March 14th, 2009

Pictures I Never Took

Steph and I are back from our trip safe and sound. The trip itself — hanging out with Kate, walking and riding the tube and train and buses all over London, visiting Bath, drinking the superior coffee and beer — was fun and eye-opening and everything else a trip abroad should be. I’m glad I can still admit this to myself, because right now I’m feeling pretty down. It seems I left my camera case, along with my Canon Rebel and three memory cards containing about 1250 photos from our vacation, in the airport in Philadelphia.

The blame rests solely on my own absent-mindedness. We had a four-hour layover in Philly on Thursday afternoon, before our flight home to Raleigh, and I cleaned out and moved things around in the backpack that I had hastily stuffed full of everything I wanted to carry with me at Kate’s house, at about 7 am London time. In the airport, I distinctly remember taking the camera case out and laying it on one of the seats surrounding us at our gate. Steph remembers me doing this, as well. I didn’t let the pack out of my sight or even open it again until we got home last night, and the camera was nowhere to be found. It seems, in our jetlagged state, we both overlooked it and left it sitting next to us as we got up to board our plane to RDU.

I’ve made calls to the airline and the airport, but it wasn’t turned in to their lost and found.

Losing this caliber of camera equipment obviously sucks, but what I’m really torn up about is the photos. I’ll scrimp and save and get another camera (which will be newer and better than my aging Rebel anyway) and a case and memory cards. But no amount of money can recreate the experiences we had and my attempts to document them.

I do have over 500 photos from our first trip to London, also to see Kate, in 2007. These images include many of the same places we went this time around. I’m thankful for this, but I’m also cognizant of the effort I made to do things differently on this occasion, capturing new lighting and angles. There were many times when I made myself, against my better judgment, be an ugly American and pull out the large SLR and accost Kate’s polite British friends in her house and at the pubs, because I thought we’d all appreciate the images I was making further down the road. Now that I’ll never see how these efforts all turned out, it feels like it was all for nothing.

I am so unusually sad about the loss of these objects that, I do realize, are luxuries in our day-to-day lives, that I must assume I’m supposed to be learning something here (other than the obvious “keep up with your shit” moral to the story). Perhaps it’s the importance of “just living in the moment?”

The only thing saving me from utter despair is that I have maybe 50 decent snapshots and a few videos from a secondary, point-and-shoot camera I took with me. These aren’t like what I was trying to capture with the Rebel though. Steph and I can only afford to take vacations of this scope every few years, and I was counting on the Rebel to give me good representations of at least most of the things we did.

“If we don’t have photos of it, it didn’t happen.” My immediate family recites this line a lot, usually as no less than three of us are shooting some event from the exact same angle at the exact same time. It’s important to each us to capture big moments with at least a few purposeful releases of the shutter (real or virtual).

“If we don’t have photos of it, it didn’t happen.” Something about this idea has always made me feel justified in hoisting up a camera when most others are sitting quietly off to the side, or even tossing me dirty looks because I’m being an annoying tourist, or getting in someone’s way. Right now, this saying is not helping me feel any better.

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February 16th, 2009

Come Lon-done

Kate’s time in the UK is growing short. Hard to believe, as it seems like I was just writing about her departure. The lease on her flat is almost up, and she has a flight home booked on April 15th. Once she arrives, she’s here indefinitely.

It will be nice having her around again, though it was also nice having a free travel guide and a free place to stay over there. Steph and I decided we should take advantage of “knowing somebody” in London one more time. We got our tickets over the weekend. We’re heading across the pond for a week, starting on March 6th.

Now that Barack Obama is president, I understand — based on my regular consumption of CNN and NPR — that American citizens are greeted abroad with confetti and brass bands playing the “Star-Spangled Banner” and people putting leis around their necks.

I hope they don’t go too overboard with the festivities for Steph and I. Though, I must admit, receiving this grandiose hero’s welcome is basically the only reason I’m going.

Man, it’s gonna be sweet.

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August 24th, 2007

The Little Differences

How silly of me! I almost let the opportunity pass me by. Having just visited a country other than the US, I owe you an entry about all the things that are different there than they are here.

So…(ahem) the biggest incongruities I noticed between the US and Britain were with our shared English language. Of course I was aware before I went over that they use alternate words for certain places/objects/actions, but what I didn’t realize was how startling actually hearing people use them in conversation, without snickering, would be. Let’s look at some examples:

While we would say we are on “vacation,” they informed us we were on “holiday.”

What we call an “elevator” they call a “lift.”

And “soccer” to us, is “thing we should spend every bit of our time watching/thinking about/reading about/writing about/talking about/dreaming about” to them.

The unit of currency is, of course, the pound, so when a price tag reads “5.00” it means “five pounds.” Cashiers, however, do not say “That will be five pounds.” They say “Five quid, please,” which is like us saying “Five bucks, please,” if “bucks” wasn’t quite so slang and even your grandma said things like “This cost me five bucks!” Though, that “5.00” tag actually means “almost ten bucks” as the American dollar is wimpy Monopoly play money in the eyes on the pound. Also, if something is “5.50” it’s not “Five fifty,” it’s “Five pounds fifty.”

And here’s another phrasing difference: “5:30.” In American, if your watch reads this, you would say “It’s five-thirty.” Or maybe “It’s half-past five,” whereas a Brit says “It’s half-five.” Not terribly different, in theory, but when you hear it come out of their mouth, it takes you a minute to realize they are referring to a time of day.

Don’t walk up to an English person and say “Do you like my pants?” To them, the word “pants” means “underwear.” (This is not the only reason you should not be grilling the English about your pants, but it’s a good start.) What we call “pants,” they call “trousers.”

They pronounce the letter “H” like this: “Huh-aech.” And for the letter “Z” they say “Zed.” These things sound kind of pretentious, and are a bit irritating.

“Mate” is, of course, their “man/bud/bro/hoss.” Also “‘mate’” (the quotes signifying the use of this term of endearment, in reference to you, by someone who does not actually know you, resulting in you feeling some uncertainty about the person speaking to you) is their “‘man’/‘bud’/‘bro’/‘hoss’.” ““Mate”” (these quotes signifying the use of this term of endearment, in reference to you, by someone who does not actually know you, and is currently in the process of doing something incredibly un-“mate”-like to you, like cutting in front of you at the bar, resulting in you feeling some loathing for the person speaking to you) is their ““man”/“bud”/“bro”/“hoss”.”

“Cheers” is to London what “Aloha” is to Hawaii. It can mean “Hello,” “Goodbye,” “Sorry,” “Thanks,” etc. When in doubt, just say “Cheers.” Or, if you mean it sarcastically, “‘Cheers’.”

“Cool” there means only “slightly lower than normal temperature.” Their multipurpose word for “neat/interesting” is “brilliant” or “brill.”

There, “pissed” means “drunk” and “mad” means “crazy.” Here, of course, being “mad” means you’re pissed (the “mad,” er “angry” kind of “pissed”).

Signage stuff:

You will never see an “Exit” sign showing you the way out of a building in London. The signs showing the way out say, even more simply, “Way Out.”

You will never see a “Bathroom” or “Restroom” sign in London. After all, this is not the room where you go to bathe, or to rest…unless you are beyond filthy…or you have narcolepsy…. The signs showing you the place where the toilets are located say “Toilets,” plain as that. Score another one for our more practical, less-stuck-up counterparts. Then again, sometimes the signs say “Water Closet” (or “WC”) instead, which makes less sense than all of the other terms put together…. So, on second thought, we’ll call this a draw.

While the appropriate wording for something you would exchange money for the temporary use of is “For Rent” here, there it would get a “To Let” sign if it were an apartment or office and a “For Hire” sign if it were a car.

Things don’t go “On Sale” there. They go “On Offer.”

Before every crosswalk, on the ground in front of you, they have printed “Look left” or “Look right” on the ground, depending on which side the left-driving traffic could be coming from. It was a nice touch, and without those little reminders I probably would have looked the wrong way every single time I crossed and eventually gotten creamed by a bus. (Buses there have two stories, by the way.)

On to food terminology:

You don’t get “take out” from a restaurant, you get “take away.”

“Fries” to us are “chips” to them. “Chips” to us are “crisps” to them.

As you probably know, London has plenty of “pubs.” We have places that call themselves “pubs” here too, and they are pretty close to what they have there — quiet, shabby places to talk and drink, that usually serve food. We also have “bars” here that are like this. Then we have “bars” that are more like clubs, loud and crowded and full of scary people looking to hook up with other scary people. This is what all the places that call themselves “bars” over there are like. Interesting side note: for as famous as the UK is for drinks and drinking, most of these sort of establishments shut down at 11:00 — much earlier than they do here. And that’s not just last call. That’s finish your beer and get out. Now. To keep the magic going you have to know the location of select places that have “late licenses” and will still be open, serving drinks. Most of these are “bars.”

Probably the biggest point of adjustment for the whole trip, was the overall beverage situation….

Being Europe, the water does not flow like, um, water. Forget that free, bottomless glass of “huh-aech”2O with your meal. You can buy a bottle for £1.50 if you want. When that’s gone, it’s gone. I tried to combat this by filling up the Nalgene I was carrying from the tap in our room every morning, but I was thwarted by the fact that London water tastes like it has bits of pulverized fish floating in it. I know, I know, it’s an old, dirty city. I don’t know what I expected. I do know that I am not picky about water — to the point where it annoys me when people express grief over minute changes in “flavor” from one place to another — but this stuff, I could not choke down without feeling like I was going to throw up.

If you’d like a Coke with your dinner, £1.50 will get you a can and a glass to pour it in. All beverages are served at room temperature. Ice is extremely hard to come by. To my knowledge, ice is a distinctly American institution. All of Europe has something against it. Maybe because it melts and waters down your drink or something. The one liquid that is absolutely, positively always frosty-cold is the beer, which leads one to conclude that at least the English have their priorities straight. The one way to obtain cubes of ice over there, it turns out, is to order a hard cider in a bottle. They will go into their special reserve for this, and you will be presented with a pint glass filled to the top with glistening, crystalline cubes.

Finally, coffee is an interesting predicament, as you might expect in Tea Land. Your options, pretty much everywhere, are a cappuccino, a latte, an espresso, or an “americano” (a shot of espresso diluted with water). In the grocery stores, the only kind of coffee they have is instant. They aren’t big on cream either. Even at bonafide coffee shops, they provide lowfat milk rather than half-and-half. For some reason, you can almost always order an americano with the milk added to it for you. It’s called a “white coffee.” There is really no such thing as a standard cup of coffee, unless you wish to lose a piece of your soul and duck into a Starbucks. Which are everywhere over there. Proving that, fundamentally, our two great nations are not that different from one another.

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