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.

You know what probably the worst part of coach travel is? Aside from the impossibility of sleeping, which seems to bother others far less than it does me (this is no surprise; I’m the worst at sleeping anywhere but a bed of almost everyone I know), especially since I’ve actually observed others sacked out in buses sound asleep and wondered how they managed it. No, the worst part is the lavatory.

I mean, at least they’ve got one. That’s obviously good. You don’t want to go four hours or ten hours or whatever without easy access to a bathroom. The only thing is–well, first, take a basic airplane lavatory; they’re all pretty much the same. Now assume that one or more of its basic components (flush, faucet, soap, paper towels) doesn’t work and that it smells funnier, take away any handlebars or other things to hold onto, and put the mechanisms for flushing the toilet and getting water from the tap (if they even work) in confusing places like the floor. Oh, and then keep in mind that you are not in an airplane, which is pretty steady during flight unless there’s a patch of turbulence, nor even in a train, which does stop at different stations but at least is generally going in a constant direction. No, you are in a bus, which bounces at every tiny irregularity in the road and makes frequent turns, stops, and decelerations, which means that even if everything in the lavatory works the way it ought (this happens maybe half the time at best), the movement of the bus will jounce and jostle you around all the freaking time, such that you’re hard-pressed enough to keep your seat while you’re doing your business (remember that you have nothing to hold onto except maybe the edge of the sink) but it’s basically impossible not to be thrown into the wall/door handle/toilet once you stand up to wash your hands. Good luck getting back out the door and down the aisle to your seat without lurching into some other hard object, too. I collected so many bruises just from my coach trip, it was ridiculous–I think I had about 15 bruises of varying sizes on my legs when I got home, and at least half of those were from the coach ride to London, not from all the suitcase-wrangling that came after (though that caused plenty, let me tell you).

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 suppose partly I hate buses because I absolutely cannot sleep on them. And trust me, I’ve tried; my very first genuine long-distance bus trip was from Pittsburgh to DuBois this summer, when I was running on…I don’t even know, 36 hours without sleep by that point? The bus was virtually empty, as such things often are with a route like that (same for the Norwich-London route; that was just me and the driver for a while on the way back), so I did the logical thing and stretched out across a couple seats, assuming I was so exhausted, surely I’d be able to sleep.

Yeah, not so much. To begin with, two seats is only just long enough to be not long enough, and if you try to curl up, prop your feet up on the window, or just let your feet dangle, some part of your body will fall asleep, which isn’t conducive to you actually falling asleep. Propping your feet up on the seat across the aisle sort of works, at least a little longer, but you have to move every time someone wants to come by, which isn’t conducive to sleeping either. That’s if there are extra seats, of course, and my 10-hour trips to and from Edinburgh, and my I-don’t-remember-how-many-hours to and from Birmingham for the Coldplay concert, were absolutely packed without a single extra seat.

Sitting up and leaning against the window is no good; there are too many hard, sharp angles, and even if you avoid those, touching your head to the window instantly conveys every single rattle and vibration from the entire bus right into your bones, which is enough to keep you awake even if you didn’t clock your head on the window every time the bus jolts over, like, a crack in the pavement.  And unlike on airplanes or even trains, there are almost never any tray tables, which for someone like me who can only do airplane-sleeping with her head on a pillow on said tray table, that’s not good.

Oh. And did I mention jolting over cracks in the pavement? Yeah, well, buses are kind of big and clunky. Every little movement seems to be exaggerated exponentially, so you’re getting jostled all the time if it’s not steadily going down the highway. Which it’s usually not since it’s always making stops along its route.

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.

Well, after shopping along Edinburgh’s Royal Mile today, I’ve discovered that the same phenomenon extends to Scotland as well, except here it’s even more annoying. I stopped in a bunch of shops that sold souvenir t-shirts, and it was more or less the same situation in other areas as well—everyone and their mom and their mom’s dog sells the same tartan throws and lambswool scarves and cashmere and stuff, and they also sell all the same t-shirts. Found many tolerable-to-pretty-awesome designs for men, ones that were clearly Scottish but still nice as t-shirts and not just tacky souvenirs. For women I think I found, like, five different designs. One was halfway decent and it was £15. I refuse to pay $30 for a shirt I’m not completely in love with, thank you very much. The other designs ranged from “meh” to actively blah, and the cheapest looked like a sport shirt, basically. Which would be fine for maybe five bucks but not for twice that.

Seriously, who thinks that women don’t want nice, interesting souvenir t-shirts as well as men? What is so hard to understand about this? I want a reasonably cheap shirt that is clearly influenced by and bought in the place I’m visiting but that also fits my style, which truly is not that picky when it comes to t-shirts. Is that really so much to ask?

When I was in Turkey shopping in places like the Grand Bazaar, I noticed something I found rather annoying but assumed it was a product of, I don’t know, a developing nation that didn’t completely know how to cater to modern tourists. Or something. If nothing else I figured it was probably isolated more or less to Turkey. And that was The Case of the Missing Womens-Sized T-Shirt. Look, I hate oversized t-shirts. I wear them to bed and that’s basically it; I won’t wear them as a normal shirt. If I’m going to wear it, it needs to fit. And I don’t know if y’all have noticed, but guys and girls kind of need different cuts in their shirts. There’s really no such thing as unisex.

Well, in Turkey? The vendors sold shirts in women’s sizes, sure. They always cost 5-10 lira more than the men’s t-shirts, and they never looked as cool. I found at least four different t-shirt designs there that I really liked, ones sold by lots of vendors (once you walk around the Grand Bazaar a little, you realize that everyone and their mom pretty much sells all the same stuff), and not one came in women’s sizes. No, the women got the boring t-shirts, ones that look like cheap tourist junk, with Turkey’s little logo on and stuff. The men got shirts that you’d actually want to wear. I did find a shirt I liked, but it took some serious doing and then some even more serious haggling.

So I was right about one thing: the hostel does have internet and computers and wi-fi. It also costs. Not as much as some places–like, the eight bucks I paid for a measly half hour at the Paris airport, this was nearer $5 for two hours–but I still don’t like paying for internet. In other words, I’ll be on, but not much. Not that, you know, anyone really cares, but still.

Also, I couldn’t see Edinburgh at all because 1) the hostel’s not in the city centre and 2) it was well dark by the time we arrived (ten-hour bus ride, y’all. Ten hours, and totally full up, so no room to stretch out, either). I’ll be doing things tomorrow but not sure what yet, so I should probably get on that.

Leaving early tomorrow morning for Edinburgh, along with something like 120 other members of the International Student Society, none of whom I probably know. Oops. There’s no specific schedule other than getting there tomorrow evening, leaving the middle of Sunday, and getting back to UEA at 2 a.m. Monday morning (good thing I don’t have class Monday), so we get to plan things ourselves, something I should’ve done at least a week ago. But I’m hoping to see Edinburgh Castle, and the (free) Museum of Scotland, and the Palace of Hollyrood House, and I’ve already booked a ghost tour of Edinburgh–an evening walking tour of the city’s spooky bits, basically. Sounds like great fun.

The unfortunate thing is that, as usual, I’ve left everything to the last minute, and even though I wanted to be asleep in 30 minutes, I have not actually finished packing. Plus I need to do some other e-mailing and writing and…things. Printing stuff I should’ve known about earlier. You know. But I’m taking my laptop this time, unlike in Great Yarmouth, because…the bus ride is something like ten hours long. I can get only so much done with notebooks, books, and staring out the window. (We’ll see how productive I really am, of course. But having no internet does tend to make me get things done.)