Transit workers on strike! No subway for two days!
My job is a four-mile walk from home, and the forecast is saying rain. Good thing I’ve got my rain trousers! Other options available to commuters are shared taxis, escorted bike rides (emergency critical mass!), and free boat rides down the River Thames.
Everyone knows how much I like to complain about cars– how they’re smelly, how they’re a waste of space, how they try to run me over…. But that hasn’t managed to put a damper on the love affair I’ve been having with all the cute little cars to be seen here in London. One of my favorite activities is Mini Cooper counting: How many are parked on one block? How many drive by in one minute? How many are parked directly in front of our building? (On a recent afternoon, the answer to this last one was four.)
Here is a sampling:
The Fiat 500 is absolutely the cutest. It looks rather like a fat little rabbit (I mean the animal, not the car). But it's gotta be the vintage one-- the new models just don't have that chubbiness!
I'm also a fan of the Figaro. It seems to come only in pastels-- blue, pink, and beige. I am not nearly stylish enough to own a car such as this one.
Smart Cars, on the other hand, are starting to get on my nerves. Look how this one insists on making a point of how it can park perpendicular to the curb-- even though it totally sticks out, and there's loads of room to park parallelly! That's just obnoxious.
The afore-mentioned Mini convention on Elsham Road.
We think the old Mini is even smaller than the young whippersnappers you see around.
Since I got to London, it’s been all about breaking records– the month I arrived was the wettest August in a century, and then the first October snow since 1934. Today London was nearly paralyzed by a massive snowstorm– four full inches! I know that doesn’t seem like much, but apparently it was the biggest snowfall in 18 years. Mayor Boris Johnson demonstrated his typically firm grasp on the situation, going on the radio to urge commuters to try their best to get to work if at all possible, five minutes after transport officials asked that everyone other than emergency personnel please stay home. We walked to Hyde Park to take part in the festivities.
Our creepy snowman
This has virtually nothing to do with the stated content of this blog, but I’ll justify it by the fact that the protagonist seems to be British. Mostly it’s just friggin’ awesome.
On Thursday, the private hospital I work for threw the employees a lavish Christmas lunch. It started out with a sushi appetizer, finished with a dessert of profiteroles (apparently these are the equivalent of the US cream puff, but this chocolate-and-cream-and-strawberry mixture was not your average puff), and was complemented by two full glasses of red wine. Wine! At lunch! At work! And this only six days after I had been treated to a Christmas party with dinner, dancing and seemingly endless glasses of champagne.
As I tottered back downstairs to work I thought, “So this is what I’ve been missing all along while I’ve been working for the government and non-profits!”
Two hours later, I got canned. With the company losing profits, they decided to lay off all their agency employees. So that’s also what I had been missing in the private sector!
(PS– Don’t be too concerned; mediocre secretarial jobs are a dime a dozen around here.)
Our weekly walk in the countryside yesterday turned out to be an exercise in orienteering. Our walk, Yalding to Borough Green, took us through what our book describes as “the vast Mereworth Woods,” where, at the woods’ opening, we were unclear about which entrance we were meant to take. Evidently we took the wrong one, because shortly after the tall pines enveloped us, our step-by-step directions stopped making sense. We walked in one direction for a while, concluded that it was the wrong one, went back and took a different turn, and soon realized we had lost the path completely. With all the turning around, we also lost track of where we had entered, so retracing our steps back to the lunchtime stop was out. Here is a step-by-step map of what we believe our route to be, more or less (click on the symbols to see what happened at each point):
Although we had gotten an early start, these days are short, and it was after four. When what little daylight that had been peeking through the fog started to slip away, I mentally worked through the Survival List: “Well, we have 32 ounces of water. We have fruit and granola bars. I have two pairs of extra socks in my backpack, and we’re wearing waterproof pants. My phone is getting a little bit of reception, and emergency in the UK is 999. What are the biggest animals that live in this wood? Foxes? Wolves?” Sergio’s Survival Checklist was lamenting that we had no lighter to start a fire to keep us warm during the nighttime.
Fortunately, we’ve gotten so dorky lately about our country walks that we also had flashlights and a compass. Casting aside our book’s directions, we decided to shoot for steadily northwestward, the direction of our final destination, the Borough Green train station. The only problem with that plan is that sometimes you’re heading north, and suddenly the path ends. Or you find a good, clear path that starts out going west, but before long it starts bending around to the south.
Finally we found a nice wide clear path that was heading straight northward. But then that path ended, and the only option was eastward. East! It was a nice path, though, and official-looking, so it seemed better than trying to forge our way north like a couple of trailblazers. Hearing traffic, we figured we must be getting close. When we saw a lantern, indicating civilization, we veered briefly southward to find some sort of factory where a guy was working and gave us directions out to the road.
Oh, how happy I was to see that road! Finally, we were free from the unknown dangers of the fearsome wood! Now all we had to do was walk four miles along a country road in the dark with no walkway and cars whizzing by at 50 miles an hour. What could be scary about that?
About 20 minutes into the walk, a Russian dude appeared on the other side of the road going in the opposite direction. He tried to convey to us that it would be at least six miles to our destination, and did we want to follow him back to his car and he would give us a ride to the next intersection? No thanks, we said. This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and besides, what kind of weirdo would be walking along the side of this road?!
Luckily, 10 minutes and much roadside crawling later, who should drive up, stop his car in the road, and give us a second chance? Desperate, we took it, and for the next five minutes watched as the road went on and on and on, no sidewalk in sight, a trip that would have taken us over an hour and left us even more wet and muddy than we already were. We thanked our friend as he dropped us at the Beefeater, where we had a cup of coffee and celebrated the fact that we would be sleeping at home.
An irritating tendency of announcements in London is depicted in the photo above. I have the following complaints about this trend:
1) Is it really necessary for a notice to include a definitition of what it is? Does a rectangular board with typed writing of an informative nature not make its identity as a “notice” clear? Perhaps alongside the “polite notice” in every bathroom in town reminding me not to flush tampons, I should also start seeing the words “mirror,” “sink,” and “hand dryer” on these respective items, lest the not-so-astute among us should try to wash our hands where we should be drying them?
2) Okay, fair enough– you’d like to make it clear that this piece of literature is, in fact, a notice, and not a love letter or a blog entry or a spot of graffiti. All right then. But is it necessary to passive-agressively insist that this notice is polite? Does it not suffice to simply make it polite? Because much in the style of everyone’s favorite “No offense, but…”, a notice that insists upon its politeness manages to come off as anything but.
The news as delivered by Sergio:
Last weekend we went to Nice, on the French Riviera. We found there the great blue sky that we had not seen in rainy London for ages. We walked everywhere around in the old city, drank espressos and martinis at beach bars, met crowds of snobbish retired people and gangs of Italians who came over to spend the weekend with us, and . . . traveled to the airport by public bus!
A café au lait at La Promenade des Anglais.
Pros: the public buses, the fisherman’s market at the Place du Saint-François, the blue turquoise water of the Mediterranean, the farmers’ market at Cours Saleya, the book market at the Place du Palais, the museum of modern art MAMAC, the dark and cold atmosphere of the narrow streets in the old city, the baroque church in the Place du Rossetti, the smell of oil (from oil painting) in Rue Alexandre Marie.
Cons: Too much aristo-fantasy architecture in the modern part of the city, too many chuchi hotels, too much cigarette smoke in the beach bars and too many bobos (bourgeois bohemians, i.e. something like French hipsters ).
We created this guy a little too early, and he was wilted a week ago...
so this one came into being a few days later. Happy Halloween!
So… uhhh… it snowed last night here in London. It is October, isn’t it?. Well, I guess since the weather is supposed to be much milder here than in New York, does that mean we’ve arrived at the height of winter, and I can expect it to stay as it is from now until March?
PS– The Evening Standard has just informed me that this was the first October snow in London since 1934!
