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.

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.

Wow, that was…an incredibly long journey. Felt like longer and more tiring than my Anchorage-Istanbul trip or Anchorage-Norwich, even though I think both of those were a longer period of hours. See, the problem was that I was behind on all my coursework, so in the days leading up to leaving for home, I think my longest night of sleep was 7 hours, and that was Friday night; night before that I had six, and then five, and then three. I stayed up late a lot doing homework, yeah. And then I got five hours the night before I flew out from Gatwick because it took so very long to get to my b&b.

I got in Sunday night at midnight, though, and I was about falling asleep standing up at that point, and then of course it took half of forever to get my bags back, and then I had to finish my last paper and send it in because I’d had no internet up until then. So I got to bed aroud 3 a.m. And then I didn’t wake up until 5 p.m., and I was up for six hours before I was dizzy-tired enough to go back to bed. Today I got up at 9 a.m., although I haven’t done much today but whatever.

Anyway, the point is, I’m done traveling, but I’m not done writing. This is still a travel blog even if I’m not living overseas. I have lots of things from England etc. I never talked about, and when I run out of that, I have plenty to natter on about from my various earlier travels. And failing that? Well, I live in Alaska. I’m sure I’ll keep coming up with something.

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.

Things I forgot yesterday, mostly. Again I should preface this with the disclaimer that if I seem to be making sweeping generalizations, I’m really not; I’m just talking out of my nether regions based on stuff I saw in Marseille.

• French people don’t mind graffiti. Mostly I’m assuming this because it was all over in Marseille. Like, normally you’ll see it on bridges and things but often it’s covered up, and of course it’s in bad parts of town or whatever, but in Marseille–practically every flat surface had something scribbled on it, even in reasonably nice areas.
• Church bells toll on the half hour, not the hour. I really don’t know why that might be, but I noticed this enough times to be sure of it.
• There’s a significant crime level in Marseille. Well. Maybe. One site mentioned that it has a reputation for theft and muggings and stuff. Mostly I just noticed what seemed a higher-than-usual concentration of police and a high occurrence of police sirens, plus bars on most ground-floor windows. Also, lots of homeless, which might mean something.
• Lots of shops close on Sundays. And on Mondays, apparently, but not the same ones, so…I really don’t know what conclusion to draw there.
• Most French don’t speak English. I swear I’m not being the ugly American here, okay? I wasn’t expecting lots of English speakers in Turkey, for instance, But I figured, it’s France, it’s in the EU, it’s close to England–probably lots of people speak at least a little English. Well, sure, some do, but at least in Marseille, it was a surprisingly low number. I actually feel like I came across more people with a little English in Turkey than I did in Marseille. Of course, if I visited a more touristy area, I suppose I might have a different experience.

And on that note…I gotta say I’m glad to be back in an English-speaking country. I liked Marseille quite a lot, all things considered, but even two days there had the same effect on me that two weeks in Turkey did: I found myself abruptly homesick for America, where things are familiar and everyone speaks my language. That mostly went away as soon as I got back to England, so apparently the language bit mattered more.

Things I learned from my day in Marseille (well, actually, I have no idea whether any of these are true, it’s just stuff I observed, so…take with several grains of salt?):

• French people like dogs. A lot. I saw one in a McDonalds, for instance, and also saw a St. Bernard and a Great Dane, both of which are in the small-pony branch of dogs. French people also don’t clean up after their dogs when they poop on the sidewalk. (This might not have been dog doo, actually, but whatever it was, it showed up all over the place.)
• It rains all the time in Marseille. Poured from about noon on yesterday and rained for a while today. At least people here actually deal with this and bring out their umbrellas. On campus in Norwich, where it rains at least once a week, 3/4 of the students will run around in the rain without an umbrella. (And actually the hostel owner tells me it’s sunny 200+ days of the year. Guess it’s…just me then?)
• There are a lot of homeless people here. More than one person was camped out down at the Vieux Port, under an overhang in blankets and sleeping bags and stuff. An old church in the Panier quarter had somebody else’s sleeping bag spread out. Lots of others asking for money. Also some lady in the market tried to talk to me and, like, show me her baby? I assume she wanted money since I don’t speak French. And then she grabbed my sleeve when I was shaking me head, so that was definitely a no.
• Everyone smokes. Oh wait, that’s not a France thing, that’s a FREAKING EVERYONE IN EUROPE thing. I swear, everyone on this gorram continent must have a pack-a-day habit. (At least they don’t do it indoors like in Turkey.)
• Speaking of which, Turkey, or at least Istanbul, apparently takes a lot of its cues from France. Maybe that’s just both being Mediterranean, I don’t know, although technically Istanbul’s not on the Med at all.
• The French do street signs way better than the English. Still not quite as good as in the US, I think, but the main point is that they have street signs at every intersection. It’s wonderful.

I’m actually writing this from Marseille even though I didn’t bring my laptop, because the hostel has a computer with internet you can use for free, which is pretty awesome. The hostel itself seems pretty nice, but I can’t say a whole lot about Marseille itself except that it reminds me more of Turkey than it does of England; it’s been raining pretty much all day. My shoes are still pretty wet. All I really did today was get in, find the hostel, and buy some food at a supermarket, but seeing as I couldn’t sleep at all last night and got up at like 3:30 a.m. to get the coach to the Stansted airport, that’s kind of an accomplishment. (Oddly I’m not completely exhausted. Don’t know why.)

I’d heard at some point that it’s kind of a European thing not to use deodorant. I can’t really say whether this is true (sure isn’t for England) and I’m guessing it’s far less so in general by now, at least, but I can definitely confirm that it’s true in Turkey. I know it’s all conditioning and it’s a natural smell and nobody used deodorant until the last century and stuff, but I am conditioned to it, so of course being in crowds of people smelling like BO isn’t a lot of fun.

That isn’t the point here, though. The point is that my Korean flatmate very kindly made us all a meal tonight because she wanted to cook us some Korean food, and I was eating in the kitchen with my flatmates. I kept noticing a smell I thought was in the food that reminded me strongly–and, interestingly enough, very positively–of Turkey. And then I realized I was actually smelling the guy next to me, who…I really don’t know, I suppose he might’ve been working out earlier or might’ve just not showered today. In any event, apparently body odor now smells like Turkey to me, and the weirdest bit is that I didn’t mind; I didn’t move away or anything because the sensation it evoked was a good one, even though I definitely didn’t enjoy that particular experience when I was actually in Turkey.