first impressions

(I apologize for the tardiness of this first post. I've been making a scattered notes since my arrival, and only now am I consolidating them into readable entries. More to follow soon.)

Heathrow Airport supposedly took the title of 'world's busiest airport' from O'Hare within the last decade or so, and I think it must have achieved this by becoming even more byzantine and sprawled. It's surprisingly similar to O'Hare in other ways – it has the same faint sort of grimy, mechanical airport smell, the same uneven off-white wall paneling and fluorescent light – like what seemed sleek and contemporary in maybe 1978. I got off the plane and speed-walked for about twenty minutes through mostly empty and halfway renovated hallways, earnestly following the posted signs to the supposed baggage claim. In the first of what I'm sure will be many brief rhetorical asides on this blog, 'baggage claim' in the UK is instead 'baggage RE-claim', a minor distinction which nonetheless reassuringly suggests that here, you do in fact have some right to reunite with your own luggage. In the US, it often seems like the onus is on you, the rugged individual, to strike out and claim your bag in the unsettled wilderness that is airline customer service.

First stop turned out to be customs, where, having long-legged past most of my fellow travellers over the trek from the terminal, I beat the rush by ducking under most of the Disney-style roped 'queue' and sidled up to customs (Brits are big on queues, I have learned). When I addressed the customs agent, I was relieved to hear my own voice sounding as flat and American as when I left – I don't plan to acquire any sort of accent while I'm here. I have no doubt it would sound affected and that people whom I respect would mock it right out of me within an hour. After a ten-hour flight of overhearing chatty British couples and reading names like 'Westminster' and 'Glastonbury' in my Rick Steves' guide and trying to imagine how people whom I might ask for directions would actually pronounce them, I became worried that my actual voice had acquired the same English inflection as my mental one had. My other anxiety, about some sort of unforeseen bureaucratic slip-up which would put me right back on a plane, was quickly assuaged by the disinterest of the customs agent. After assuring him that yes, I was a student, and that, no, I had no intention of seeking employment during my stay, my passport was stamped.

A train and cab ride later I arrived at my residence hall in the part of London known as Chelsea (ahem: The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea), where I was to spend two days before Queen Mary opened. I told the cab driver to keep all ten on a nine-pound fare, and the degree of his gratitude seemed to confirm what I'd read in the guidebook about nobody tipping in the UK. I'm glad I didn't have to stay at the study abroad program's residence hall, a tall but unremarkable building on King's Road; the two-person rooms were smaller than my single at Queen Mary, and the surrounding area is a bit much. By that I mean expensive and sort of touristy, with everybody walking around in buttoned-up pea coats, shopping bags in hand. King's Road was the manifestation of everything I'd expected wealthy London to look like – a busy, narrow street with three-story brick buildings in all different shades and with myriad old-world architectural flourishes, fashionable multi-ethnic people, cars driving on the wrong side, lots of trendy little boutiques, quaint chimneys galore.  The streets are laid out in a sort of drunken spiderweb rather than a grid, with the major roads leading more or less towards the financial district, known as the "City of London".  The side streets are more residential, lined with what look like 19^th or early 20^th century row houses, all with high, prim fences, really narrow sidewalks in front, and about two or three high-end sportscars per block. The traffic thing is more disorienting than you'd expect, not because it's so hard to remember to look right instead of left, but because you have no intuitive understanding of the traffic patterns which normally would allow you to anticipate where a turning car might come from. I'm embarrassed by how helpful I've found the “look right” and “look left” signs painted on the pavement at crosswalks. But I've been here a week, and I still haven't gotten hit.