Dusk Through Narrow Streets

First I should say that if anyone found their way here from Travel for the Over 30s or Emm in London, I apologize that it’s taken me so long to get this post up–here in Alaska it’s still March 28, but it’s late evening for nearly everyone else, if not tomorrow already. My excuse is that I was out of town the past couple days and only got back late last night…and then I woke up with a cold. So that’s fun.

Anyway, the awesome blogger at Golden Prague had a great idea: get together expat bloggers to post about their experiences as an expat and link along to the next person in the list. (This also means that at some point I am really going to comment on the other entries in the list. No, really, I am.)

My expat story probably isn’t that of most other expats; I lived in Norwich, England, for one semester, just less than three months. The fact that I came there from Alaska, and shortly after having spent two weeks in Turkey, probably affected my experience a bit; as a nearly lifelong Alaskan and certainly a lifelong American,  I’m used to certain things, and England–England is different. My time there was far shorter than many, and I’m not sure that it’s enough to experience a foreign country the way it really needs to be lived–but for me, it was more than enough to fall in love.

Part of that, I suppose, is that I was already something of an Anglophile and wanted to visit; I love Doctor Who and other British things (I’d count Merlin and A Bit of Fry and Laurie, except I watched those after coming back), and British accents kind of make me melt. Somewhat less since I lived around them, but still. I’ve always been fascinated by history, and since spending three weeks in the D.C. area a few years ago, I’ve had a real love for the physical, cultural history you can see in the land and architecture of a place like that. (There’s more evidence of my Alaskan-ness: I live in Anchorage now, the biggest city in Alaska, but apparently I’m still a small-town girl, and our city doesn’t have much of what makes even ugly cities a little bit magical. We’ve got a lot of concrete and modern glass-walled buildings and some old houses. The 4th Avenue Theater is from the 1940s or 50s and looks like it, but it’s really not used for anything and might be torn down. That’s about it.

Compared to what I’m used to, virtually everything in Europe is old–and that makes it somehow magical. After I first came back from England, I didn’t really know what to say to people who asked how it was–how do you sum it up, anyway? Usually I settled for making a joke out of it and saying that it rained a lot. Lately, I’ve been saying instead something like “Norwich was really pretty…I miss it.”  I am not used to cobblestone streets everywhere and dark alleyways leading off to funny little courtyards, and buildings that look like they’ve been pieced together from bits of other buildings, and old cathedrals, and visible history even in the fields that have clearly been fields longer than those in America. I walked around Norwich a lot, mostly on the way to shops or gigs, and I took gobs of pictures, but mostly I tried to drink it all in.

Not all of it was great. The administration at the University of East Anglia was just as bureaucratic as at any college, and it really was wet almost all the time. Plus I think everyone there drinks and nearly everyone smokes, which I’ve whined about before, both of which were kind of odd for someone who does neither. But the people were almost universally friendly,  and I saw much more interest and participation in the political process there than here. Everyone was invested in the US election even though it wasn’t their own country, and I went with several other UEA students to protest high student fees (my reason for it was a free bus to Cambridge, but still). I didn’t make as many friends as I’d have liked, but I got to know people that I miss.

To be honest, though, it was mostly the place itself that captivated me. In early November, when I’d been there maybe a month and a half, I wrote something in my travel column for the student paper back home that pretty well sums it up (even though my phrasing didn’t survive an edit job I won’t comment on in a public forum):

Back in my dorm, rain still coming down outside and my wet shoes slowly drying on the floor, I can think of plenty of things I should be doing, like cleaning up the papers strewn across my desk or getting to bed. But I’ve had a minor epiphany growing in me over the week that I can’t help thinking about. It’s hardly profound or life-changing, and it’s simply this: I love this place. I really, really love it.

I’m not sure what brought me to that realization—I haven’t hated England by any means while I’ve been here, but something’s subtly changed. Maybe the Guy Fawkes Day fireworks did it, the rain on the wet leaves at night, the old brick houses. Maybe it was Great Yarmouth with its run of tacky tourist traps and long boardwalks, or the buildings with red tiled roofs and odd sections at different heights, as if each was cobbled together from leftovers of other houses, many sooty and marked with graffiti but compelling in their ugliness. Maybe it was a few nights ago in Norwich, walking down St. Benedict’s Street, peering into the shadows in all the tiny alleys and shadowed courtyards that branched off from the main road. Maybe it’s the way every corner positively bleeds history: Houses and streets here have long memories, longer than you’ll ever find in America.

Whatever it was, in only the short time I’ve been here, England has already crawled into my soul and made a home there in a way I can remember very few other places doing. This isn’t going to change much for the time being, I suppose, except for this certainty: I have no idea when I’ll be able to do any international travel again after I return to Alaska, but I do know that someday, I’ll be back.

I could natter on more about how much I like British phrasings or odd little differences like how their standard paper size is bigger than ours (seriously, it’s like a couple centimeters narrower and several longer), or the weird pronunciations I got completely used to (like Gloucester, which looks like three syllables to Americans but is actually two), but that right there is the most important thing I have to say about it.

And now I’d like to direct you on to the next blog in World Blog Surf Day: Emm in London describes her expat life in, you guessed it, London, and how much she loves the city despite the many, many bureaucratic headaches she fought through to move there from South Africa.