London Wrap-up

Now, as I've mentioned, this site has been pretty much a love letter to London (and England in general) since day one. Lately I have corrected this, as I'd like anyone interested in visiting or moving there to get a more well rounded picture.

But just for the sake of a kind of proper closure or to balance the summation or to appease the curiously Churchillian markings in the frost on my window...a quick parade of positive points.

Boredom is bore-derline fictional
See what I did there?

Seriously, even if you are low on cash you basically have to be terminally stupid and/or lazy not to be able to find something to do in London. I couldn't even do a brief summary of all there is to do by way of music venues, museums, restaurants, pubs, nightclubs, galleries, theaters, cinemas, shops, libraries, parks, markets, novelty locations...let me put it another way. If you are a Person with Interests and A Little Initiative, then you shall find somewhere in London that Caters To You. Time Out magazine is basically the bible of things to do in the city, but obviously there are other sources of information on the matter - many, many sources. Given that this sort of thing was the real meat and potatoes for this site, I'll stop here. Throw a dart at the archives and you're bound to hit an entry filled with my rabbling on about one fun place to go to or another.

Transit
Like anywhere on Earth, longtime locals will groan about the public transit system whenever they get the chance. I'd be lying if I said I never had my own frustrations with the famous London tube system or that I hadn't experienced the joy of having myself compacted into the side of a train car during rush hour. That being said, getting around London was easier and quicker than anything I have experienced anywhere else I've ever been. The slowest late periods and Sundays still managed to blow the finest Ottawa bus service out of the water - and in this I refer not only to the tube but the overland rail and London's own bus services. Like a lot of things in the city, it's expensive...but a clever individual can really get a lot for their money.

I will say this, if you have the extra time and patience then the bus system can actually be much better for your wallet (generally running at half the price) and your peace of mind than the tube. When I worked in Barbican for a stretch in August, it only added ten minutes to my route to take the bus and I often got half the double decker to myself (plus the childish good fun of a double decker bus ride). The bus is also advantageous in that you better learn the space between neighborhoods and see London as a whole, instead of disconnected dots of radius surrounding tube stations. Overland rail, which is much more prominent south of the Thames than tube lines, also carries this advantage.

By and by, whether you go for a day or a year, do not waste precious currency on any map guides to London unless they are the London A-Z. This is widely accepted as the finest guide to finding your way about the city and it is sold in damn near every book, stationary and even corner store in the city. There are a variety of sizes and formats, but a standard paperback sized version will do you plenty fine. A cousin of mine who has lived in the city all his life, working in various locations, still gets some use out of his copy thanks to the density of London neighborhoods.

I said it before and I'll say it again, Google Maps does not have your back in this city. Only a month ago it got me lost down some dark alleys about half a kilometer off-target from where I was trying to get to, despite punching in the correct address. To be fair, I shouldn't have placed so much trust in the green arrows location, but to be vanity fair the damn thing should be accurate - particularly when you consider that Google Maps is powered by the imprisoned souls of Christopher Columbus, James Cook and Marco Polo.

Anyways - at the end of the day, Londoners have an understandable love affair with the tube system which walks hand in hand with the daily grumbling. This has led to some rather amusing and detailed websites which you may enjoy checking out. Serious fans of the film Amelie could get a bonus kick out of this one.

Employment
If you are just looking for a steady paycheck, as opposed to gunning for a specific career path, than this is in fact a good city to be in. Recruitment agencies grow like weeds and though they can be a waste of time, I can honestly say I got all but one of my jobs over there through the durn things. Skilled workers (i.e. anybody who can put around in Microsoft Office Suite) who want to do a kind of working vacation in London shouldn't have a big problem once they get past the initial obstacles posed by immigration.

Football
Plenty of stadiums and enthusiastic pubs in which to catch a game. I myself lived not too far from Arsenal stadium. Even without being a rabid sports fan, I found myself getting a little sucked in. If you want to work your way in with the locals, you could do a lot worse than to follow football and learn enough to join conversations on the subject - just be careful who you swear allegiance and to keep an eye on what team any given group of pub dwellers may be supporting. The infamous football fan violence-o-rama phenomena isn't as bad as it's made out to be, but folk can still get more worked up about it than politics and religion combined.

and finally...

The one line hit parade
- Old and varied architecture, lots of it!
- The relatively new smoking ban.
- Hell of bike lanes/paths.
- Waitrose supermarkets.
- Wide availability and variety of alcoholic beverages.
- A cacophony of ever changing and specific-yet-vague slang. My personal favorites would have to include lairy, chav and shrapnel (definition C). Though not slang per se, the term gormless will always have a special place in my lexicon.

And finally, finally (for real) finally...

London is a place where you can count on more before less, louder before quieter, faster before slower and so forth. There are many, many aspects of the city that I would define as being neither better nor worse but simply more intense than anywhere else. This is something which drew me from the comparatively quiet hamlet of Ottawa, but I can honestly say that after thirteen months there I am happy to be in Carp again - which I shall put up a couple of updates about, if only to show that it has it's charm and places of interest. From there we shall see!

Mid to late Janurary is looking to be a more realistic time for my moving to Toronto. I reckon that I should maybe try learning from past experience? Specifically, I think that if I had found the patience to save a little more money and weigh the pros and cons of who to stay with while I sorted out the job/apartment equation in London...well, it might have taken me a lot less time to get settled in and I wouldn't have felt like my situation was as precarious as it did on some days. So I reckon I may grab a short term job doing whatever, so that I can pad my bank account a bit more before heading down.

Anyways!

I doubt this will be the last time I write about England just as I do the notion that I shall never return there. A friend I made is moving to Berlin in the new year and, depending on What Happens, I may fly over to visit her - and Berlin and maybe Paris as well.

I promise, this is not the end of this here bloog.

BLOOG.

Crap Bags

Holy crap bags I had a great weekend catching up with people...and there are still more folk to see!
Though I wouldn't call this a first world problem, it certainly is better than a kick in the face.

So yes, back to the task at hand of examining the less appealing side of Londinum - to be followed by something positive.

Crime
London is a big city and it has a somewhat notorious crime problem, despite an overall decline in crime rates in recent years. Like the high cost of living, this is something which most of the human race is well aware of - regarding big cities in general, if not London specifically. Islington ranked fairly well in the overall London borough crime charts.

As in Germany, strict knife and gun laws have led to a trend towards "weaponized" dogs amongst gang members and thuggish types in general. Pitbulls (and mixed breeds with a healthy bit of pitbull in them) are very trendy amongst Chavs and their ilk for precisely the associations that make most other folk shy away from them. In Islington, Finsbury and Hackney I saw more of these dogs than any other by far and I must admit that it was a little annoying how my view of them had been changed to one of apprehension by the almost inescapable headlines put out by the various news outlets (which generally bore a great resemblance to the style and bluster of millennial American journalism).

Though it's been many years since the infamous Kray Twins ran around Bethnal Green, organized crime is still a force in the city - with the Russian Vory most recently capturing the public imagination in Cronenburg's latest.

But la dee dah

I generally felt perfectly safe as I went about London, be it the shiny tourist paradise along Embankment or getting lost in the Kray's old neighborhood while trying to find an illegal bar. This is despite a failed terrorist attack that happened in a part of Picadilly Circus I'd been in only a couple of days prior. Say what you will about the big brother effect, all those CCTV cameras left me feeling safer than if they weren't there. As a friend of mine put it, "Try living in Israel for a year, then move back to London and see how scary it feels".

That being said, I can see my patience for them wearing thin if the new talking camera initiative gets some serious momentum behind it. I can't say as I see a lot of wisdom in the ongoing ASBO program either - generally the British law seems focused almost entirely on the treating the symptoms of crime while paying little heed to addressing the causes and this is displayed rather well by ASBOs. Better to try and brand a child with a mark of cain than to find out why he or she is acting up in the first place? I guess, seeing as how they are so effective at deterring further offenses.

Pollution
Cars are the primary culprit of London's pollution troubles, sparking Mayor Ken Livingstone's congestion charge and low emission zone initiatives. I've talked a bit about this before, in the broad strokes, but I haven't really said anything about my personal experience. I can tell you that the entire time I was in London, when I blew my nose the results were always dark grey going on black. This had only ever happened to me before if I had spent an evening indoors with several heavy smokers, so it was certainly disconcerting when I noticed the same thing after spending an entire day out of doors and romping through St. James park.

I also remember feeling a slight tug on my lungs when I was in certain areas during my first three weeks. That went away as I got used to it but, as is generally the case with these things, getting used to it was a tad more disconcerting.

General Filth
Walk around London's core and you'll probably wonder why London has such a reputation for being a dirty city. Outside the inner core, it's not unusual in a lot of neighborhoods (including my own) to see garbage bags burst open with their guts decorating the sidewalk, on top of the usual littering. The practice of fly tipping is also well exercised in some parts. Coming from Ottawa, you can appreciate how this drove me crazy and took the longest of anything to get used to. I know that part of the reason is the way that local councils charge for rubbish collection, but that can't possibly be the whole story.

When it comes to recycling, I can say that the public attitude generally doesn't match the enthusiasm and PR on the subject which is put out by the government. I could toss out some theories on this, but I don't feel qualified to say anything of great substance. Suffice to say, I found this difficult to reconcile after the first thirty times it came up.

So okay, enough already. Next post I'll see what I can do to sum up the great things about London/England.

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Addendum: For those of you who are a fan of Saul Willaims and/or free music of a high quality, may I suggest you head on over to his website to download The Rise and Inevitable Liberation of Niggy Tardust! Interestingly, Trent Reznor has produced the album as well as helping with writing and backing vocals.