Hey friends! My Daddy celebrated his 54th birthday on January 24th. Nathan and I made him a birthday video from London! We sent him a DVD of the video and surprised him on his birthday. He really enjoyed it and I hope you will too!
Click on the link to the right. Once you're at youtube, make it full screen by clicking on the little icon on the toolbar with the four arrows.
Love,
Lauren
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
A valuable lesson.
We’ve been here nearly a month now, and I’d say we’re beginning to feel like locals. Lauren’s fake accent is getting better all the time, and we’re becoming accustomed to a cold flat, warm drinks, and perpetually overcast weather. Well, truthfully Lauren’s still cold.
I love London though. London is so many things all at once. Down one street you will find a picture-perfect pub where you can get a delicious steak & ale pie and chips for £5, and down another you will find a hectic mix of crowds, shops and traffic that never seems to stop. There are markets that sell antiques so beautiful you begin to contemplate ridiculous methods of transporting them back to the States, and department stores so luxurious that their “sale” items are miles beyond your budget. There are places for every interest. There is food of every kind. Best of all, there is a great diversity of people. Riding the tube is like turning a tuner through various foreign radio stations, every station being in a different language. And sometimes, unfortunately, the stations smell bad or act strangely. But usually they are a delight to observe.
The weekend pub-going crowds are another story. The cliché that “the city never sleeps” is never more true when you’re trying to go to sleep and the city is awake and has been drinking, and is waiting for its bus, making noise on the street. And by noise I mean unprovoked screaming, singing, and general ruckus. It doesn’t help when your flat-neighbor is blasting techno at all hours of the night, but at least techno has some order to it, some rhythm. Drunken screaming is particularly lacking in harmonious qualities.
Interactions with restaurant staff and shop-owners are a favorite. It’s incredible how few people here speak intelligible English (London is a haven for foreigners from every nation). English speakers are so rare that sometimes I forget that the national language of England is English, and I go into establishments and feel guilty for not speaking the native language of the employees, as if I’m causing an inconvenience. Repeating yourself is no guarantee for getting your message across. I asked one waitress if refills were free at least three times, and she assured me they were—only to charge us for every refill. I was sure that one waitress we encountered was an alien, in the literal sense. Her attempt at English produced choppy robot-like sounds that I wouldn’t be able to replicate without a voice-modulator. And if I’m really lucky, I’ll ask a shop-owner what the price of a particular item is, only to have them tell me that “for you, £2.29.”
The bustling, melting-pot atmosphere that London provides is nicely balanced by the rich history behind it. You cannot help but stand in awe before many of the buildings, the architecture itself inspiring—not to mention the fact that whatever you’re looking at is potentially centuries old. Much of London represents what some might call our “world heritage,” in that the figures who inhabited its buildings or walked its streets shaped the development of the world’s civilization in remarkable ways—both for good and for the worse. On certain occasions, as I’ve walked the halls of Parliament or Westminster Abbey or the British Museum, I remember again that we are not the first, and will not be the last. It’s comforting and frightening at the same time.
Speaking of the British Museum, I should mention that they have in their collection of ancient artifacts a very old rock (allegedly an old tool used by very old people). While the exact age of the rock is not known, it is at least, they say, 1.8 million years old (that’s B.C. now). While I haven’t actually verified the scientific process of carbon dating in my own research, I would like to believe that the rock is as old as they say. Anyhow, I was naturally taken aback by such an incredibly old piece of the world, and for some reason I felt compelled to talk to the rock, to tell it about the state of the world as it is now, which the rock could never have surmised from its small glass prison inside the vast halls of the British Museum. I realized, as I tried to tell the rock about all the pertinent history I could remember, that I didn’t remember very much at all. I had all my dates and times confused, not to mention names, and inevitably ended up talking about World War II the whole time, which is so typical. I was embarrassed of course, and my embarrassment led me to tell the rock about my own life, something with which I am much more familiar. After I had finished telling the rock all my biggest hopes and dreams, and deepest fears, I stopped, and waited in silence. The rock did not return my gesture however, and the museum was closing. So I walked away, and as I walked I thoughtfully acknowledged how little I had to tell the rock which didn’t involve myself, and how lamentable it was that I couldn’t remember more after all my years of schooling. And so I've learned a valuable lesson from the rock, and from the city in which it resides: that we are not the center of the world, and that there is much to learn.
Nathan
I love London though. London is so many things all at once. Down one street you will find a picture-perfect pub where you can get a delicious steak & ale pie and chips for £5, and down another you will find a hectic mix of crowds, shops and traffic that never seems to stop. There are markets that sell antiques so beautiful you begin to contemplate ridiculous methods of transporting them back to the States, and department stores so luxurious that their “sale” items are miles beyond your budget. There are places for every interest. There is food of every kind. Best of all, there is a great diversity of people. Riding the tube is like turning a tuner through various foreign radio stations, every station being in a different language. And sometimes, unfortunately, the stations smell bad or act strangely. But usually they are a delight to observe.
The weekend pub-going crowds are another story. The cliché that “the city never sleeps” is never more true when you’re trying to go to sleep and the city is awake and has been drinking, and is waiting for its bus, making noise on the street. And by noise I mean unprovoked screaming, singing, and general ruckus. It doesn’t help when your flat-neighbor is blasting techno at all hours of the night, but at least techno has some order to it, some rhythm. Drunken screaming is particularly lacking in harmonious qualities.
Interactions with restaurant staff and shop-owners are a favorite. It’s incredible how few people here speak intelligible English (London is a haven for foreigners from every nation). English speakers are so rare that sometimes I forget that the national language of England is English, and I go into establishments and feel guilty for not speaking the native language of the employees, as if I’m causing an inconvenience. Repeating yourself is no guarantee for getting your message across. I asked one waitress if refills were free at least three times, and she assured me they were—only to charge us for every refill. I was sure that one waitress we encountered was an alien, in the literal sense. Her attempt at English produced choppy robot-like sounds that I wouldn’t be able to replicate without a voice-modulator. And if I’m really lucky, I’ll ask a shop-owner what the price of a particular item is, only to have them tell me that “for you, £2.29.”
The bustling, melting-pot atmosphere that London provides is nicely balanced by the rich history behind it. You cannot help but stand in awe before many of the buildings, the architecture itself inspiring—not to mention the fact that whatever you’re looking at is potentially centuries old. Much of London represents what some might call our “world heritage,” in that the figures who inhabited its buildings or walked its streets shaped the development of the world’s civilization in remarkable ways—both for good and for the worse. On certain occasions, as I’ve walked the halls of Parliament or Westminster Abbey or the British Museum, I remember again that we are not the first, and will not be the last. It’s comforting and frightening at the same time.
Speaking of the British Museum, I should mention that they have in their collection of ancient artifacts a very old rock (allegedly an old tool used by very old people). While the exact age of the rock is not known, it is at least, they say, 1.8 million years old (that’s B.C. now). While I haven’t actually verified the scientific process of carbon dating in my own research, I would like to believe that the rock is as old as they say. Anyhow, I was naturally taken aback by such an incredibly old piece of the world, and for some reason I felt compelled to talk to the rock, to tell it about the state of the world as it is now, which the rock could never have surmised from its small glass prison inside the vast halls of the British Museum. I realized, as I tried to tell the rock about all the pertinent history I could remember, that I didn’t remember very much at all. I had all my dates and times confused, not to mention names, and inevitably ended up talking about World War II the whole time, which is so typical. I was embarrassed of course, and my embarrassment led me to tell the rock about my own life, something with which I am much more familiar. After I had finished telling the rock all my biggest hopes and dreams, and deepest fears, I stopped, and waited in silence. The rock did not return my gesture however, and the museum was closing. So I walked away, and as I walked I thoughtfully acknowledged how little I had to tell the rock which didn’t involve myself, and how lamentable it was that I couldn’t remember more after all my years of schooling. And so I've learned a valuable lesson from the rock, and from the city in which it resides: that we are not the center of the world, and that there is much to learn.
Nathan
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