London, UK

I just landed in Dublin a couple of hours ago. I’ve already checked into my hostel, and decided to go for a walk. I haven’t really discussed my stay in London though, so I’ll go ahead and do that now, and I’ll catch you up on Ireland later. Before I say anything else, though, I wanted to show you this:

This is the view I have from where I’m sitting while I’m typing this at the moment. With the help of a handful of (oddly, Canadian) tourists, I came upon this lovely park (St. Stephen’s Green), and am enjoying the cool spring air while I type on my netbook. (To be honest, I’m pretty exhausted, and this is entertaining enough to keep me up but relaxing enough that I can actually do it.)

So, yeah, London has turned out to be like New York city, in that you can say you’re from there but you actually live an hour or so away. My initial impressions were of the “Manhattan” of London, if you will, as I tubed (that’s what Brits call the metro) in for a day and then back out to Coventry. Living in Kingston upon Thames, however, has given me a real perspective on the size of the city.

My hosts were Julien and Gus. Here they are standing in front of the Big Ben not wearing any pants:
 

They were incredibly resourceful and fun. They spent a day sight-seeing with me. Together, we saw:

The London Eye (We actually, quite coincidentally, in fact, arrived on the Eye’s 10 year anniversary day!)

Buckingham Palace

Here’s a photo of me standing beside one of those famous guards who are forced to look forwards in those commercials. (I was actually too afraid to step too close because I didn’t know where “the personal bubble” began on an inanimate person.)
 

Oh, here’s one I’m most excited about – Me trying to re-enact the Abbey Road album cover:

I know the photo isn’t very good, but the battery died for good right after this shot, so there were no retakes.

For the sciency folk in the audience, Julien came with me to the Science museum, and, though we were only there for a short time, I got to see a whole bunch of awesome stuff – Faraday’s magnet and coil; Edison’s light bulb; Joule’s heat experiment apparatus; Roentgen’s x-ray tube. J. J. Thompson’s original cathode ray tube should have been there, but it was at another exhibit when I went. I also saw some old-school computers from the ‘60s and ‘70s, but I can’t remember their names of the top of my head.

Another odd quirk (Britishism, or, reverse-Americanism) that differentiates Canada from the UK is their coke bottles:

Why don’t they have those odd curves our bottles do?

Also, squirrels and pigeons seem to be much friendlier in London than in Montreal:


Actually, even right now a whole bunch of them (like seven?) are walking around me, cooing, completely unthreatened by my furious typing.

If I had to summarize what I feel I’ve learned from these first two legs of my trip, it’s that North America isn’t as big a part of the game as we feel it is – Canada is so US-obsessed all the time, we feel (or, at the very least, I know I do) that they dominate the world, but in fact we’re very much on the sidelines. They have gossip rags with celebrities I’ve never heard of, they really don’t care about our music scene, and everyone here seems to have been everywhere in Europe already. Think about how exotic a trip to Spain sounds. For a $1200, 7 hour flight, you wouldn’t be wrong in feeling it was uncommon, but people around here can fly there for a few hundred dollars. You can spend a weekend in Dublin or Prague on any given week, if you like. The world feels much smaller around here; different foods, music and cultures clash and it’s not that uncommon to meet someone from another country that we don’t hear from as much in Montreal.

People here also have no idea where Montreal is. The first thing I said on the first day was that they don’t care about hockey (go Habs! 4 out of 5, nice!) or the olympics, but the fact of the matter is that it seems we don’t really factor into their everyday life much at all. The US is merely a nuisance that controls the internet, and Canada is a mere afterthought, if given any thought at all.

At least, that’s how it feels for now. I’m going to snap this thing shut and go for a walk now. :)