Dusk Through Narrow Streets

I think I mentioned before that I miss Norwich and in many ways it’s Anchorage that is making me miss it. Anchorage is fine, don’t get me wrong, and I like living here; it’s big enough to have reasonable opportunities (for entertainment, employment, friends, outdoor stuff, whatever), small enough to not be overwhelming. But it’s…very new, and very small as cities go. We just hit 300,000 last year and we’re the biggest city in Alaska, so as cities go…we don’t have much soul.

Maybe that’s a weird way to put it, but when I’ve visited cities before that I’ve fallen in love with, it was because I got a sense for the soul of the city. That usually rules out any city whose buildings were constructed mostly in the last fifty years, so Anchorage is definitely out, as was London in this case (I know London has old parts, I just couldn’t find any of them–I saw stuff like the Tower and Big Ben and Trafalgar Square, but virtually everything was so modern it was just boring). Katowice and Marseille had grafitti everywhere and odd courtyards and alleys and cobbled streets. They were kind of exciting and very different. Edinburgh was old, really old, and full of history…plus more cobblestones and alleys. Same for Norwich. And I just eat that stuff up. I love that sense of magic and mystery to a place when you know it’s really seen things. To some extent you can get that even in cities with predominantly modern architecture, at least if you find parts with grafitti on subway tunnels or something. There’s a beauty in the grit and ugliness.

Anchorage is fine, and it’s got mountains and trees and all, but as a city–it doesn’t have enough beauty and history to give it a soul, and it doesn’t have the right kind of ugliness.

Neither did Norwich, for the most part, but despite being roughly the same size as Anchorage if you included the surrounding area, it felt much…cozier. And it sure had a lot more history. (And cobblestone streets and little dark alleyways. Have you got the idea yet that I love those?) I miss that. But the specific thing I’m missing right now, which seems to show up a lot more often in Europe?

Outdoor bare-bulb light displays. I don’t even entirely know how to describe it. Particularly when they criss-cross over a street–this picture I took my last week in Norwich isn’t great (click to enlarge), but it gives you an idea. And I’m sure that sort of thing is done in the US, but I sure haven’t seen it in Anchorage, in part because…well, none of our streets are set up right for it. And I miss it, because it’s pretty, and I don’t see it here.

Now offering e-mail subscriptions to this blog! Come on, you know you want one.

No, seriously, I am more awesome than you. I have photographic proof. Observe:

Yes. I have a baby TARDIS on my dashboard. Isn’t it adorable? My car needed an air freshener anyway because when it isn’t cold, it always smells something like a wet dog, which is odd because to my knowledge my car has never transported a dog, wet or otherwise. So when I found the Television and Movie Store (uh…Darleks? Dude…) across from the Forum in Norwich and discovered that among hordes of other Doctor Who merchandise like action figures and rubbish bins and lunchboxes, they sold air fresheners shaped like little Daleks and TARDISes…well…could you really expect me to resist?

No I’m not a hopeless nerd, I don’t even know what you’re talking about.

Okay, well, maybe this will be considered a bit closer to genuinely awesome and less hopelessly nerdy?

See? Pins all over my backpack from basically everywhere I visited and then some because…I always like the whole vintage-luggage-sticker thing and wish I could do that? Something. So what we’ve got here, not in order because I truly cannot be bothered, is Coldplay, Philadelphia, Barrow, North Slope Borough, Disney World (yes, that’s Stitch in a Hawaiian shirt), Guillemots, Marseille, Cambridge, London, Oxfam, Scotland, Poland, Anchorage, Turkey, a campaign button for my grandpa when he was running for Minnesota governor, and…hm. I have a pin for Codes in the Clouds, too. I’d be rather annoyed if I lost it, because it was cool. And yes, all the ones for bands are of acts that I actually saw live. Because I’m awesome.

It’s really kind of funny–before this year, I’d done a significant amount of travel all over the US (though mostly to the same areas–Florida five or six times, Hawaii about eight times, family repeatedly in Washington, Nebraska, Montana, Minnesota, and of course there’s travel within Alaska), but the only foreign country I’d ever visited was Canada. I’d been to at least a couple territories in it, at least, but that was it, unless you count visiting the French embassy in D.C. or the tiny piece of British territory at the Captain Cook Monument in Hawaii.

Within the space of a year–well, six months, actually–I added five more countries to my list and became something of a jaded international traveler (making the 20+-hour trip from Anchorage to Istanbul is a little nerve-wracking; going back and then, a couple weeks later, making the same trip back to London is just exhausting). My passport isn’t close to being wrinkled and dog-eared from use the way I’d kind of like it to be, but at least it’s got stamps from every country I’ve visited save Scotland, which is something.

I spent a lot of time in Turkey craving an ordinary American sandwich–you know, like something from Subway or even just some lunch meat, cheese (cheddar, please God, not feta), and lettuce slapped between a couple pieces of bread. I didn’t expect to have the same problem in England.

Oh, they’ve got Subway there; I broke down and bought something at Subway more than once. It’s the cold prepackaged sandwiches that baffle me. At least in the UK (not so much elsewhere–I had the worst time trying to find some basic sandwiches to save for later when I was in Marseille and Katowice), every place you look–ASDA, Tesco, Boots Pharmacy, truck/bus stops, campus food outlets, you name it–seems to have the same basic selection, and that selection is very, very weird. For starters they all have mayonnaise. All of them. And the kinds…okay, well, put it this way: “prawn cocktail” is not going to be a common prepackaged-sandwich variety in the US. It is in England.  (It’s disgusting, too. Trust me on that one.) I’m…blanking on some others. Just believe me that they’re odd. All I wanted was something basic: some bread, some meat, some normal cheese, some lettuce and maybe some other veggies like a couple tomato slices. That’s easy to find here. In England? Near impossible.

Most of what’s annoying about RyanAir is to be expected, really; they are very cheap, so they have to make up for that in every possible way, by charging for any checked luggage and plastering their airplanes with ads and all that sort of thing. The more annoying part is that the people who fly RyanAir seem to be pretty uniformly–well, stupid. I don’t know if I just think this because I’ve been on airplane flights pretty regularly since I was very young and therefore know exactly what I’m doing, which means I might have a bit of a “lol noobs” attitude towards less experienced travelers…or if it’s because people really are stupid.

I mean, I totally understand hanging on every word of the safety lecture if you aren’t familiar with it. At least that stuff is mildly important. And, okay, since RyanAir doesn’t do reserved seats and loads from both ends of the plane, it can be difficult to find a seat, which I suppose explains–but doesn’t excuse–the seemingly inevitable pushing and shoving past each other that happens as everyone is getting onboard (though frankly I think there’s never a good enough reason to have several people going in opposite directions in those tiny airplane aisles).

But look: it does not take much knowledge of air travel to understand that bags you can’t or don’t want to store in the overhead bins go under the seat in front of you. Not under your seat. Not between your feet. Not in your lap. Under the seat in front of you. That’s what it’s for. There’s even a bar so you can’t put crap under your own seat. Even that is more easily remembered from experience, I suppose, but this is common sense: you really don’t want your bag in your lap or under your feet for two and a half hours. There is room under the seat in front of you. It’s totally empty. Squash your bag in there. Seriously. I can think of at least five women just in the rows around me who spent the entire flight from Katowice, Poland, to the London-Stansted airport with their bags either in their laps or under their feet.

And really? I know even on more normal flights people start unbuckling their seatbelts before the fasten-seatbelt sign goes off at the gate. But whipping off your seatbelt and standing up while the plane’s still moving down the runway? As the flight attendant is making an announcement, at that very second, that you shouldn’t take off your seatbelts yet? COME ON PEOPLE. THIS IS COMMON SENSE. YOU ARE NOT FIVE YEARS OLD. SIT THE FRACK DOWN AND SHOW JUST A TINY BIT OF PATIENCE, GEEZ.

Oh. And when they keep proudly telling us “We’ve arrived 20 minutes ahead of schedule!” and remind us they have the best on-time-arrival rate of all European airlines? Sod off. I’m convinced they just pad their arrival times for that very reason.

Until this summer, I’d never done much travel by bus to speak of (or international travel, but I think we’ve covered that). Then I ended up having to use an affiliate of Greyhound to get from Pittsburgh to DuBois, PA, where my best friend lives, and of course the same thing going back. That was…what, four hours? Five? I forget. Mostly I’ve traveled everywhere by airplane, with some driving by my dad when needed.

And then I got here, where travel by coach and train is very common, and first I have the four-hour coach trip from Heathrow to UEA, and then more recently the ten-hour one-way journey to Edinburgh, and then two hours each way to the Stansted airport for my Marseille trip, and yesterday 3-4 hours each way to Birmingham for the Coldplay concert (which was fan-bloody-tastic, by the way). For comparison, I’ve done enormous amounts of airplane travel and not insignificant train travel, in Alaska and then here, plus that trip on the sleeper train to Ankara that was not much fun.

My conclusion? Coach travel sucks.

And…I’m just gonna expand on that later, because I’m lazy and also I need to pack for Poland, ulp.