England is fun. I spent about twelve days in London, York, Leeds, and Edinburgh in July for vacation. I had a great time. Everyone is so nice there, helpful and polite.
We spent three days in London, going to the usual places like the Tower of London, the British Museum, the London Bridge, Hyde Park, Kensington Palace, etc. The day we arrived we had to stay up for almost forty-eight hours or we’d suffer from jet lag throughout the vacation, so that wasn’t fun.
It’s weird when a country has so much history. It makes America feel small and stupid. We only have 250 years and still can’t fit everything into a school year’s curriculum. We’ve got students who wonder what happened after Vietnam. Meanwhile, the poor British kids have to remember every single king and queen for three thousand years and who they fought and when/why they lost power. And it doesn’t help that everyone’s named William, James, or Henry. Plus so many wars–vikings, Anglo-Saxons, Normans, and the French and so on.
London is an inspiring city. I got some good story ideas (no wonder most fantasy comes out of Great Britain). Not only does it contain creative talent, but things to inspire that creative talent. I wished I lived in a nice boring country like London. They’re so boring that Biden and Trump were bigger headlines than anything King Charles did. Their news is about taxes on traffic lights and disease control, not who got shot today.
And origin point of so much good literature. We saw the Globe, which is not the original but a 1:1 duplicate near the same space. It’s a beautiful theater. Well set up and engineered to give A) the actors the best opportunity for a good performance and B) the audience–everyone in the audience–a good view. Shakespeare was not a pretentious author like James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon. His audience was everyone–the upper, middle, and lower class. He was a commercial writer. The plebeians who stood on the ground would throw orange peels at the actors they didn’t like and the actors threw them right back. You weren’t supposed to just sit and watch. It’s like today’s wrestling–high audience involvement/participation. Low brow and high brow humor. People forget there are fart jokes in Othello.
We had to do a LOT of walking. Not just to our destination but in the destination. After three days of museum visits and walking tours, my legs were terribly sore and my hips were tight. And I trained for this–I did lots of walking before the vacation–and I still suffered.
The British Museum is huge. It feels like it’s the place where England keeps all their stolen stuff. But like, what usually happened was that an English archaeologist would go to Gambia or Assyria or somewhere, ask “can I look for stuff here”, and the country would say “sure, we don’t care.” But it’s anthropological/archaeology only. Meaning there’s lots of statues without noses and pots. LOTS of pots. Like Link’s wet dream. It started to become a running joke with us. When you put everything together like that it all starts looking samey. The same stone statues, the same jewelry, the same pots. Not much variety like a science museum.
They have a lot of American music. Doesn’t seem like they home grow their own pop radio singles, despite having such a lush musical background (Beatles, Rolling Stones, Spice Girls). I heard a lot of Sabrina Carpenter and Shaboozey. But also a lot of past hits like Backstreet Boys. I’m not sure what their BBC policies are on what music to play, but apparently they don’t shirk from old one-hit wonders.
The metro is pretty nice. It only took one or two rides to figure out how the system works, and it’s much farther reaching than the one in DC. It seems like you can get anywhere. Each stop is only 2-3 minutes a part and no more than a ten-minute wait for a train. An underground system is a must in any metropolis, like New York.
And this is because English roads are… not good. You know how we Americans laughed at the Mini Cooper? That’s the necessary size of an English car. There are two big issues–one is that the lines are just too too thin. There is very little buffer space between lanes, usually no shoulder, and a lot of hills and valleys and curves. The other issue is that the roads are all lined with bushes and trees, obscuring your view. You can’t see over them or around them, creating so many blind corners. What we would call highways are thin two-way country roads that have curves no one can see around. It also doesn’t help that most of the notifications are not from signs but writing on the road, which wears away.
They also treat speed limits differently. We always go the max posted and then a little bit over. Their speed limits are the absolute maximum, but you have to go much lower. Like it may be posted 60, but you have to go 30, because if you don’t, you will die. There are so many blind turns and narrow roads that two cars cannot fit, so you have to pull over to let other people by. Luck has to be with you that someone is not driving the opposite direction. Drunk driving is not an option, because if you were to drive heedlessly you are guaranteed to end your vacation in a fiery wreck.
My wife did all the driving (as she gets carsick if anyone else drives) and she was teaching our kids some new words every day as we were trying to get from one place to another. But especially when parking. Not a single time she didn’t cuss up a storm at parking because the spaces are much thinner and we were in a Volvo SUV. Each time she had to park she kept acting surprised that the spaces were so narrow, like they hadn’t been that way the entire trip.
TL;DR cars bad, mass transportation/walking good.
Everyone says that you don’t go to Britain to try the food. And they’re mostly right. Personally, I thought it was fine. Except they serve mushy peas with every fish and chips. First, horrible name, needs PR. Second, it’s just baby food. However, the advantage of bad food is that you don’t eat much. Therefore, everyone in London looks thin and pretty. Lean and muscular from all the soccer they play. They don’t have obesity in England. People don’t walk on canes or use electric scooters in the grocery store purely because they can no longer support their own weight. How does this happen?
It’s not that they eat more fruits and vegetables (they don’t have any–all the farmland seems to be used for cows and sheep). They only seem to have berries, potatoes, and leeks. We had to get our vegetables from Subway (the restaurant, not the metro).
It’s that A) their portions are smaller B) they walk more (a necessity in a compact city and not really an option in a wide country like America) C) their food doesn’t have as much sugar in it. Go to McDonald’s. They have three options for soda–Coke, Sprite Zero, and Fanta (without food coloring). That’s it. No Mountain Dew, no Dr. Pepper, no Red Bull, no grape soda, no 7up, no other choices. It’s beautiful. I wish we could adopt such a custom in America. It made me rethink what I eat here. No more heaps of Taco Bell or double entrées from LeeAnn Chin for me.
The only thing I don’t get is baked beans. It was at breakfast at every hotel we went to. I can’t think of anything that’s less of a breakfast food. Bring that to a barbecue, not my Trix cereal. I will take some of those sautéed mushrooms though.
