It’s not that nothing is different here. In fact, everything is different. Every detail is similar but slightly altered – the cars are mostly the same make but much smaller (Fred noted early on the lack of pickup trucks). The streets are similar but the signs are different. Traffic drives on the left side of the road. The roads are tinier, and come and go from every which way. There is one intersection nearby where we have to cross seven times just to get to the other side. And don’t even get me started about navigating roundabouts as a pedestrian.
In the first few days we were here, all the newness culminated into a general feeling of unease, a slight discomfort with my surroundings. Even though I’ve lived in the UK before, and I know what to expect, the changeover still has to happen. It will happen when we go back too. I think that’s what people who are uncomfortable with travelling to – and especially living in – foreign countries can’t deal with. Life is more or less the same everywhere – we all eat, have conversations, get from one place to the next - but changing over from one culture to the next is…hard. It’s challenging, anyway. It’s like walking out of your house one day and seeing everything familiar flipped into a mirror image.
The way that I deal it is, every time I’m out, I think to myself “today that is new. Tomorrow it will no longer be new. Every day more and more things will not be new, and then I will be adjusted.” And it happens much quicker than one ever expects it might.
We’ve now visited both of our campuses and done a fair bit of exploring around London. It’s amazing how comfortable it all feels. I think it’s because we know that we’re not just living here: this is our home. Even if it is for just a year.
One of the more exciting things that has happened came about entirely by happy accident. Fred and I had hiked it downtown to see about opening a bank account, we sat down in a pub to have a pint and a tea and two gentlemen asked if they could share our table for a bit. We got acquainted, and soon found out that they were both East Londoners – who fit to the “T” the stereotype that North Americans would have of them based on Mary Poppins. One of them even sang the “Chim-chiminee” song to me so I could place the Cockney accent. They were out to celebrate a new job one of them had just gotten that day. They were doing a bit of a pub crawl, and asked if we wanted to join in. Of course we said yes – and we couldn’t have possibly found better tour guides!
They introduced us to London Pride, a darkish beer which I found to be extremely delicious, some hearty steak and ale pie, and Ye Ole Cheshire Cheese, a beautiful, dark, low-ceilinged pub just off of Fleet Street that oozed mystery and history, where Dickens is said to have penned a good portion of his famed novels - it's even alluded to in A Tale of Two Cities. We also visited a statue of Samuel Johnson’s cat, which was in a courtyard outside of where they used to live.
Among other things, Johnson wrote the first English dictionary, and is well known in London for having said of the city “"When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."
After a whirlwind of a first week in this beautiful, historic and bustling town, I couldn’t agree more!
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