platform and consulted my guidebook, which informed me that prisoners used to be chained to the platform and the townspeople would pass by and pelt them with garbage. Charming.

After the casa I walked around the city for a bit, and decided to cross the river away from the tourist attractions. The other side of the river was dominated by a steep hill, and I found a cobblestone street that lead up it. I enjoyed the walk, but eventually had to stop because my eyes started welling up, and I began to sneeze. It’s been so long since I found myself in the middle of nature, that I’ve forgotten I usually have allergies this time of year. They haven’t been much of a problem in London, seeing as it still rarely gets about the fifties (there were about two weeks of sunshine, which I have since begun to fear might have been total flukes) but the Italian sunshine caused the verdure to bloom, which in turn caused me to sneeze. I’ve learned not to mind the hayfever, but as I walked back I began to notice that I was getting the oddest looks from people, and I realized just how striking bright red eyes can be. I figured I must have looked like I had been crying, so I tried to counteract it by smiling broadly at people. This just seemed to frighten them even more, so I ended by simply keeping my eyes glued to the pavement.

I ducked into a cafe to recover, and ended up getting dinner there. The cafe had a fabulous view of Verona across the water, and it was the ideal place to watch the sun set behind the duomo. Italy is filled with mosquitos (I had shared my room with one the night before, as well as with three charming Australians,) and at sunset swarms of swallows came out to feast on the bloodsucking pests. Watching the birds swoop in the twilight, and feeling the day begin to cool I sneezed, and, however horrific it may have looked, I smiled.

I had to take a final exam last week on eighteenth century literature. The entire thing took me two hours and involved writing two essays–one on Fielding and one on Johnson. That was my final exam for school, but this is my real final exam.

I’m am writing from Venice on the first full day of a two week tour of northern Italy. For seven days I’m going to be traveling alone in a country where I don’t speak the language, living in hostels and
eating as much gelato as humanly possible. After that I will be joined by a friend from school (she spent the semester studying in Mali, and is now doing a tour of Europe. We’re meeting in Pisa.), but until then I am
embarking on what I consider to be my real final exam. I get to find out what I’ve learned about finding my way around a foreign country and relying on my own resources. I’m a little frightened.

I arrived in Venice yesterday, on a flight that took off from Stansted airport in London at six thirty in the morning. Stansted is about an hour and a half outside of the city, so to ensure that I arrived with enough time to check in and make it through security I had to catch a three thirty am bus from Victoria Station. I find it difficult to sleep on buses and planes, so by the time I reached Venice I was a bit of a basektcase. Still, I wasn’t going to waste a day Venice, so tired as I was I headed out into the streets
to explore.

Venice is very difficult to navigate. The streets and canals don’t seem to move in a straight line, and right angles are almost unheard of. I spent a good deal of time wandering around yesterday, only to end up back at my hostel. The city feels very touristy; I seem to hear French and German spoken as much as English and Italian, but it has an undeniable charm. To begin with Venitians seem to be much fonder of dogs than the British, and they don’t feel the need to put them on lead. The dogs follow their masters in the various cafes and tratorias, and seem to be incredibly well trained. The ubiquity of the dogs means that the integrity of Venice’s sidewalks suffer a bit, but it makes the city feel cheery.

I’m ending my trip in Venice, so I’ll be back. Thus, I’m taking my time to explore the city because I don’t feel I have to do everything at once. I saw San Marco square with it’s gorgeous Basilico, which I didn’t go into, and the grand Doge’s palace, which I did. The Doge’s palace was amazing, filled with paintings and frescos by the likes of Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto.

I know next to nothing about Italian art (I have a hunch that will change after this trip,) but I loved looking at the large canvasses. The palace also included a tour of the dungeons, which can be reached over the “bridge of sighs,” so called because prisoners crossing it would sigh when they caught their last glimpse of the outside and freedom before being locked away for good. I can’t say I blame them.

The area around San Marco is incredibly touristy, and hence incredibly over priced, so I tried to see other parts of the city. I went to another museum the Accadamia, which also included many works by Veronese, Tintoretto and Titian (I’m sensing a theme.) I loved the art, though, although they could
probably open another museum just for all of the madonna and child paintings alone.

Italy is famous for its churchs, but I have yet to go into a church. Instead, I went to the Jewish section of town and took a tour of the four synagogues. Venice has the oldest ghetto in Europe. I learned that the word ghetto comes from the Italian word for foundry. When the jews were sequestered in the fourteenth century the old foundry was turned into a living area for them. Now if I can find out what a foundry is I’m going to be all set; I think it has to do with building ships. Anyway, the jews had to live in the ghetto and could only leave during the day if they were wearing a yellow or red badge if they were male, or a yellow scarf if they were female. Nowadays they’ve gotten a little more casual. Apparently some
of the first skyscrapers in Italy were in the ghetto because they had to fit a large community–between three and four thousand people–into a small space. Nowadays only around three hundred jews live in Venice proper, but I think it has to do more with property taxes than persecution.

The time at the internet cafe is going to run out soon. Tomorrow I leave bright and early for Verona. Till then, ciao.

So it’s been ages since I’ve written, and I feel guilty about that of course, but I have a decent excuse. My father came to visit me from the US last week and I had a great time taking him around London and showing all of the places I’ve been raving about this semester, and I think he had a great time being taken.

He’s an American History Professor, so while he very considerately allowed me to drag him to all of the art museums that I’ve grown to know and love here, he had two main interests when it came to London sight seeing. The first was to stop off in every book store we passed and look in the history section to see how many books cited his work, and the second was to visit sights that had to do with World War Two. Still, he put up with my anlgophilic itinerary and dutifully followed me to the shows and galleries that I wanted to visit. We saw two amazing West End plays while he was here-a Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Crucible, which was impeccable, and the John Doyle production of Mack and Mabel, a tale of silent era Hollywood. The Crucible was probably a better night in the theatre, and not in the least because the Arthur Miller script was ten times better than the Jerry Herman score, but Mack and Mabel was an interesting production. It was directed by the same person who did the new production of Sweeny Todd on Broadway (which is well worth seeing,) and he used the same conceit in this production–the actor/singers doubled as the pit orchestra. Believe me, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen an actress dressed as a flapper tap dancing to a feel good number about talkies with a saxophone around her neck.

In deference to my father, however, we did make a stop at Winston Churchill’s war rooms, which are located in the basement of a large building near parliament. The rooms had to be underground because of the air raids, and Sir Winston along with his advisors and staff had to live there for much of the war. After touring the offices and living area I can safely say that they were not to be envied. They had to live without natural light, ventilation or flushing toilets for weeks on end while they drew up strategy and talked policy.

One of my favourite parts of the exhibit was the private phone line that ran directly to the white house. It was apparently kept super secret, and only a handful of people, even the people admitted to the bunker knew of its existence. To camouflage the room it was disguised as a toilet with an occupied‚ sign outside the door. Many thought that it was the only flushing toilet in the complex, and the prime minister was the only person allowed to use it-a circumstance which I’m sure couldn’t have fostered much love between Churchill and his staff.

The museum also contained a modern section devoted entirely to Churchill and his life and legacy. I enjoyed listening to his speeches, and seeing his paintings (he was apparently an avid amateur painter, as well as a prolific writer.) There’s something about viewing an ex prime minister’s cigar stubs, or watching a clip from his favourite movie (a bio-pic about Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton,) that really humanizes him. But I also found that the more I read about Churchill and his policies the more disturbing I found him. Churchill was a war hawk in the strongest sense, and while when I was younger I used to admire his unshakable resolve and conviction, in a post Iraq world those no longer seem to be such desirable qualities. There’s no such thing as a British cowboy, but Churchill comes pretty close in his go it alone resolve. Yes he drank wine and scotch instead moonshine, and rode thourough breads instead of mustangs, but there’s the same individualistic determination, and a willingness to use guns before words that frightens me. Of course, there is no comparison between World War Two and the current Iraq debacle, but I’m pretty sure that if Churchill were alive today he would have done the same thing Blair did and sent the troupes to Iraq. As somebody who went to a Quaker school, that frightens me.

I really enjoyed the war rooms as a whole, though, and would recommend them for anybody visiting the city. It’s an era of history that I find completely uninteresting, but after that visit I will definitely have to do some more reading, I clearly don’t do it justice.

There are some things that are cool about London, but you see them every day and slowly become inured to their coolness. Those red phone boxes, for instance, or the phrase “mind the Gap,” on the Tube, these things used to thrill me because they seemed so quaint and quintessentially British, but now I don’t notice them much. You can usually tell when your acting like a tourist because you find things interesting that the natives don’t notice—like those phone boxes. Nothing makes a hardened Londoner roll his eyes more than seeing a group of people posing in front of one of those red telephone boxes. Then there are the things you don’t see every day, the things that even consummate Londoners race to photograph because it is so new and interesting. The larger than life size elephant robot I saw on Saturday definitely fit into the second category.

There was a four-day performance art extravaganza going on in London this weekend. A puppet group has staged an elaborate show, lasting four days, about an Indian sultan from the past. Apparently he had a dream about a little girl who will exist in 21st century London. The dream consumed him, so the court scientist built, what else, a gigantic time traveling elephant to take him to 21st century London and find the little girl. They were going to ride the elephant around London, and then have a bunch of events where the riders acted out scenes from their story, culminating on Sunday when a giant puppet of a little girl would arrive on a spaceship.

We, my friend Katie and I, didn’t see any of the theatricals, but we did get to see the giant elephant, which was awesome. The elephant was followed by a rock band, which provided the soundtrack to the elephant’s story. It was a great opportunity to take pictures without feeling like a tourist.

The nice weather we’ve been experiencing recently has taken me not just to the city parks, but to the suburbs as well. After I posted that seemed to be no Jews in London, I got a bunch of posts from family and friends insisting that there was, in fact, a strong Jewish community in London. You just need to know where to look. My single other Jewish friend at Kings (who is also American), and I decided to go in search of them. We had missed every major Jewish holiday this term except for Passover, though the two person Sedar we cobbled together in my kitchen was barely worthy of the name, so I was fuelled by the deepest, most culturally specific force a Jew knows to go and find my people, and atone for neglect of my culture: guilt.

We found that the main Jewish neighborhood in London is called Golder’s Green, and it’s located way to the north of the city, in Zone three on the tube map. We took advantage of the May day holiday (May first is a bank holiday here, for no apparent reason) to grab a bus out to the burbs. When we arrived we looked around, unsure what to expect. Would there be a synagogue on the high street? Would the soundtrack to Fiddler on the Roof be playing in the background? What made this neighborhood more or less Jewish than the rest of London? We weren’t sure, but the high volume of Chinese restaurants told us we must be in the right place. And sure enough, as we walked down the high street, amid the McDonalds and the Starbucks we began to see Kosher bakeries and restaurants, and stores selling Jewanalia like menorahs and mezuzahs.

As I said before I don’t consider myself to be really Jewish. I was never Bat mitzvahed and I don’t practice, but this semester has made me feel more Jewish than at any other time in my life. There’s something about being the only Jew in the room that makes you extremely aware of your heritage, and I have been the only Jew in the room since January when I arrived. But I’ve always considered myself culturally Jewish, and I missed the things I considered to be my cultural heritage that I took for granted in the states—bagels and lox, hamentaschen, matzah ball soup; my connection to my religion was deeply culinary.

We had come, then, to Golder’s Green to perform the only kind of Jewish ritual that I knew: eating. We wandered in and out of the bakeries and delis, buying a piece of ruggelah there, and pickle there to take home and eat later, but we took our time before selecting a falafel stand with a line out of the door to purchase lunch. With our deep fried chick peas and diet cokes, we ate outside and watched the passers by, thrilling at the sight of men wearing long beards with curly forelocks, and women in long jean skirts with children in their arms. Back home, obviously conservative Jews made me uncomfortable because I always felt inadequate around them. Besides from the disagreements about Israel and a woman’s place in the workforce that I felt we were sure to have, I knew that I was not their idea of a good Jew, because, well, I wasn’t a good Jew, and that made me resentful. But here it was amazing just to look down the street and know that I was not alone. Here, I wasn’t the bad Jew, I was the only Jew (well, one of two,) and that was tough. It has been ages since I had felt that I didn’t have to be the one carrying the Jew-torch: in my flat and in my classes I was the one who had to know everything about being Kosher, or the exact translation of each Yiddish interjection. In Golder’s Green I could finally relax and let others carry the torch; I could go back to being the bad Jew that I’d been all my life, and that was a great feeling.

After the falafel, and a desert of Kosher cookies, we decided to walk to Primrose Hill. It was a long walk that took us over Hampstead Heath, which is one of the highest points in London and offered a great view of the city. Away from the rush of inner city London, it was nice to take some time and just stroll through the increasingly green landscape. Of course, this could only go on for so long before the sidewalks vanished entirely, and we were left looking over our shoulders to watch for the SUVS (less common than in America, but still a presence) and Lexuses didn’t get us. And I realized that suburbs are nice, but Jews or no Jews, there’s no place like the public transportation system.

What is better than anything else in the whole world? London in the sunshine. I discovered this when we were blessed with an entire week of London sun. Suddenly I was incapable of doing anything—cleaning my room, revising for my exam, writing my blog, all of these became onerous tasks because they meant staying inside for more than half an hour at a time. As a result, I am behind in all of the things I should have been doing this week.

My dad comes on Tuesday, and I was hoping to have finished studying for my exam by the time he arrives (I have to take it the day after he leaves, this semester has been a masterpiece of poor academic planning on my part,) but now I fear I will have to send him off to a museum while I sneak away to read Henry Fielding for a half hour here and Johnson for fifteen minutes there. Still, it’s been worth it. At my college at home, the campus is small enough that the entirety is connected by a series of underground tunnels, and during the winter months, if it is cold and wet, I have been known to go for days without seeing the sunlight, moving from class to class underground. But I’ve never felt as sun deprived as I have this semester, when I had a long walk in the open air to get to school. I’m pale normally, but I’ve now reached a state of pallor so extreme that small children run when they see me because I resemble creatures they know only from storybooks and Scooby Doo. So now the sun is irresistible to me. Slowly it’s repairing the long winter damage. The other day I noticed that my usual sickly shade of pallor had been upgraded to just plain pallor, and thought, well, it’s a start.

I’ve been using the sunshine to explore London’s park system. There are a series of beautiful parks in and around the city, which come alive in the nice weather. A typical day for me involves taking a blanket, a book, and a Diet Coke and heading West of Trafalger Square where three of the big parks are in easy walking distance. Hyde Park is the grandest, and on a Sunday people are still known to “promenade” through the park in their Sunday best, but it’s also the farthest away, so I don’t tend to spend a lot of time there. Instead, I like to go to either Green Park or St. James’ Park. Actually, Green Park and St. James Park are connected, and I’m never quite sure which one I’ve ended up in, but as I can’t make distinction between them I can say that they are equally lovely.

There are the requisite lakes and flower beds and soft ice cream vendors, along with the bird poop covered statues that seem to exist in every park in London, but I prefer to stick to the large open grassy spaces, fringed with trees that provide shade. I’ve taken to spreading out a blanket under the trees and reading the non-school books that I’ve been buying for a pound from Oxfam. I’m reading PD James right now, who I never really enjoyed before (I’m not really a huge mystery fan,) but now I love reading her work because it’s set in London. It’s great to read a scene and realize I had lunch there just the day before. Reading in the park is fun because I can look around at the other sunbathers, most of whom are couples in their twenties and thirties who seem to enjoy bringing bottles of wine and feeding each other various kinds of fruits.

There are also kids playing Frisbee or football (the British kind) while their mothers and baby sitters read or gossip nearby. These could all be terrible people, but I have no notion of it. Everybody looks kinder, gentler in the sun. I get the urge to buy strangers ice cream, and to join in the football games—we’re all emerging from the blah’s of winter together and there’s a sense of camaraderie between us.

St. James’ Park has a pond, actually all of the parks have several ponds, but there’s a particular pond in St. James’ Park that has been set aside as a bird sanctuary. For the record, I just want to state that I hate birds. I’m fine with all manners of creepy crawlies—snakes, lizards, spiders—these don’t really bother me, but birds freak me out. It’s an irrational, but strong, fear. My least favorite types of bird are waterfowl, particularly geese and swans who are both vicious and strong (not to mention disease ridden; I think flue can be passed between ducks and humans). For some reason, though, people decided that a duck and geese filled pond would be a good thing to have in the middle of a park filled with vulnerable children. I tend to avoid the pond whenever I can, but it bears mentioning because the variety of waterfowl the park has managed to acquire. I’m used to seeing the typical green-headed mallards and their brown-feathered lady friends that inhabit both the Thames and the ponds of Central Park, but there seem to be an endless variety of ducks and geese here. My favorites (from a safe distance) are the ones with bright blue bills, maybe because the vivid colors make them easy to spot if they should chose to come after you. But St. James doesn’t stop with the ducks, there are also much less exciting pigeons and sea-gulls (pond gulls?) and other city birds taking a break with their fellow human Londoners in the quiet of the park, not to mention partridges and other types of game fowl that enjoy the human free banks of the pond, and pelicans. One of my favorite signs warns park dwellers not to feed the pelicans—feeding the disease-ridden ducks and vicious swans and geese seems to be perfectly all right, but the pelicans are taboo. Go figure.

There was still a lot to see of Bath after the Abbey, and I was worried because it was already ten o’clock and we had yet to do our first Jane related event. Our next stop, however, was also non-Jane related. We headed to the Roman Baths next, which were on the same square as the Abbey. The Baths were an attraction in Austen’s time as they are today. There’s a BBC adaptation of Northanger Abbey, which has a scene where the heroine, Catharine and her ditzy chaperone “take the waters” together. This involves walking into the pools at the Roman Baths wearing a bathing costume that is much less revealing than what most people wear on the streets nowadays. The best bit, though, was that the women walked around the spring with plates of food tied around their necks, which they held above the water (that came to about mid-chest level) and elaborate hats! They were wearing bonnets that would put a southern Baptist church to shame. Because I’m pretty pasty, I’m extremely sun conscious, but I don’t think I’ve ever gone swimming in a hat.

The baths themselves, however, were more interested in the Roman period of their history than the Regency. They had a lot of information of Roman bathing practices, and the religious significance of the Baths etc. I didn’t have much patience for the audio tour, so I breezed through the baths, and headed out through the pump room, which has been turned into a high class tea room. In the pump room there was a man dressed in regency clothing selling waters from the bath spa. I bought a glass, and the man was nice enough to let me take his picture. The water was said to have had medicinal properties in Austen’s time, but when I tasted it I nearly gagged. London tap water is pretty awful, but Bath water puts it to shame. Thick tasting and tepid, the water has a slightly sulfuric taste that I assume comes from the hot springs from which it sprung. Yuck.

Allison had decided to skip the Baths, because she had already seen them on a previous trip to Bath, and I caught up with her at a Cadbury Chocolate house on one of the main streets. She was giving herself another infusion of caffeine and chocolate. I was a little non-plussed at her choice of a Cadbury chocolate seller, because Bath is swarming with small chocolate boutiques and ice cream shops. It seemed to be one of those towns who had the high end of everything—organic this, home spun that seemed to be for sale in every shop window.

Not being able to afford anything for sale in the various boutiques, we window-shopped our way up the hill, until we got to the Georgian houses that sat atop the hill. We ducked into One Royal Crescent, a Georgian house that had been preserved with furniture and trappings from the era. Not to be outdone by the Abbey, One Royal Crescent had a little old lady in every room, who handed us a laminated guide with a key to the various furniture and knick knacks in that particular room, and then informed us that they were there to answer any questions. One of the guides informed us that absolutely everything in the house was original; there were no reconstructions of any kind. Not just the furniture, but the pictures on the walls and the knick knacks on the tables were all from the Georgian period. I liked looking at the things on the desks, which included an eighteenth century guidebook to Bath in the study, and a set of curlers in the lady’s bedroom. I asked one of the guides, who had just finished giving us a lecture on nineteenth century beauty products (you know, lead in the make up, early deaths etc. etc.) if each guide could do each room, or if they each had a room of the house that they specialized in. She informed me that every guide worked on a volunteer basis, and that they were experts on every room in the house, which I though was pretty impressive.

We headed out of the house via the kitchen, which had been donated in toto by an enthusiastic kitchen supply collector. I noticed a small wheel suspended above the fireplace that looked a bit like a large wooden hamster wheel. Inside was a cut out of a medium sized dog. I asked the guide about it, and she explained that Bath was renowned for it’s “dog wheels” in their kitchens. The dogs were placed inside the wheels and ran, thus turning the wheel, which would in turn work the bellows in the fireplace where the food cooked. I wasn’t sure what repulsed me the most about the story—the breech of animal rights or the complete lack of human hygiene part. What with the sulfuric tasting water, and the dogs in the kitchen, Austen’s contempt for Bath society was becoming a little more understandable. I suppose she took to watching her neighbors during mealtime and making witty remarks to avoid whatever was on her plate.
We had had a long day of sightseeing, but we had yet to get to the main event—the Jane Austen visitors center in Bath. One Royal Crescent was located at the top of a very steep hill, with a gorgeous view of the city and a bright green manicured lawn. The lawn looked inviting after a day spent walking around, but we were girls on a mission. We tumbled down the hill, almost literally, until we got to the Jane Austen center. I should point out that I am a firm believer in the fact that Austen is an author for everybody. Any body who says that she writes “girly books” in my presence is in for a long haranguing. But the Austen visitor’s center was not doing much to help my case, as it was located on the intersections between (cough) Gay and Queen Streets. The woman inside informed us that Austen had not actually lived in the building that the center was built in, but that she had lived on that block, which explained the location.

Walking inside we were greeted by the requisite little old lady, who sold us our tickets and explained that the tour began with a lecture. The next one was starting in five minutes, and she led us to a waiting area, decorated with various Jane related paraphernalia. Highlights included one of Austen’s samplers, which was mounted on the wall, and a very witty letter from Emma Thompson about Jane Austen’s effect on her life. Next to Austen, Thompson in one of my other great heroes, so I was thrilled to see them on the wall together.

The lecture was interesting, and it is to the tour guide’s credit that she did not obscure how unhappy Bath made Austen. I love Austen’s work, but I feel more and more betrayed by her the more I learn about her life. She was a flaming conservative, and a consummate city hater—preferring the quietness of the country, and the stability that a monarchy without unalienable individual rights could bring. This guide pointed out, however, that one of Austen’s objections to city life was that it allowed her much less freedom than country living, which I suppose is a fair point. Nowadays I consider city life liberating—it gives me the opportunity to do so much, to dress and talk however I want without being the center of attention. Americans in London are no big deal, thanks to the sheer number of people. I think I would have stood out a whole lot more if I was studying in a smaller town, and I’m not sure that would have been a pleasant sensation. For Austen, however, exactly the opposite was true. Bath was a place to be seen as much as to see, and it is no wonder that she found the unending scrutiny exhausting.

After the initial lecture, the rest of the museum consisted mainly of dummies in costumes from the various Austen films that had been shot in the nineties, and long descriptions about how various things were done in Austen’s time—how she may have cultivated her beloved garden, how they made ink, how the postal service worked. (The modern British postal service, by the way, originated in Bath, we saw the plaque for the man who started it in the Bath Abbey. Apparently he was a theatrical manager who hired a bunch of coaches to take his troupe in between London and Bath, and started to carry correspondence with him, for a modest fee.) I found the whole display really interesting, and I felt that much closer to Jane when I walked into the gift shop, and purchased a souvenir card.

We did other things in Bath—went for afternoon tea, checked out the old guild halls, promenaded in the Bath Assembly rooms where Austen’s ball scenes took place, but really the best part of Bath was just seeing a different British town that wasn’t a city, and that presented a different picture of English living. Just seeing flowers in bloom everywhere I turned was such a marked contrast from day to day life in London. What was a bustling city in Austen’s time, was now a sleepy village, going about its day to day existence, while gracefully deigning to share its rich past with the various literary minded pilgrims who filtered through its squares.
(See next post for pictures)