I was leaving home in the morning, heading for the bus stop to go in to the university. As I approached the end of our street, and the turn onto the more major cross-street, I was surprised to see a Victorian hearse pass.

Two beautiful grey horses in fancy tack and bridle (complete with the feather head dress) drawing an elaborate, gilded and ornamented, glass sided wagon containing what appeared to be a coffin. The whole affair was driven by two men in formal dress — coat and long tails, top hat, the whole bit. It was a vision out of a Dickens novel, for sure.

This surprising conveyance was followed by just two dark, limousine-style cars. (And then a red London city bus.)

I assume that it was really a funeral arrangement of some sort.  I was just surprised to see it trotting down a city street in what is not precisely an upper-class or elaborate area.  I think of horse and carriage as being something that people hire for weddings and other romantic occasions, not for funerals.  And there wasn’t a long line of mourners following.  (Though the tradition of a huge number of cars following a slow hearse and paralyzing traffic for miles around may be more of a US thing.  I don’t know.)  It just felt…  Out of place, I guess, in the middle of a neighborhood of early 20th century row houses filled with immagrents and making its way through dense traffic.

George's fish bar, London UK

Unfortunately, the awning doesn’t come out in this nighttime photo, but the full shop signage says:

George’s Fish Bar / Fried Chicken / Barbecued Spare Ribs Our Specialty / We Fry Fresh Fish / Calamari

?!?!

When we first saw this place, we couldn’t stop laughing.  I’m surprised that they don’t advertise hamburgers, pizza, Chinese noodles, and chilled monkey brains while they’re at it.

This is clearly a grease-pit, but we were so amused by the sign that we had to try it at some point.  Eventually, we did and discovered that it’s essentially just “George’s Fish Bar”.  The spare ribs and chicken were dreadful.  Oh well — it’s about what we expected.  Actually, the surprise was that the fish was not too bad.  (Though clearly not what we get at the most excellent local pub!)

But this is really a small reflection of the kind of culture we find in our neighborhood.  We’re living in a neighborhood that’s struggling between ghetto and gentrification, with a healthy sample of immigrants across the spectrum.  Near us, the predominant immigrant groups seem to be Turkish, Greek, and Russian (or the myriad of Russian-speaking former USSR states and satellites that appear Russian to my uncultured eyes, anyway).  We hear a medley of languages on the bus and English is often in the minority.

The local shops and restaurants reflect that melange.  Like “George’s”, many of the store fronts have clearly changed hands many, many times over the years, housing a succession of ethnic groups and their tastes of home.  There’s a Chinese restaurant on the main drag whose plate glass windows still proudly announce fish and chips.  (It’s now defunct; I wonder who the next generation to inherit it will be.)  The local groceries vend everything from kimchee to couscous to salsa, including some vegetables I have never even heard of before.  Within a few minute’s walk of us there are Greek, Turkish, German, and French bakeries and patisseries.  Butcher shops proudly proclaim that they carry halal meat.  There’s a cafe down the street from us that advertises Italian cuisine on its awning, but as far as we can tell it serves essentially British mainstream food.  It’s run by a Turkish woman who spent most of her career as a fashion designer in Egypt.

It’s a fascinating contrast to Madrid, which appeared (at least to our outsider eyes and linguistically impoverished ears) to be much more culturally homogeneous.  In Madrid, you heard essentially one language and most of the shops and overt culture were recognizably Spanish.  (Aside, I suppose, for the massive flux of dubbed Hollywood films.  On which, hopefully, another post another time.)  Granted, there appeared to be a significant number of immigrants from other Spanish-speaking nations, but there did not appear to be such a variety of different origins or ethnicities as we see here in London.  Beyond our neighborhood here in London, we see a high density of Indians, East Asians, Africans, and others.  We run into Nigerians on the subway and hear French on the buses.  The researchers I work with at UCL come from across Europe and beyond.

All of this makes London an exciting, but also a bit dizzying place to spend a few months.  The US is proud of its history as a great cultural melting pot, welcoming immigrants from across the globe.  (Though we’re currently struggling to resolve our own feelings about the current generation of Mexican and Latin American immigrants.)  But there are very few places in the US that approach this density of diversity, I think.  Different regions of the US have different ethnic mixes — Latin American and Native American in the Southwest, East Asians on the West Coast, a mish-mash of Europeans on the East Coast — but by and large, each city will have only a few highly represented cultural groups.  Perhaps New York or Washington DC approach this level of diversity — I haven’t spent enough time in either of them to get a real feel for it, the way I’m just beginning to here.

I suppose this is to be expected of one of the Great Cities of the world.  London is, after all, the capital of what remains one of the most powerful nations on Earth.  It was a capital city roughly 1600 years before Washington DC was a gleam in Madison’s eye.  I suppose it’s not a great surprise that it attracts such a wide variety of people from so many backgrounds and walks of life.  Sometime it leads to serious friction, of course.  Any time cultures (and economies) collide, there are bound to be.

It’s fascinating and fun and overwhelming.  In the short time we’re here, I’m sure we’ll only have the chance to just sample some bits of it all.  But I’m glad to experience what we can of it.

Oh, and the groceries have truly awesome olive oil…

In fact, it’s been snowing all day today (2 Feb — Candelmas!), and apparently most of last night.

I know that for those of you who live in chillier and snowier climes, this would be no big deal.  And I enjoy the snow for the snow’s sake myself.  The problem is that, although London is essentially as far north as Calgary, it has a much more moderate clime.  (The reasons for this are somewhat debated, but the consensus puts it on the Gulf Stream.)  Thus, like many cities far further south, London enjoys fairly warm winters and rarely gets this much snow.  The BBC reports that this is the worst snow storm to hit this end of the UK for 18 years.  And, like warmer clime cities, London doesn’t have the snow-removal infrastructure to handle it all.

Here are some pix of our yard, house, and street in the snow.  It’s lovely, when you don’t have to go anywhere and have a nice warm house to crouch down inside…

The front of our house in the snow. Note the depth of snow on the front wall.

Back yard of our house in the snow. I love the snow on the branches.

The primary school behind our house. Needless to say, school's out today.

View down our street in the snow. Note that at noon, the snow has not yet been plowed.

What does this mean for us?  Snow day!  The city is essentially paralyzed, with even Heathrow experiencing partial closures.  The city busses are out, which means that it would be excruciating for us to go into the city if we wanted to.  And you know the weather’s bad when it shuts down the subway:

Snow paralyzes the London Tube lines

Fortunately, the Turkish grocery on the corner is open today, so we were able to pick up some staples.  The owner seemed happy to have business today…

The euro is a very new currency, and it was clearly designed by currency snobs.  Coins come in 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, and 50 cents, plus €1 and €2.  Bills follow the same 1-2-5 strategy: €5, €10, €20, €50.  1, 2, and 5-cent coins are copper-colored and increase in size proportionally.  The 1-cent euro coin is so tiny and cute that we have to keep some as souvenirs.  10, 20, and 50 cents are gold.  1 euro is a small circle of silver ringed by a larger circle of gold.  2 euros is a small circle of gold ringed by a larger circle of silver, plus it’s larger.  The edges are also textured such that a blind person can easily distinguish coins by size and texture.  The paper bills are also scaled in size proportionally to value, which starts to get annoying once you hit €50 notes.

Now you hit the British pound, a currency which evolved more than was designed.  Coins also come in 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, and 50 pence, £1 and £2.  The 1p coin looks about like our penny.  The 2p coin is also copper-colored and ENORMOUS (ie about the size of a quarter).  5p is silver-colored and about the size of a dime.  20p is silver, smaller than a quarter, and has seven sides.  £1 is also smaller than a quarter, gold-colored, and REALLY thick.  £2 looks sort of like the €2 coin.  (Oh, and the £20 note is larger than the €50 note and peeks a good half-inch over the top of my wallet.)

The point to all of this is that without a lot of drilling to recognize coins on sight, you’re going to fumble around for minutes with your change, squinting at the little numbers and annoying cashiers, when you try to pay for things.  Getting into the swing of the money was so easy in Spain and so difficult in the UK that you can see that currency design really does matter.

Accepting that I can’t possibly be objective, I’d say that the US currency is somewhere between pounds and euros in the bizarro unpredictability factor.  A lot of that is just that we don’t do so many coins.  We don’t really do silver dollars or 50-cent pieces anymore.  Pennies are copper, nickels are way bigger and thicker than the tiny dimes, and quarters are a nice respectable size for their value.  And once you get to paper money, it’s just a matter of looking at the numbers for anyone.  We don’t do the brightly colored, variable-size paper bills that seem to be all the rage over here, but I admit that I don’t think it makes that much difference for usability except perhaps for the blind.

I write this from Heathrow’s Terminal 2 (which strives to be as overwhelmingly capitalist as Terminal 5, but is older and smaller and fails to quite carry off the “intimidatingly posh” look).  Thankfully, after a much-needed sleep at our soon-to-be rental house in London, and a delightful breakfast with our lovely hosts-to-be-landlords, I am vastly clearer headed than I was when I first hit Vancouver.

I have been drawn to the Pacific Northwest ever since I first visited there more than a decade ago now.  The lush evergreen forests, the mild climate and silver sunlight, the water and the mountains — they all call to some part of me.  Metaphorically, people seem drawn to the elements — fire for the brilliant and sere desert, the rich earth of farmlands, the water of the seas and rivers, or the air of the mountainscapes and the great plains.  I feel the water and the air in my soul — the call of the gulls, for which Legolas laments, sings also to me.  The Northwest, an intimate marriage of the sky and the sea, feels right at some deep level.

I also love the art of the Pacific Northwest First Nations (or Indians, if I’m being less PC).  Although I appreciate the aesthetic of the Navajos’ geometrical patterns and the curves of the hand-thrown Puebloan pottery, I really love more the abstraction and the themes of the Northwest.  They love the skies and the oceans and the creatures that inhabit them.  Raven’s wings grace their art with curves above Whale’s elegant flukes, with a spectrum of life intertwined between.

All of these things call to me when I visit Vancouver, teeming metropolis that it is.  Even as I wander the streets of this vast, gleaming, and almost painfully-hip modern city, the mountains hang above me and the scent of the ocean is never far.  Art appears randomly on street corners and honors the otherwise inhuman lobbies of corporate skyscrapers.  Evergreen trees peek between buildings and fill the fantastically beautiful parks that grace this green city of water and light.

Like New York and Chicago before it (and Albuquerque and LA and San Franscisco now), Vancouver is another modern melting-pot of cultures — in this case, the predominant Canadian Euro-caucasian ancestry culture sluicing into the influx of pan-Asian cultures in a chaotic, non-laminar mixture.  In this socio-cultural reactor of a city, you are bombarded with the sensations of half the world.  A myriad of sushi joints are interspersed among French and Italian cuisine, European chocolatiers, and Canadian steak and smoked fish; Indian art galleries nestle between high-end jewelers; and a dizzying array of multinationals, vending everything from chic evening wear to hip Gore-Tex laden outdoors adventure gear to grungy tourist kitsch shipped by the cargo-container from cheap manufacturers across half of Asia, bombard you from all sides.  It’s an electric-feeling place, where the signs are as often in Kanji or Korean as in English or French, and you can hear a dozen languages on the bus.

For all of it, though, and as much as I love the location and the feel, I realize that it’s missing some things that I have come to love of Madrid.  Madrid, for all its lovely-but-homogeneous Spanish culture, has a sense of time and identity that Vancouver can’t match.  Though it’s hardly the oldest city in Spain (rising to prominence only in, I believe, the sixteenth century after Ferdinand and Isabella moved the capital there), it’s still far older than most cities in North America, and it’s clearly more “adult”, in some sense, than the unruly teenager of Vancouver, striving to decide its own identity, on the cusp between childhood and adulthood and struggling with growing pains and puberty.

Madrid gives an almost paradoxical sense of calm and, for all its melange of tiendas and restutrantes, a sense of unity that is lacking from the somewhat frantic-seeming pace of a modern megalopolis like Vancouver.  Even the presence of tiendas reveals the difference — Madrid is a city of neighborhoods, where every barrio has its own panadería, frutaría, peluquería, locutorio, papelería, pastelería, pollería, carnecería, and charcutaría.  (Or three or four charcutarías, each selling “the very best” jamón iberico pata negra.) Even in our very short time there, we’ve gotten to know many of the shop vendors by sight, and they smile when we enter and cheerfully put up with our broken español.  There are the cervezarías, where, like “Cheers”, the same crowds gather every evening for tapas and cañas of the local cerveza.  Each area has its own iglesias and plazas, its own escuelas and bancos and comisaría de policía , its own public sites and history and art.  For all that Madrid is larger than all but about four cities in the US, it feels like a much smaller city, because so much life revolves around the neighborhoods.  Even in Madrid’s business centers, you have only to turn a corner to find a cervezaría or bocadilla shop tucked between the ministries, consulates, or banks.

Vancouver doesn’t have that feel — at least given my (admittedly drastically limited) experience there.  True, I have spent my time mostly in the heart of the business and financial district of the city — Vancouver’s equivalent of Manhattan, I suppose — but even so, it doesn’t feel quite as personal as Madrid.  There are a barrage of restaurants and clothing shops lining Robson St (Vancouver’s “Golden Mile”, I think), but they all feel a bit touristy.  There are none of the shops that make the place livable for residents — the individual greengrocers and butcher shops, the corner store where you get shampoo, or the low-key corner pub where they always know your name.  There are no bread shops, streaming with locals in the morning buying their baguettes or tostas de casa for the day. Instead, you’re surrounded by glitter and fine food and towering skyscrapers, monuments to modern international commerce.

It’s likely, of course, that I’m simply exploring the wrong parts of Vancouver.  It is, after all, a vast city, of which I have sampled only a tiny fraction.  So it’s quite possible — probable, even — that there are neighborhood districts, somewhere, with that same sense of hominess and community.  But somehow I suspect that they will be the exceptions rather than the rule for this hip modern metropolis.  Vancouver feels like a “car city” — having come into its own in the age of modern transport that ties together, and yet ironically isolates, our modern culture, it feels like it never had a chance to develop the localized society of the walking-speed neighborhood, where your horizon is limited to where your Tevas can take you in a lazy afternoon and the shopkeepers know you because you buy eggs there on the way back from the metro every other day.

Still, that part of my soul that longs for the sea and the sky and the evergreen forests does resonate with Vancouver and the Pacific Northwest in general.  Even if, as I think likely now, I never live there myself, I will always be called back to camp in the mountains and sail the rivers and oceans and explore the byways of the great cities.  I was glad to be there for a few days, and I’m glad to be heading back now.

But we’ve discovered that you just have to accept a certain amount of “economic inefficiency” when traveling.  Indeed, sometimes it’s not only necessary, but welcome.

For example, even when public transit is available, sometimes it’s way better to get a taxi.  When we went to Germany a month ago for Spiel, for example, we arrived at the Essen bus station at like 9:30 PM after something like 14 hours of travel.  (Yeah, that’s longer than you should expect.  We couldn’t get airline tix to an airport near Essen, so we flew into Frankfurt and then had to take bus+train combo for about 4 hours.) Anyway, we were aware that Essen has great public transit, but at that point, we were just way too shot to try to figure it out.  Fortunately, a very nice taxi driver and €15 got us to our hotel.  We considered it money well spent at that point.  On the way back, we had the system much more figured out, and were able to get back to the Essen central train station (Hauptbahnhof) for about €3 total.

A much bigger example hit us just this past weekend, though, on our trip to Barcelona.

Like good, economically efficient and adventurous travelers, we had been staying in a lot of hostels in Spain, and so we had booked a hostel in Barcelona as well.  To date, they had all been great experiences.  We had been lucky enough to get private rooms in most cases, and often the accommodation itself was neat.  (We can highly recommend the HI youth hostel in Córdoba, for example.)  Typically, we saw travelers of all ages and backgrounds, from teenagers out on their own to families with small children to people our parents’ age.

Not so in Barcelona.

The place itself was physically fine.  A bit grungy/shabby, but in that “well-used” way, not the “unclean” way.  We ended up in a ten-bunkbed dorm room, which, in principle, we’re okay with.  We even had an interesting conversation with a French-Canadian couple who were in the room.  The place even had WiFi.  (For free, no less!  Much better than I can say for some uber-pricey posh hotels I’ve stayed in for work travel.)

The disaster started at about midnight, when we were trying to catch some sleep.  See, the problem with this hostel is that it’s smack in the middle of the tourist district of Barcelona.  And Barcelona itself is one of the great youth tourist destinations and party cities of Europe.  We thought that surely, in mid-November, we’d be well out of tourist season and it would be okay.  Nope.

We were the oldest people in the hostel — as far as I could tell, everybody else was between 16 and 25 or so.  And most of them were clearly there to party.  People were in and out of our dorm room for hours in the middle of the night (with luggage), there were loud drunken conversations in the hallway at 5:00 AM, the whole bit.  We cushy middle-class working types couldn’t sleep through it.  Worst night of sleep in a long time.

So the next morning, we wandered down the street until we found a nice-looking hotel, popped in and asked after a room.  Yes, they had a free room and it only cost about three times what the hostel did.  That’s actually about what we expected, so we jumped on it.  The hostel, of course, would not refund any of our money, so we were out that, but at least it was cheap to begin with.

But the new hotel was lovely, private, was still convenient to the tourist centers and public transit, had free WiFi, had a great breakfast, and, most of all, was quiet.

We slept fantastically that night.

Travel inefficiency, perhaps, but we decided that it was money well spent indeed.

We don’t have an oven, but we do have a combination microwave/toaster oven that we use a lot on its toaster setting.  It took a lot of experimentation to figure out which settings apply to the toaster oven and which to the microwave.

Microwave/toaster oven settings

At first, we figured the little wavy lines inside the square meant microwave, since they looked like waves inside the box.  But, no.  Actually the steaming pot means microwave (and the water drop and snowflake mean defrost, but that wasn’t so hard to figure out).  So, we figured the wavy line inside the box meant toaster oven, and we had several heat settings.  Wrong again.  The pot ALWAYS means microwave.  The toaster oven is either on or off, and the additional settings are combinations of microwave and toaster oven.

But the really impressive one is the washing machine.

Magical incantation

(Note that you can click the image to get a larger view if you really want one.)

There are 12 wash settings: A, B, C, D, F, G, H, J, K, M, N, X.  We can get as far as assuming that the degrees Celcius indicate cold, medium, and hot.  The faucet with the water is probably something about the rinse cycle.  The feather seems likely to be delicates.

We’ve totally failed at trying to puzzle out the rest, and my ever hopeful Google searches have turned up nothing on international wash cycle symbols.  So we essentially have chosen a wash setting at random.  We’re washing everything on X.  It’s getting things clean.  Fortunately, we haven’t had to wash anything delicate.

Our apartment building: Raimundo Lulio 22

None of the apartments you can see from here are ours, though, because our apartment faces the courtyard.  Almost all Spanish apartment buildings have a street side and a courtyard side, and apartments open on to one or the other.  The courtyard is a lot better for us, since it’s quieter.  There is also a lot more shade.

The books warned that Madrid is brutally hot in August.  We arrived on September 4, braced for a few uncomfortable weeks in our apartment with no air conditioning, but the nights have been lovely, breezy, and cool.  The Spanish really know how to tweak their architecture for maximum comfort.

The view down our street, Raimundo Lulio

Most of the buildings in this area appear to have shops below and apartments above.

The view north, along Sante Engracia, from approximately Raimundo Lulio

The major road by our apartment is Sante Engracia, which is filled with shops and restaurants.  There are two (small) grocery stores, a pastry shop, two butcher shops, and a fruit shop within a one-block radius.

The view south, along Sante Engracia

On the other side of Sante Engracia is a plaza called Plaza Chamberi (this is the Chamberi district).  There’s an other larger one called Plaza Olavide about three blocks in the other direction on Raimundo Lulio.  There are plazas everywhere.  They fill up with people visiting and children playing by 7pm.

Plaza Chamberi