Londonward

The following post is rather long, and ties up some of the entries I’ve posted in the last two months, the time I’ve lived in London. I wanted to wrap some things up and write them down for myself when I still remembered them.

Arrival at Heathrow was a breeze, as was the tube journey to central London. At that point I didn’t really mind the stifling heat and lack of air, I just wanted to be as inconspicuous a tourist as I could with all the bags. The fifty-odd minutes to Green Park were over in what seemed like minutes, as I tried to peer through the windows at the dark stations outside. Much of the journey was overground, but since it was so dark I couldn’t really make out anything. It did fit my expectations, though.

Expectations are strange. You have a set of wild, weird things you expect, usually not based on any kind of rationale but rather on anecdotes, media and even music. Mine were mostly stupid, but only in the details and weird Kai-things like sounds and music that made up the “soundtrack of London” in my head.

When I get tired, I get irritable, and tired I was at the point we changed trains at Green Park. The Victoria line was empty, which was a relief. I was wary of getting out at Brixton because of all the horror stories I had been told about the place. Besides, it was 9 p.m., hardly a time for a tourist with massive bags to hang around the place, right? After waiting for a long while for a lift that was never going to come, we took once again to the stairs, with me cursing and lugging a suitcase marked “extra heavy!” by the airline.

The ticket lounge in Brixton is a large hall, and I waited with my back against the wall next to the newsagents’ watching all the people while waiting for our flatmate to come and pick us up. Upstairs, on the street, heavy rain made looking for a cab difficult. (I had wanted to take one since carrying the bags was getting really, really annoying and I was scared of the whole Brixton thing.) So we walked, turned a corner and I instantly recognized a building sporting a headliner text. It was the Brixton Academy, a place I had wanted to visit - and I’d just run into it by half-mistake. It was events like this that repeated in the following days, coupled with “Oh, so that’s what it looks like in real life” and “That must be X” type reactions. Eventually we just took a bus, crammed inside and took it a few stops to the flat.

The smell in the apartment took some getting used to. I remember pacing from kitchen to bedroom to bathroom trying to make sense of it all. The Finnish language magnetic poetry on the fridge seemed like a message from another world. I took some words and wrote “A humble request: Buy more beer”. Settling to bed in the evening after drinking some Coke and eating some cookies bought from the Off-licence still didn’t feel like this was going to become home. Well, I’m writing this on the same bed, and two months on I’m still confused as to what to call this place.

The first few days went by in a haze of tube journeys, sandwiches, tourist attractions, bus rides and amazement. London was a lot of things, noisy, dirty and busy to start with, and ugly and intimidating pretty soon after. The intimidation faded quite quickly, though, and I don’t even think it’s that ugly anymore either. Negative feelings have faded away at some point, in the same way as thinking that the cars drove on the wrong side of the road.

It wasn’t long before I had visited the LSE campus. In those days it was quiet, standing dignified off the Aldwych. I just wanted to see the place I would be attending, but didn’t really have any business there. It was all just a lot of hanging around, really, taking in the sights and doing the “must-do’s” that didn’t require massive investments. Oh, and spending an entire day going to Ikea, buying basics and coming back stomachs full of Swedish meatballs served by Polish girls.

In some ways, it took me an embarrassingly long time to go to a pub, probably over a week after arriving. More embarrassingly, it wasn’t even a good pub, but a rather large, high-ceilinged hall of a pub in Brixton, the Goose. No matter, though, I’ve had plenty of experience after that. The Goose wasn’t all bad, don’t get me wrong. It just wasn’t very intimate - not that I’d want to get intimate with the clientele there anyway.

A little over a week after I had arrived, I met up with some people I only knew through the web. We went to a pub, then bowling, and then had food at Shish. Wanting to catch the tube home and not risk the night buses (which are great, I just didn’t feel too familiar with the geography yet) we left before the night was really over, but I hope to meet up with them again soon.

I’ve written about how I felt the first days at school. Prior to the start of term, I went to a welcoming party that wasn’t very welcoming. I stood with beer in hand, alone for most of the night. I really felt out of place among the people, most of whom were younger than I was, and who largely knew each other from living in halls of residence. A few good souls talked to me, and I’m still in contact with some of them. A rocky start, maybe, but the way has become easier.

I’ve grown used to the LSE now in many ways. It still doesn’t feel like I’m actually here for three years. For this academic year maybe, as an exchange student, but certainly not for two and a half more years from now. It almost doesn’t feel like the normal state of affairs, but rather some anomaly. This must be some recurring theme in my experience here, as the established state of affairs just doesn’t want to become the norm in my brain. I go to lectures every day, and I’ve talked about my “routine” of spending time in the library, even at the weekend, but in some weird way I’m nowhere near as used to this as I remember being in Helsinki.

It could be because the (re)adjustment to life in Finland came a few years before adjustment to going to university. Here they both came at once, and are both quite different from what I’m used to.

Significantly though, life is really no different here than anywhere else. Life goes on in its own way, and though there are some minor differences, by and large there’s no change. I’ve learned a lot of general life stuff, from not buying a SIM card for a phone from a shop that seems dodgy (I did, and the guy tried to swindle me out of £10) to carrying three full pint glasses at a time to the table.

Thanks for sticking around to the end of this post, as well as through my ramblings so far. I know I have a couple regular readers, and some on-and-off ones as well.

To finish with, here are some things I appreciate about living in London. I intend to compile some sort of “Things I like” list sometime soon and put it up separately.

• Polite people on buses and on the street. If you want to get past by someone, you say excuse me. If you bump into someone on the street, both parties apologize. It becomes second nature, and the Finnish way seems pretty brutish.
• Afternoon newspapers that are honestly different in content from the morning newspapers.
• The labeling on buses as well as traffic information at stops. The night bus network.
• People are generally very accessible. If you want to talk to someone in a bus or a pub, you can but you don’t have to. No one will think you’re weird though.
• Rounds in pubs
• Abbot Ale

Week 8 (of 10). Monday. First class at 10 am: International Relations. Handing back of the first essay. Mine was “A good essay with room for improvement” where I “make a good use of the literature” but I should have “related ideas to the notion of war as an institution of international society” more clearly.

The mark? 65. According to the student handbook, it is smack in the middle of the “very good (Upper Second)” category. I’m happy with that, but have a feeling the teacher was being easy on us on this one. If I can keep it up on the next one, I’ll be happy.

After a weekend consciously spent doing nothing serious, I’m about ready to get back into the routine. The thought of hitting the books every day is actually kind of comforting now - I got kind of bored over the weekend. At least I can start to make headway on the 3 essays I have due before the end of week 10. Only 4500 words to write!

Resonance FM, heard on 104.4 MHz. I stumbled across it while absenmindedly turning the dial on the radio on my way to school yesterday. I thought I had hit a pirate radio station broadcasting droning ambient music. The droning soon gave way to a distinctly English short comedy show, with lines such as “In this show, we follow a fish across the Pennines, with only a herbivore for company”.

The station is a community-driven project, “providing access radio to London’s astoundingly talented and diverse arts community.” Intended as a radical alternative to conventional stations, it broadcasts amazingly esoteric and avant-garde stuff, from noise to silence to political commentary to a video games show. I also caught most of a replay of an old-fashioned radio play this morning. It was called “Fugue in G minor” or something, and it even featured an original commercial for California-based wine. What’s strange, though, is that I recognized a line from the play, “I’ll start the melody on the organ” as having been sampled into Hideki Naganuma’s song “Oldies but Happies,” which featured in Jet Set Radio Future. Talk about coincidence.

The station’s programming isn’t as fluid and sleek as those on professional stations, but it doesn’t matter. The fact that there is an officially-sanctioned channel for broadcasting anything from ear-splitting electronic noise to death metal to talk about the Occult is great, and a victory for freedom of expression. I wholeheartedly support the station’s continued existence and encourage you to give it a try, either on the radio in central London, or online. It really is a way of broadening your horizons on radio, music and conception of art.

Of course, my view is entirely subjective and based on maybe two hours’ listening so far. Sure beats “Drivetime” on just about all the commercial stations, though.

Reading up on regional economics is never exactly engaging, but when the book you read from looks like this, it just doesn’t happen.

Seriously, people. Marking things in library books just isn’t cool. Not only is it horribly annoying to be reading someone else’s comments in the margins, it actually distracts from the text, because with all the underlining, those are the only bits people will read.

On a lighter note, my International Relations professor related a story in today’s lecture on globalization about why Ireland is the booming economy it is today.

“Oh no, it’s not because they’ve given up alcohol. They most definitely have not, which is a fact I applaud. In fact, I go back there a few times a year just because of that. No, it’s because they opened up their country to foreign investment and gave massive tax breaks to whoever wanted to come in - hedge funders, pension funds, all of them.”

He’s cool, taking jabs at bankers and economists, who he called “terribly dull people”. I hope to run into him at the George IV some time.