That’s what they say in England. “It’s early days, yet.”
Peepsies! It’s been a very full first week here.
Classes started on Monday at ten; we have art history on Mondays and Wednesdays and literature on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That’s right, Fridays are free. FREE. Which means that for me, the weekend has started. I had trouble even motivating myself to write this. I am so relaxed.
Things were a little bumpy Monday morning – I went running at 7 and got through my morning exercises and ablutions with time to spare, so I went over to Bedford Square (wherein lies the Paul Mellon Center) a little early. This turned out to not be early enough. When I arrived, our coordinator Viv asked if I had a passport photo, which apparently – and I say emphatically, I never got the memo – was something we were supposed to bring with us to the first day. Not our passport, just a photo. Can I go after class and get one taken? You can go right now, she says. Just run down to the YMCA on Tottenham Court Road, they do pictures there, it’s about three pounds. The office secretary very nicely offers to go with me and show me where it is and the coordinator immediately says no, sorry, we need you here. But okay, I’m an explorer, I can deal with this, especially since the extremely English name Tottenham, coupled with Court, no slouch itself in the English-sounding department, makes me very happy. It’s about twenty to ten and, with a few false starts, I find my way with little trouble to the YMCA in question.
Since my mother is very big on YMCAs, I should note that this YMCA is exceptional. It does not look like any YMCA I have ever seen. It is huge – sleek design, dark and cool inside, huge reception desk, everything colored in candy tones. It looks like the entrance to a Disneyworld ride, and not one of the dinky ones like It’s A Small World. And a sign informs me that this is the first YMCA ever. EVER. Number one. Crazy – I didn’t know they started in England.
So anyway, I’m feeling good that I found it and even better that I’ve managed to do a little historical sightseeing, and I ask the woman behind the desk about photos, but she says no, we don’t do those, try Boots across the street or the Tottenham metro station.
Boots is a pharmacy chain in London, pretty well-known I guess, and pretty big, offering a lot of other stuff besides pharmaceuticals, but I don’t know this at the time, and in the hubbub of the World’s Oldest YMCA, I mishear and think I’ve been advised to take a photo at “the booths across the street”. Moreover, the Y is sort of on a corner and I will later discover that the “across” the woman at the desk meant is across a different street than the one I assume it to be – a street, in my defense, that is not the street I came in from. So I go back out and cross this wrong street and spend more time than I care to admit looking at the closed garagelike door of some big industrial building that lies directly across the street from the Y, going, Where are the booths? I ask at an Indian takeout place and the guy there says, “Um, try the shops?” What shops? “The shops!”
Okay, so on to Plan C, I go to the metro station, but the woman there tells me that they don’t have metro photo booths anymore. Well, I never really got why they had them anyway – like what, do you come home and go, Hey, sweetheart, here’s a few snaps of me on the morning commute – but clearly I wouldn’t argue with a few photo booths if they were to present themselves at this point. So I turn myself back around and heading up the street, I see Boots pharmacy, and in dazzling piece of inductive reasoning I realize that this is what the Y woman was talking about. I am a little sweaty at this point as this first week London has been, according to our teachers, uncharacteristically hot and sunny. I go into the pharmacy – No, we don’t take photos. Do you know someone who does? The electronics shop across the street. Despite the fact that Boots is also on a corner, I get the right across-the-street this time, and I go into the Sony store, where I’m told, after announcing my business, to wait. So I wait and start to feel kind of awkward, but whatevs, I’m okay hanging out with the four or five guys who seem to be running the shop together. They bring out the Polaroid and have me stand against a white shade by the door – it’s a bit of makeshift operation – and then we have more awkward waiting while the Polaroids develop, and then they present me with four small photos and charge me five pounds. I open the little folder that contains the pictures and I behold the face of Frenetic Photo-Oriented Wandering. It is nothing to blog about.
I march back to Bedford Square, twenty minutes late for class number one. Whoops. I am received with sympathy – I’m sorry, I should have just told you to come back if you couldn’t find a place, says the coordinator. But I give her my photos. Good thing I have them, right? Probably needed them to get some sort of international student I.D. or something like the one I had in France, gets you into all sorts of things for free, right? She pastes my picture above my name on a sheet containing other similar pictures of people in my class. It is a sheet that the teachers can look at on the first day, thus enabling them to know what you look like. That’s right. You yourself are presumably sitting there able to display your own sweaty visage, but this way, I guess, they don’t have to look up.
Anyway. So, Highly Important Picture taken. I don’t mean to grouse. Really, things have been fantastic here, absolutely unbelievable, and even my little peripatetic search for a picture place furthered my sense of the city.
I’ve been doing a lot of tourist stuff, and I am not ashamed. Already I think I’ve done more sightseeing than I ever did in China, and there’s more to come. Since we get out of school at 12:15, we’ve usually got the afternoon for outings (that’s right, like Mary Poppins), and we’ve done some great stuff. Monday was a teacher-guided, mandatory trip to the British Museum, which is across the street from where we study – seriously, two minutes to get there at the most – and we got to wander the Enlightenment Gallery, which is an eclectic collection: a sixth-century glass ball designed to ward off illness, an assemblage of beautiful polished shells, walls full of volumes from Balzac to Shakespeare, two mummified heads that caught me rather by surprise. We also saw the famous – and famously contested – friezes and statues of the Parthenon. I’m always amazed – maybe stupidly – by ancient representations of the human form, because, well, ancient interpretations of the body tend to look pretty much like us and our own ideas of ourselves. Again, maybe a dumb thing to be surprised at, because we’re the same species as they were, same musculature, same skeleton, same brain – but that in itself is kind of amazing to me. All those years ago. We had to leave for a little welcoming reception at the Paul Mellon center before we could see much more – or even spend decent time with the things we saw – but I’ll definitely be back. Admission is free,
On Tuesday we struck out on our own – I bought an Oyster card, which is like the French carte d’orange, enabling use of the subway and bus on either a debit or a time-based system – and went to the Tower of London, where we had a tour from a yeoman warder, which is what they call the guides there. The guides are, it seems, actually members of the British army, and they live at the tower. In the tower. So we saw it all – the green where Anne Boleyn and Jane Grey and Catherine Howard were beheaded, the gate where they came in, the chapel where Anne Boleyn is interred (and where, our warder said, his niece was married recently, which seems an odd choice of venue, symbolically speaking, if you’re hoping to embark on a happy partnership, but certainly a talking point, I’m sure), the staircase where the skeletons believed to be those of child-monarch Edward V and his brother, who disappeared into the tower in the fifteenth century, were discovered in the seventeenth, the room where Sir Walter Raleigh (a relative, so I’m told, so I hope because that would be frickin cool) was imprisoned rather genteelly, the building where they briefly held, I think for reasons of morale during the blitz, Rudolf Hess, the cringe-inducing instruments of torture in the dungeon, the sixty-inch-waisted armor of Henry VIII. I saw the Thames for the first time, too, and on a beautiful day, the light shining on the water. The whole place feels so peaceful and pleasant. You’d never guess. Maybe that’s why our yeoman’s niece was willing to have her wedding there – maybe she thought it would constitute a break with history, a reimagining of what people can be, the construction of a new history. Which I guess is kind of what marriage is, too.
Yesterday, we took a 35-minute train out to Hampton Court, the sprawling palace that Henry VIII confiscated from Woolsey when Woolsey fell out of favor and Henry realized that his cardinal actually had a bigger house than he. It was great – Hampton Court has been, if not number one, pretty high on my list of things I want to see, since, like a bunch of other Americans, I find the Tudors fascinating. (I will say that I found them so, and had done a lot of reading about them, prior to the Jonathan Rhys-Meyers incarnation of Henry VIII, which hopefully gives me a few points.) We saw an awkwardly funny dramatic interpretation of one episode of life at Henry’s court by an actor with an awkwardly funny codpiece – Thomas Seymour preparing to ask Catherine Parr to marry him, only to discover that the king has already set his sights on the lady. I experienced a wave of my old grade-school compulsion to shout out the answers but tamped it down. Don’t worry, Thomas, she outlives him and you two get together. Although that doesn’t go as well as you might think either.
We explored the grounds, got lost in a maze – a word on mazes. Mazes sound very cool. Mazes, seen from above, are aesthetically pleasing. Mazes, as featured in Harry Potter, are full of interesting things – mazes in most fiction tend to hold things worth going through a maze for, whether they be treasures or lovers or monsters to defeat. Mazes, in practice, are – I don’t know. Mazes. You go through, you can’t see much because if you could it would ruin the maze. You go this way, you go that way. Yay. The seven of us walked around in a line, occasionally reversing direction (“Oh, crap,” said one of my friends when she realized she was bringing up the rear, “I’m going to be the one who gets picked off.”) We found the center, we found our way back to the entrance.
The gardens were absolutely gorgeous – some more along French lines, the trees they called “tailles” at Versailles, shaped and sized, some a little wilder, as in a section labeled “Wilderness”. The yew trees, some of them dating back, as the signs said, to the early eighteenth-century reign of William III and Mary, were thick and twisty, planted in lines so that between them were straightaway views of fountains, arbors, statues. All the flowers were in bloom and the stalks were laden with glorious fragrant roses of all colors, (including one type that kind of looked like an egg, white around the edges and yellow in the middle). We stayed almost until six, when the palace closes – they still hold events and concerts there, and they were actually setting up for one that night.
So – we’re relaxing today, with plans to go to coastal Brighton this weekend, and to attend a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe next week. A little nervous about the essays to come, but I’m here to see England, not to write a thesis. And make no mistake, I am learning. Like the word re-up. I don’t think it’s necessarily a British word, I’ve heard it used a lot by my fellow American students, but I’ve just become aware of it and I am impressed with its versatility. It means resupply, basically, or refill – I have to re-up my cellphone minutes, you might want to re-up that Oyster card. I have to re-up my broccoli, other than that I have all the groceries I need for tonight. Good stuff.
Ooh, it just rained. That’s new. Maybe we’ll get that foggy good-for-the-complexion London weather. Yesterday, at Hampton Court, one of my friends said, “I hope it rains, because I brought my jacket.” Seems unpredictable, though. Like one of the security guards said in the neoclassical wing of Hampton, while telling us about the rumors that William III was “gay or homosexual”: “Some things you just never know.”
