Statues and Coach Trips and Reading, Oh My!

One of the famous red telephone booths

When I was little my mom made a bedtime rule: if we kids were tucked in bed by 8:30 we could stay awake reading for another half hour. In summertime it was excruciating to go to bed with the sounds of neighborhood kids playing outside and the sun still up, but we did it religiously for years—just for those extra 30 minutes of reading. Reading was heaven and made bedtime not so dreadful.

Raised on C. S. Lewis and Roald Dahl, I had my eyes fixed on England long before I ever planned to come visit. I longed to see the “tube,” to eat a “biscuit,” to walk down cobbled streets through curtains of rain. In practically every children’s book I was exposed to the place was magic, for crying out loud. So it should be no surprise that England, birthplace of so many beloved classics, had me hypnotized, and when I decided to do a study abroad I knew right away that London was the place for me.

Well, it’s been six weeks . . .

*Satisfied sigh*

And England did not disappoint . . .

The wild landscape is incredible, the cultivated gardens equally stunning. I definitely felt a thrill looking out over the moors Charlotte Bronte drew on to write Jane Eyre. How can I say how cool it was that everything was just like in the books? A movie buff might get a similar thrill from walking through the set of a favorite film. For me, that has been the magical part of England--the literature and art that's poured forth in a flood and swept the world, so that I can come here and connect the wonderful things I've grown up reading to real life experiences. Where else would that be possible to such a large degree?

Garden at Stourhead

A room at the Stourhead Estate house 

A tree in Hyde Park

A balcony in the British Museum, which held practically every famous thing I'd ever seen in a textbook

Winged Nike at the Louvre

Every street, every building here is steeped in history and meaning. The very air is thick with centuries of layered adventure, and civilization's turning points are stacked together like knick-knacks in an antique shop. What does it do to a place to have a millennia of cultivation settled in its bones.

A view of the townhouses across the street from ours

Old graveyard by the Bronte House

The culture's age was a difference from my home that I expected. But oddly enough, I think the thing that’s struck me most over this program has been just how similar people here are to people back home. Even when we visited France, where the language barrier was very real, everything was still so similar. People were friendly. They talked to us about their jobs, their favorite sites, etc. Never having been outside the States before, I’d always built up other countries as these very exotic, very “other” places, filled with people who held totally different viewpoints from me. That made them exciting, but also a tad bit unrelatable. I anticipated that I could visit England, I could fall in love with it, but on some fundamental level I would never be able to see it from any perspective other than that of outsider.

How wrong I was.

From the moment I passed through border control to the moment I stepped off the bus from our latest excursion a few hours ago, the people here have been nothing but welcoming. And London itself, filled to the brim with different cultures and peoples is testament to the fact that here anyone from anywhere can find a home--and that's another kind of magic entirely.

The really marvelous thing is that, even though they may hold different beliefs or have different lifestyles, the people here have just as much love for their families, just as much interest in the future as people from home. In a very real way, it's shown me just how easily people from different backgrounds can become friends.

At the Sikh temple

I especially loved attending my congregation in Blackheath. It was a smaller one, of only forty or so people, but that really allowed me the chance to get to know some of the members one on one. And even in such a small pool, people still hailed from all over the world. In a way, I as an American fit right in. It made me wonder what the experience of a Londoner visiting the States might be. Would they find the atmosphere quite so warm? Would they feel that the place fit them like a glove? I suppose it entirely depends on where they went. A side effect of being a country that could fit the UK inside itself forty times is that the U.S.A sometimes feels as if it has few overarching goals that every region works towards to define the nation. But perhaps so many different regions is a type of diversity we excel in.  

This trip has been deeply satisfying in so many ways. A few days ago, I started reading a UK edition of Harry Potter. It’s been exciting to suddenly understand little details I always skated over before: Dumbledore’s scar of the London Underground, Dean Thomas’ West Ham poster, Mint Humbugs, Paddington Station—it’s fun to be able to picture things exactly.

And of course the candy has been a wild improvement, one I will be loathe to relinquish.

But the ability to picture people from another country as simply people and not faceless strangers is something I won’t be leaving behind. It’s been incredibly valuable to learn that the world is a lot smaller place than I’d always thought.

View from the top of St. Paul's Cathedral

I Like the Look of That Lake

Setting: Imagine this with 1000 times more rain

Our coach careened through the countryside, fields and flowers alike nothing more that drowned blurs of green streaking past our windows. Up, we flopped, and down. Then sideways with a heart-stopping jerk. The narrow country road was bumpy and our bus driver enthusiastic.

Suddenly, we slammed to a stop. I wrenched forward in my seatbelt, whacking against the seat before me. Waterbottles, oranges, and other small valuables made an exodus to the front of the bus.

Immediately, forty round and bug-eyed faces pressed against the right-hand windows. We had slowed before to let cars squeeze past, but we’d never completely stopped. What monstrosity must we now be facing?

Our worst nightmare: another bus.

“Oh spit, spit, spit!” a girl cried (only, that is not exactly what she cried).

Inch by tedious inch, the buses backed and rebacked, trying to rig the configuration for success. Our own coach’s rear made a sickening crunch as we nicked a low, stone wall. Then laboriously, at snail-like speeds, we scooted forward.

Early travelers of the Northern England’s beautiful Lake District also used coaches, just of a different sort. And they probably had plenty of coach problems of their own in the rugged landscape. But then and now, the difficulties are well worth the chance to experience the picturesque—the beautiful and sublime—to the highest degree.

Our first dose of the sublime came at Fountain’s Abbey, yet another abbey disbanded after Henry VIII dissolution of the monasteries act. Wordsworth penned one of his most famous poems about a ruined abbey, and though this was not that abbey (see earlier posts for that abbey), the feel was the same—huge, abandoned, stone archways. Damp corridors filled with moldering leaves. Rafters dusted with cobwebs, now home only to the birds. It was quite the experience to walk through the abbey ruins and think about how long the place had taken to build and how many generations had lived there. It kind of gave me chills to see how quickly nature had grown through it. In a poetic sense, you could almost feel how soon you, too, would be like the abbey, part of nature again. I think that feeling perfectly describes the sublime for me—awe and wonder at the beauty and majesty of a thing, but also a shade of horror at how large and overpowering the environment can be.

Inside Fountains Abbey

Looking up the abbey's tower

The exterior of the tower

An inner chamber

Following the abbey, we were off into the thick of the Lake District and the dense picturesque. After parking our things at the lakeside Youth Hostel, we embraced our wild sides and hit the local slopes. In this case, our wild sides were sheep sides, because, man, those sheep can climb like nobody’s business. It was incredible to reach the bluff and feel on top of the world. The entire landscape spread before us like a patchwork quilt, and I finally knew what that expression meant—hundreds of sheep pastures knit together by tiny rock walls. We took many photos in the vein of Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.

Looking out over the valley

Back at the hostel, it was interesting to compare our experience as tourists there with the experiences of the Lake District tourists of old. It was too cold to go swimming, so our sheer enjoyment of the place came from sitting and talking with friends and looking out over the marvelous expanse of water to the hills on the other side. Five-year-old me would have been shocked by the No Swimming thing and chalked the whole day up as a Waste. But thankfully twenty-one-year-old me did glean pleasure from just sitting and watching the water lap against the pier. And I would argue with my five-year-old self that sitting and watching water lap is not a waste of time. It is, in fact, a different way of getting educated. Because, like the transcendentalists, I also believe that truth can be found through emotion. I’m grateful the Romantic era, particularly the Transcendentalist movement, occurred so that we could take a school trip to watch the sun sink low and light Lake Windermere’s surface on fire. I can see how people got poetry from that.

Lake Windermere

Artistic interpretation of Lake Windermere

A stretchy duck on the lake shore.

Artistic interpretation of the stretchy duck

It’s interesting to consider how deeply nature is tied to emotion. Any extremes in nature, whether from reality or depicted in art, seem to express certain feelings: tempestuous, placid, and everything in between. And artists such as the Brontes, Wordsworth, and Friedrich have channeled the natural environment to create passion in their art, to tie nature and emotion together. With our trip, we did the same thing on a smaller scale: We toured the Lake District to discover the marvelous landscape around us, and our art processes those discoveries to explore the landscape within ourselves.

Our Que to Queue

The queue to see the crown jewels at the Tower of London

 “Mummy, I am not going to queue for half an hour to see some crown jewels,” the ten-year-old in front of me declared in disgust. “If I do, I’ll die.”

“No one has ever died from a little queueing,” the mother assured him, and off they went to queue.

I hesitated before following. I didn’t blame the little tyke for his reticence. If his experience visiting the Tower of London had been anything like mine, then he’d probably queued patiently at various locations for half the day.

But still, it was the crown jewels! Could there be anything more quintessentially British than queuing to see crown jewels?

In the end, I decided the now-hour-long wait to see the jewels was worth it.

It seemed like hundreds of people were there, but, in true British fashion, the crowd was calm and well-ordered. Our queue moved us through like a well-oiled machine. And we all stayed neatly in our little line right up to when we officially entered the museum-like exhibit where . . . we continued to stay in our neat little line throughout the entirety of the exhibit.

As the glitzy diamonds appeared, there was no shoving or jostling. Not the slightest hint of a head craning to see any artifact, either, because everyone got their turn to see everything as we filed slowly past in a row. It was peaceful.

The universe, for once, was organized.

St. Edward's Crown. Photo cred: The Royal Mint

I’m not surprised, though. It seems the British have always had a talent for drawing order out of disorder.

From the hope and aspirations their first fleets of explorers carried as they sailed out to conquer the globe to the majesty and girth of scientific progress in the Empire’s golden age, being British has always, in part, meant organizing the world by rational laws.

Enlightenment thinkers believed that the answers to life, the universe, and everything lay within humanity’s grasp. Death bowed down as medicine advanced. The planet shrunk as modes of transportation improved. With eyes straining to the horizon, and hearts filled with patriotic fever, the Brits laid Science across the world like a measuring stick, and the world lined up to satisfy.

Statue in the entry hall of Westminster Palace 

Their enormous colonialist success contributed to a strong national identity. More than just individuals, the British people saw themselves as part of a group—an intelligent, brave, and hearty group.

When the Great War broke out, it was a small thing for the empire to leverage this patriotism to mobilize the whole of the country and its commonwealths into a powerful, unified force against the Germans. The national identity that had lent itself so well to expanding across the globe and pursuing scientific discovery turned as a single entity to fighting the war.

British propaganda poster for WWI

Additional propaganda poster writing the national narrative

Civilians, soldiers, and politicians pulled together. The great national genius that had established an empire now created a fluid assembly line of recruiting, training, and outfitting thousands upon thousands of troops.

To be a Brit meant doing one’s part against the central powers, which, from a larger perspective, meant doing one’s part against the forces of evil combining to swallow the continent whole.

Britain lived together, it died together, and it won together.

A pair of naval guns outside the Imperial War Museum in London

Thankfully, the world wars are decades behind us now. But the British identity has not faded with time. London especially, with so many different cultures putting down roots inside its borders, continues to be a place of teamwork and altruism. To be a Brit still means working together towards the common goal of a better world.

Trooping of the Colors outside Buckingham Palace

With that in mind, queuing is simply a natural extension of viewing others as part of oneself. After all, a good queue can only be maintained by the common consent and respect for others’ needs held by every single person in the line. A queue reflects the British love for order, efficiency, and fairness.

Interestingly enough, just like in a queue, with so many differing viewpoints, forward progress in life can only be achieved through the same principles of respect for others’ needs and a consensual goal in mind.

Perhaps Britain’s queuing is more than just a means of waiting. Perhaps it is also a means of acting, of leading, of showing the world how quickly and pleasantly things can get done when we all agree to abide by rules that help everyone.

London builds the future from the past

                        

Floating through France (actually just Paris)

The Eiffel Tower at dusk

Into the tunnel we shot at almost 200mph. Suddenly, everything was black and quiet. Our own faces stared eerily back at us from the windows, a whole other coach of ghosts riding the same train just outside. But we, the flesh and blood travelers, were bundled safely in our thick, metal train, flying hundreds of feet below the ocean’s surface on our way to Paris.

Half an hour later, we shot out the other end of the tunnel into France. The countryside surged by in great, rolling waves. Trees were a solid blur of green on either side, telephone poles barely visible flicks of shadow on the glass. Almost in the blink of an eye, we arrived in Paris. The morning was still young, and I was ready to hit the ground running. We only had four days to pack in the true Parisian experience and didn’t want to waste a second of it.

Boy, did Paris have a lot to live up to: from everything I’d read and seen my whole life I just knew this city would be the height of cuisine, music, art, and basically anything else cultured and elegant. I knew simply visiting Paris would make me cultured and elegant too. The only problem was, so did everybody else.

The streets were filled with surging hordes of tourists, the metro filled with even more. We were just a few dozen tiny dots in this ant’s nest of people frantically, desperately trying to “experience Paris” for themselves. But what did experiencing Paris even mean? Was it the food you ate? The art you saw? Could the experience be forced?

The only answer was to try it and see for ourselves. So we joined the mad rush of bodies and began cramming pastries with the best of them. Back and forth we went in the hot sun, down the metro stairs to smash ourselves into a sweaty crate and rattle under the city—then up again, snapping pictures left and right.

The Mona Lisa, I was there. Arc de Triomphe, I was there. The Love Wall. Sacre Coeur. The Eiffel Tower. See my photos? It was magical.

A bakery near our hotel

Sacre Coeur

Stairs going up the inside of the Arc de Triomphe

Winged Victory overlooks the mingling horde at the Louvre

Looks like it, right? But frankly, it all began to feel a bit thin. The monuments and grand sculptures and paintings flew by in such rapid succession that none of them were making an impact. I wondered what being a tourist was for if one came, saw, and left again without feeling a thing. It was time to slow way down.

With a new outlook in mind, we went to the Tuileries Gardens and just wandered. Their irises were in full bloom. The air was still and cool, sweetened by hundreds of flowers. I ate a salted caramel crepe really really slowly, letting the buttery topping and the gentle vanilla flavors of the batter slowly spread across my tongue. I chatted with someone nearby. We swapped tourist stories and watched pigeons hop along the walkway.

Caramel crepe in an outdoor cafe

The slower I went, the more I experienced. The city came alive, Paris lighting up between the crowds.

We visited other museums and moseyed through the displays. We read the placards if we felt like it and didn’t if we didn’t. We spent a long time just sitting and savoring. One of my favorite experiences was eating a take-out lunch down by the Seine, watching little waves lap the pillars of a bridge and waving at the big boats of tourists floating past. Another was talking with a native Parisian on the metro and hearing about her job interviews and all the languages she knew. A third was lying under some trees in Luxembourg Gardens, feeling the sun filtering through the leaves and listening to the musical rise and fall of French from café tables nearby.

Along the Seine

A muskrat in the gardens at Versailles

Flowers at Luxembourg Gardens

I came to some conclusions. As sappy as it sounds, in order to experience Paris as the city one always dreams of, one must take the time to dream. Some cities, like New York and San Francisco or even London to an extent, are cities to do. But Paris is a city to wander, to sit, to watch. Less is definitely more.

Because of the sheer number of visitors, in some ways Paris is more a city of the world that it is a city of France. The people who watch and cheer as the Eiffel Tower begins to sparkle are all guests. The people who haunt the bakeries and crowd the street performers are also more likely to be tourists than not. And that’s why it seems safe to say that an authentic Parisian experience is the tourist experience.

As I discovered, some ways of being a tourist are more enjoyable than others. So for those planning their own trip, the point is don’t be so eager to have a Paris adventure that you miss the fun in getting it. Sometimes an adventure is a climb through the catacombs, and sometimes it is simply a wonderful nap on the grass with a croissant in one hand and bunch of grapes in the other.

An almond pain au chocolate, a.k.a Joy

Savory and Sweet Southall

The Sikh Temple in Southall

Looking at a Sikh altar through the grilled barrier of the terrace around the prayer room 

The free meal at the Sikh temple (Langar)

Typical clothing store around Southall

Traditional Pakistani dinner at Gifto's Lahore Karahi in Southall

Of Sheep and Sleepy Things: The Slow Life of Stourhead and Stonehenge and Tintern Abbey

Mr. Darcy in turmoil: Pride & Prejudice (2005)

Rain streams down Grecian columns, announcing a storm with turbulence paralleled only by Mr. Darcy’s fervent, and Elizabeth’s anguished, emotions. The garden behind them is a drowning mass of green. Under the protective porch of the garden’s decorative Roman temple, the tension is thick enough to cut.

“Might I ask why, with so little endeavor at civility, I am thus repulsed?” Darcy’s voice is stony, his face strained.

Elizabeth’s eyes flash. She stands her ground in righteous fury, the goddess of the storm. “Do you think that anything might tempt me to accept the man who has ruined, perhaps forever, the happiness of a most beloved sister?”

Excruciating. Thunder crashes. The audience writhes in agony.

This declaration scene in the 2005 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, starring Kierra Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, is perhaps the most thrilling romantic scene of all time. When Darcy’s and Elizabeth’s personalities clash, sparks fly, and set against the stunning backdrop of Stourhead Estate in southern England, the scene is even more passionate.

But desperately romantic gardens aren’t included in this movie just for the sake of good visuals. No, gardens and the life within them have been a critical part of the British identity for centuries upon centuries. Jane Austen herself makes ample use of them in her stories as ideal places for socializing, self-reflection, and revelation. And, thanks to our excursion this past week into Bath and Wales, we had front row seats to see how British people today treasure and enjoy the beautiful natural world around them.

Driving out of London on the left side of the road

Our first stop on our pilgrimage to Wales was Stonehenge. I love the way the nation has managed the site—restrooms, gift shop, and visitor information are down the road and over a ridge from the stone circle to give the ruins privacy. We had to take a shuttle from the parking lot to Stonehenge itself. Posters inside the shuttle encouraged patrons to visit other heritage sites afterwards, to experience more history. That drove it home for me, we were on our way to Stonehenge! We were going to see history!

The first sight of the ruins was thrilling. How can I even describe the majesty of dark-green fields rolling to a horizon all around, while under a foreboding sky these vast monoliths weighed down the Earth?

The mighty Stonehenge

Me at the mighty Stonehenge. This photo captures the feeling of the sky better.

A light rain began to fall, and wind whipped our hair back and forth. The drama of it all was enough to give you chills, inside and out. Looking out from Stonehenge, across the way, was a field of sheep, and farther beyond that, a field of yellow flowers. Far different from the Dippin-dots stands and the hydra-headed public drinking fountains I can picture surrounding heritage sites in Utah, Stonehenge had the feel of a national park—rugged, untouched, left in the wild to be looked at and wondered at. It was easy to see the pride the security officer and other workers took in guarding the site. When we asked them questions about Stonehenge, they eagerly responded with an enormous amount of knowledge, not just about the ruins but also about the surrounding area. It was clear that, in terms of heritage, the natural area around the site is just as important to the British as the stone ruins.

There was something so evocative about the wild stones and landscape that I thought Stonehenge would be the highlight of our trip.

But then we went to the Stourhead Estate.

My, oh my.

Hold on to your britches folks, ‘cause there’s about to be some seriously unmanageable beauty up in here.

Stourhead Mansion

Stourhead Chapel

Approaching the lake from the entrance

Looking out over the lake. I love the different shades of green.

Established in the 18^th century by a banking family, Stourhead is home to a Palladian mansion and acres upon acres of naturalized gardens. Different than the crisp topiaries, tidy flowerbeds, and sharp-angled paths of Enlightenment era gardens, Stourhead’s gardens embody more Romantic ideals. Though the gardens are man-made, they’re meant to look like they’re not, which means the plants are tangled and sprawling, the paths meander to and fro, and the flowers are left to overgrow.

A garden path along the lake shore

A stone tunnel covered in moss

After the tight, boxed city, I felt myself breathing easier just by being there, and I think other people felt that as well. Though not crowded, the garden paths were busy with walkers. And life slowed down. There was no rushing here, only a gentle mosey-on-by, a break to feed the ducks, a few-hour rest on a bench by the lake. Everyone was smiling and peaceful.

One volunteer told me, “I lived in the city for a long time, but I keep coming back out here to the country. Meh, the city’s not for me.”

Over the years and even today, people have spent a great deal of money recreating a look that nature does naturally, but it was obvious to see that they value it even more because it is an escape from city life that they can keep working in. Stourhead is still a working estate, and we passed many gardeners and volunteers who said they had worked there for years and had no plans of leaving.

On the final day of our expedition, we stopped at the famed Tintern Abbey.

Tintern Abbey

 Of the land near Tintern Abbey Wordsworth wrote,

"Five years have past; five summers, with the length 

Of five long winters! and again I hear 

These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs 

With a soft inland murmur.—Once again 

Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, 

That on a wild secluded scene impress 

Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect 

The landscape with the quiet of the sky."

And I can see why—the fluting birds, the insects, the smell of every green thing come to life. The landscape around the ruins was nothing but an emerald carpet, sweeping up the hills on either side.

It was strange to wander through the empty skeleton of the abbey and try to imagine how it must have been back in the day. Someone remarked that if King Henry VIII had not passed his dissolution of the monasteries, then Tintern might be a busy bustling city today.

Inside the ruins

As it was, the ruins were busier than I would have thought. Conservation efforts have been set to with a zeal seldom found outside the British, and this too was a heritage site where people came to ramble with their dogs and take life slowly. With the amount of people, I began to think that, though sites like these had done well for Romantics in the past, modern day romantics would need to forge farther afield to find their solitude, since now the population at large has come to appreciate what Romantics have been telling us about all along. Romantics, in the field, are the hipsters of the natural world.

Before our trip I hadn’t realized how deep the British love for these historical sites went. I’m grateful for the nationwide efforts to preserve them and grateful for the chance I had to see them in such pristine condition!