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