Happy Earth Day

In honor of Earth Day, I thought I'd jump back on the blogging wagon after a long absence (travel, final papers) and writing a little post about what it's like today living on the other side of the earth from my home.

Well, spring has sprung. This is mostly proven by the fact that I was invited to a barbeque today. A barbeque? In April? In England? Indeed. Spring fever has caught on and people are getting wild and crazy.

Not that winter's chills have completely let go, but the down jackets have been put away and the sun has come out. It's chilly and bright, perfect weather for the beginning of spring (never mind that it should have begun about a month ago).

The best thing is the sudden profusion of flowers. First there were crocuses - yellow and purple so bright and rich, and so unexpected after a grey winter, that the color seemed like it was vibrating. Then the daffodils. I've never seen so many daffodils in my life - in flower beds, lawns, meadows, cemeteries, median strips. Not to mention the daisies and other little buds dotting every green patch in sight. It's all utterly pretty.

I must say I haven't felt particularly in touch with the earth over here. I live in a very suburban atmosphere without the easy access to vast national parks or to the Pacific ocean that I have back home. I spent a few weeks at home over spring break and the contrast was amazing. I was in awe of how much open space we still have, even on an overpopulated planet.

And it's not only the calm of staring out at a big landscape, or not being able to see any man-made thing at all for miles that I miss. It's also feeling and moving with the rhythms of nature. I went hiking a lot in the desert when I was home, and in desert you just have to pay attention to the rising heat, the moment of sunrise and sunset, the movement of rain clouds, in order to stay alive.

It's scary sometimes, especially for me because I scare easy, but not nearly as scary as guns or bombs or any of the awful things that happened this week all over the world. The violence of humans inspires anger and sadness and reaction. The violence of nature inspires respect and adaptation.

As the weather becomes more hospitable over here, I'm going to make a lot of effort to get outside and see this portion of the world. The landscape is actually one of my favorite things about England, part of the reason I wanted to come here. I got to explore it a little last summer and the hiking was absolutely stunning. This summer I'll be doing more of that, trying to make the most of my time here and to keep myself sane as I write my master's dissertation. And right now I'm just appreciating the sun and beginning to emerge from the cocoon of my wintertime coziness - starting with that barbeque.

How I miss home

Happy first day of spring! I counted up today, and I'm almost 8 months into my 13-month year of living abroad. I spent today packing for a couple of weeks at home and, of course, thinking about all the things I'm looking forward to over the break. And that got me thinking about what I actually miss when I miss home. This year, when I've felt homesick, it's actually usually been a good feeling, because it reminds me of all the things and people I love back home. I'm hoping that when I get back there next year, I'll be able to appreciate those things even more than I did before I left. Of course, things always look rosy from afar, though, so I'm afraid that as soon as I get home, I'll come up with all sorts of stuff that was better over in England! So, I'm making a list here of a few things that I really want to appreciate fully when I get them back in my life.

1. Community.

Family of course is the thing I miss most. I'm very close to my family, and last year (my senior year of college), I was very close to my friends, too (when you live with people for four years, you share a lot!). But this year, I've found myself doing a lot of things alone. I eat my meals alone most of the time, do my work alone, walk to and from school alone, go grocery shopping alone, travel on trains alone. This of course makes it really sweet when I happen to have someone around to do stuff with - when one of my housemates is in the kitchen cooking dinner at the same time as me, or when I run into one of my new friends on campus and sit down to do some studying at the same table. But it's rare, and I not only miss the company I've had from my friends over the past four years and my family for my whole life. I also miss those specific people. Thank god for skype.

It's funny, because I've always thought of myself as an introvert, and I do need plenty of time alone to focus on my work or daydream or just be quiet. Too much time with too many people drains my energy and I have to recharge. But I've discovered this year that too much time without people also drains my energy. I guess the middle path is best.

2. Food.

Not just dishes at my favorite restaurants or special family recipes. No, I miss the food of all the Bay Area, because I'm beginning to realize it's pretty unique. I've complained on here before about much trouble I have finding good veggies around here, and I cannot wait to get back to my local farmer's market. I also just find that people here are less into fresh and healthy eating than me.

Back home last year, a lot of my friends were going vegetarian and even vegan. I'm still an omnivore and probably always will be, but I eat meat maybe once or twice a week, tops, because I love cooking with vegetables. Here, though, people eat so much meat, so many frozen vegetables, so many cans of beans, so much cheap take-out Chinese food. It's not that I abstain from any of those completely (except the beans, gross), but it's weird to be around people who don't know any other kind of food. I was told the other day that I was 'adventurous' for ordering dishes with eggplant and spinach at a restaurant. What?

What I feel is more than just food snobbism. It's profound gratitude that I was raised on truly fresh, local, and delicious food that's good for me and good for the planet. I feel lucky to be able to taste so many amazing things that farmer's have coaxed out of the ground, rather than eating stuff that comes out of some commercial processing plant. Finally, I'm so happy that when I'm at home, I get to buy most of my food from the people who grow it or people who are just passionate about food, to talk with them about it and maybe get a recipe tip or something, instead of grabbing my food off a supermarket shelf.

3. Weather.

Well, obviously. I've talked about this plenty on this blog. But how lucky am I to come from a place without sub-zero temperatures? Not to mention the beautiful ocean that makes the climate so temperate around San Francisco. I will be taking every opportunity to get outside and enjoy that sun when I'm back home.

Spring/Transitions

This weekend, the weather has been bizarre. Woke up to bright sun - an hour later, it was blizzarding outside my window - the clouds cleared and it sunny again - I glanced back at the window and saw snow - currently we're back to blue sky. I guess the only constant is that it's cold.

Even the temperature, though, has been swinging back and forth over the last week. After endless snowy, cold, grey weather, the sun came out, and I walked to school without a coat on for the first time in months. Everyone rushed outside to eat their lunch, and sitting inside at our computers felt ridiculous when it was so nice outside (p.s. the high was only 54 degrees, but it felt like 70 to me).

Alas, it was not to last. Now it's snowing again. In March.

That taste of spring, though, reminded me that the semester is almost over. Once again, after winter hibernation, I'm moving into a period of transitions. I'm not particularly good at transitions - I'm a creature of habits and comforts - but I also feel a great attraction to them. I love to look forward to things, whether it's a new book, an upcoming trip, or just breakfast tomorrow morning. The thing is, of course, things usually don't turn out exactly how you imagine them, and whether the reality is better or worse than anticipated, it always takes a bit of adjustment. You go to sleep, already savoring the taste of pancakes, only to wake up and find your milk has gone sour. Maybe you dissolve in a heap of tears, or maybe you end up eating some scrambled eggs that taste just as good. Or maybe someone surprises you with some fresh croissants they just brought back from the bakery, and you decide to postpone pancakes until tomorrow. There's just always that moment of recalibration that's sometimes joyful and sometimes hard.

There's a lot of patience involved in transitions. I've been listening to music on Spotify recently, which is great because I was really missing Pandora. On the radio function, you never know what song is coming next, and in the moment that the last song ends, I always start conjecturing about the next one, and it's usually not what I expect (except that this morning, I was hoping they would play something by A Fine Frenzy, and they miraculously did). Sometimes it'll be one of my favorite bands, and sometimes I'll reach immediately to click the thumbs down button. But sometimes I just don't know if I like the song yet or not, so I just sit there and listen and wait to see how I feel about it. And since the best thing about this radio function is discovering new favorite bands, that minute or two of patience and listening can really pay off.

So here I go transitioning from my last semester of classes into my first summer of truly independent writing work. Yes, I'm writing to a deadline, but the restrictions on the what, how, and why of my dissertation are pretty minimal. For someone who wants to write books, this will be good training in making my way through a big writing project without much outside structure.

I'm not saying that writing a dissertation is like listening to music or eating pancakes, but the fact is that I'll be doing a lot of those latter two things while attempting to do the former, and I like the way the micro mirrors the macro sometimes (often). I will also be living for about 5 more months in a country where the weather changes all the time. Then I'll move back across an ocean and a continent and start looking for a job. So my life will be full of transitions. I guess I better just keep listening and get ready to recalibrate.

In which cold and hot are opposites and going to the movies solves everything

Since I've been in England, I think about the weather a lot, check the forecast a lot, complain, predict, stare out the window, calculate the relative merits of different keep-warm outfits. And today I was thinking about how differently people respond to different climates. It's not just that the weather changes your mood or your habits. It also changes your attitude toward weather itself - or at least this seems to be true for me.

For the last four years, I lived in a very hot place, basically the desert. Now I live in a very cold place. Both kinds of climate can be really unpleasant of course, but in really different ways. There's something about cold weather that makes people complain about it. Even when I'm happy that it's raining or snowing, I kind of feel the need to gripe. I also fill a lot of conversations with speculations about the chance of precipitation tomorrow, the next day, over the weekend, next week....The international student handbooks weren't kidding when they said that the English love to talk about the weather.

What's ironic is that no matter how much you check the forecast or exchange predictions, it will always surprise you. The forecast changes daily. A rainy day will clear up unexpectedly, leaving you looking silly in your rain boots. And a dry day turns out to have such a thick mist that it's practically raining.

And then there's the actual cold. I really don't mind rain, but I do mind the freezing cold air that blows that rain into my face and makes my lips numb on the walk to school. Who decided it would be a good idea to settle on this island in the first place? Couldn't we just leave it to some other animals who are better adapted to the cold? And why do so many English people insist on wearing the lightest of jackets, or even no jacket at all, when it's below freezing? And then complain about how cold it is!

So that's the dynamic around cold, wet, grey weather - you talk about it endlessly, you try to predict it, you gripe and gripe, but in the end it eludes your predictions and you never do anything to make it better, never try to find the silver linings, like the fresh smell of rain or the fact that your country doesn't have a drought problem, or the fun of cozying up when it's snowing outside and drinking hot chocolate.

Hot weather is a totally different thing. I just don't remember talking about the heat so much when I was living in southern California. I suffered in it, definitely. There were days when wearing any clothes at all seemed unbearable, when working was out of the question. But when the sun is beating down, people seem to expect to feel happy, to revel in the heat - the opposite of the assumption that cold weather is always miserable and we must complain about it. Hot weather isn't an excuse to complain, it's an excuse to put on your bikini and sun bathe or buy yourself a refreshing drink.

I think part of this is that, when it is truly and really hot, silence and stillness are your best friends. Heat melts your energy away, and no one wants to waste the precious energy they have left by talking about how low-energy they are. Better to summon up some last strength and drift through the heat waves toward an air-conditioned place or a glass of cold water.

There is one constant in both extremes of climates. Going to the movies is always good. In cold places, it's a warm place to curl up for a few hours. In hot places, it's a haven of cool darkness. So yesterday I went to see a remastered print of Roman Holiday and accompanied Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck to beautiful, summery Rome, where people roll up their sleeves and eat gelato. That's the other thing about weather - it always makes you wish for its opposite - and I was really jealous of Audrey and Gregory as I stood waiting for the bus after the movie, freezing my face off.

But jealousy aside, it was a great way to spend a Sunday evening. It's such an adorable movie, with jokes that don't get old and great side characters - little sketches perfectly realized in a few moments as the journalist and the princess zoom through Rome on their Vespa. No matter what you're needing an escape from - the heat or the cold or school work or work work - it's great to watch Audrey Hepburn's princess escape her duties and responsibilities and jaunt around a beautiful city, basking in the heat, beautifully captured in the cool tones of classic black-and-white film.

Scrapbook II: Grey Days

Some more photos I didn't have a place for but wanted to share. This time around it's the grey days pictures, shading into night.

Scrapbook I: Sunny Days

 I've been going through my photos from the past few months and wanted to share a few that I liked particularly but that don't really fit together into any particular theme. So I grouped them into sunny-day pictures and grey-day pictures.

I threw this one into B&W just because I thought it looked nicer that way.

The same statue from two angles.

 

The one on the left has odd framing, but I like the impression of a stag just pausing on its way through London.

London: The Burrough Market

Here are some pictures...

 ...from Londonnnnnn!

 

Among other things last weekend, I visited the incredible Burrough Market, a haven of deliciousness. It was a bit difficult to capture it in pictures because I was too busy eating and gawking and it was really crowded, but I tried to get a little of the flavor (no pun intended...actually, who am I kidding, the pun is always intended) of the place.

I didn't even notice the wonderful names on these jars until I looked back at this picture. It was the labels that caught my eye.

Arrivals II

This is my second arrivals post, since I have now landed in the place I'll be living and studying for the next year. So although I went through passport control and walked past the "Nothing to Declare" sign at the airport about 2 months ago, I still feel like I'm embarking on the adventure. I'm starting to settle, but I haven't quite stopped ruffling my feathers in attempts to get more cozy in my new nest.

When I arrived at school, I was overwhelmed by new people and places and the sense that I had landed in a much bigger pond than I was for my undergraduate degree. Actually, I still feel that way a little. But there have been bright spots during the last week or so that promise a future sense of warmth and familiarity that will gradually replace the homesickness and confusion.

First, when I showed up at registration with my important documents in hand, the first thing they did was offer me a free novel. Could there have been any better sign that I've come to the right place to study literature?

Then there was the nice bookshop owner who special ordered in a copy of a book I have to read by Monday and recognized me when I came in the following day to pick it up. There was the relief at finding that my share-house actually does have both washer and dryer and I won't have to struggle to get my clothes to dry in the cold English winter. The wonderful Italian deli with free samples and delicious panini; the discovery of a nature reserve right next to my house; the news that Ian McEwan is coming here to talk about his latest book, and subsequent pleasure of tearing through said book over the weekend, letting everything strange and confusing melt away for a few hours every day as I leaped back into the story to pursue that most basic of goals: to find out what happens next.

I guess (not to be existential or anything) that that kind of sums up my life right now. I'm not really sure what to expect from this new city, new school, new community, so I'm just waiting to see what happens next, what strange encounter or new discovery I stumble upon each day, and how each little thing affects the way I see this place and anticipate the coming year of study.

So, here I am. Stay tuned for more travel observations and - judging from my reading lists - lots and lots and lots of book reviews.

A Visit to the Natural History Museum

Yesterday I spontaneously popped into the Natural History Museum on my way into town. Two hours later, I re-emerged and continued on my way, and what a great way to spend an afternoon.

The building itself is worth the visit (which by the way is free, although I donated my spare change because I had such a nice time). It's quite old and was the venue of a famous debate in the 1800s about The Origin of Species. Unlike most museums, it consists of a single room with a lower and upper gallery and an iron-and-glass roof that makes it more reminiscent of a train station. Both levels are circumscribed by a colonnade, with larger stone columns interspersed with smaller ones, each made from a different kind of stone found in the British Isles.

Amongst all this architecture are probably hundreds of glass cases containing specimens, from a bat skeleton to a stuffed Capybera. The museum also has the wonderful oddity of letting visitors touch certain exhibits, like a stuffed cheetah or the fossilized remains of dinosaur eggs (which I found particularly thrilling). So in addition to seeing the amazing animals, you get to see the amazement on the faces of adults and children as they reach out to caress the fur of a cheetah.

In fact, one of the things that struck me most about the whole experience was the beauty of negative space, as in, the shapes of empty space created by objects. The openings between the iron-work in the roof create a beautiful pattern on the glass cases when the sun shines through, as well as a dazzling mosaic to gaze up at from the lower gallery. As you walk along the upper gallery, the view down to the lower floor is filtered through the row of columns. The cases, of course, create a lot of unreachable empty space, a sort of cushion of air that separates us from the more delicate specimens. And best of all, the skeletons reveal the amazing architecture of space in living bodies, from the gaping sockets where an elephant's tusks should fit to the delicate barrel of the ribcage in infinite variations of size and shape.

Because I was on my own, I wandered around quite slowly but not systematically, and took pictures of everything that caught my fancy. I don't normally take pictures in museums, but because I was in no rush, it felt OK, and not like I was distracting from my experience of the exhibits. On the contrary, each specimen felt entirely real and very immediate. The permission to touch some of them was a perfect way of reminding me that what I was viewing was very, very real, and of recreating every few minutes the thrill of realization that I was actually in the presence of some incredibly beautiful and exotic phenomena. It's amazing how a hall full of skeletons and stuffed birds can give you knowledge and excitement about living things. This was definitely an experience that convinced me that the beauty of the universe is a more-than-sufficient object of my faith and wonder.

So, enough talk, here are some pictures, which I hope will give you a bit of the same feelings. Let me know in the comments if there are other natural history museums you've loved or that I simply must visit!

An exhibit window full of specimens that either relate to or actually inspired characters from Alice in Wonderland, including the Oxford Dodo (it was in the case next door), but also the White rabbit, holding an actual pocket watch and a very distempered-looking bird. Speaking of which...
Why is a raven like a writing desk? Conveniently next to the Alice case, this writing desk was just sitting there and not looking anything like a raven.

This illustration reminded me of the villain in Up for some reason.

The skeletons were really intriguing and surprisingly expressive. I tried to capture what I was talking about earlier, that feeling of empty space contained within the bones.

 I'm not sure these pictures convey it, it's tricky to translate into two dimensions.