8/12

Overdid it with the caffeine.

Spent the day exploring, once again, the Shoreditch neighborhood of East London; ultra-hipster, quaint, just far enough away from the core of the city center…

My first stop this morning (afternoon?) was at a coffeeshop just across from the Tower of London. Stomach rumbling, head aching from a night of ball-pit frolicking, gin-drinking blasphemy, I bopped into the cafe of a four-star hotel out of necessity. Once inside, I was greeted by a perky guy who spent an exorbitant amount time explaining the various pastries underneath the thick glass dome. I obliged him and purchased an dark-chocolate, orange lump of loaf along with my Flat White. The space was sterile yet charming. The ultra-clean marble-lined tables alongside the saturated colorful artwork left me wondering if the place had ever seen any real sit-down customers.

After clicking away for awhile on my laptop, I overheard the barista talking to another cafe customer about the City of London during this time of year. He explained to her that the city center around the area where I am staying is generally vacant as a result of some political, financial reasons. I decided to take him up in conversation about the city, its culture, and where to go next.

Thirty minutes later, I have learned about probably a dozen nuggets of dining, drinking, and exploring in London. A paper receipt scribbled with 7 different specialty coffeeshops along with the names of the best baristas at each place has me now tackling a new goal: drink the best coffees by the best baristas in London.

Fast forward to three train rides, four miles of walking and a smoked-salmon and cream-cheese lunch and I’m now half way through an espresso sourced from Kenya that is highly citric, immensely powerful and actually keeping me from doing my real work..

8/14

Two days, four coffeeshops later.

Kafein, PrufRock, Climpsons & Sons, Mare St. Market

Each shop in a different area of London; my way of travel. Never would I have had the same opportunity to “come across” these specialty coffee shops without the help of a local, deeply embedded into the scene.

Business ventures on the horizon.

Being sick on the road in the summertime is the ultimate punishment. I’ve been fighting off a lingering cold since Rome a few weeks ago and for some reason it’s getting worse. I distinctly remember when I checked into my hostel in the center of Rome and learned that two of my roommates were fighting something… I’d be doomed.

This reminds me of last year during the tail end of my August ventures around western Europe. I remember finding myself sick, teary-eyed, curled up in my hostel bed in Madrid with two weeks left of travel. I am in the same position now. Last summer I found respite when I landed in Paris and my travel partner had arranged an apartment for us and he carried me off to a resting place for a few days. Imagine.. landing in Paris and wanting nothing more than a bed, rest, and some television. London provides me the same situation now.

This time I am at the whim of my own decisions. Do I walk around the city in the heat during mid-afternoon, constantly clutching a water bottle and hoping a fountain is around the next corner? Do I grab a beer or two with some strangers, chatting and enjoying conversation while silently dying? Or, lay in a hostel bed for hours, hoping no one comes in and disturbs the peace?

Health is all we have, folks.

My entrance into the UK came with all the expected (and also probably fulfilled by my subconscious) difficulties.

From the Ryanair flight stranded on the tarmac, door open, unable to relieve passengers until London Stansted retrieved proper personnel to deploy the staircase to the insanely incompetent staff at the poorly reviewed backpackers hostel that I booked at 11 PM simply out of necessity… I am here regardless.

*sigh*

I am here regardless of where I rested last night, ate breakfast this morning, decided to spend my time, my money, my anxious energy. With each pound spent, always calculating the relative equivalent in dollars, my blood pressure rises. It’s OK, I will replenish the bank account once I’m home.

The world is equally as strangling as it is liberating. I have decided to find liberation through staying put. I won’t go to Glasgow, I won’t take the 20$ RyanAir flight from Glasgow to London on the 16th of August (which I failed to acknowledge would actually end up costing hundreds more, considering the travel to Glasgow, even to and from the airport..), but I will spend 17 days in a city filled with endless possibility.

Things are looking up. I’m sending countless emails to people in my research-related field. I’m endlessly seeking some type of intellectual social stimulation outside of the brain-frying carbon-copy hostel-goer conversations that are a right of passage for a 21-year-old college student traveling for an extensive period abroad. I’m sure I can find this stimulation in a place that breeds some of the most intelligent people and high class institutions in the world. I don’t know what I’m looking for, so I’m sure I’ll find it.

In the meantime, I’ll keep flipping my way through a book given to me by my host/professor/friend in Tuscany. I started this book on the beach, under the Tuscan sun, with sand in my toes and salt drying my ever-darkening skin (so thankful to my Native American ancestors for this trait).

An excerpt from Zadie Smith’s On Beauty: 

..Howard had pitched his tent and made his case. He had offered them a Rembrandt who was neither a rule breaker nor an original but rather a conformist; he had asked them to ask themselves what they meant by ‘genius’ and, in the perplexed silence, replaced the familiar rebel master of historical fame with Howard’s own vision of a merely competent artisan who painted whatever his wealthy patrons requested. Howard asked his students to imagine prettiness as the mask that power wears. To recast Aesthetics as a rarefied language of exclusion. He promised them a class that would challenge their own beliefs about the redemptive humanity of what is commonly called ‘Art’. ‘Art is the Western myth’, announced Howard, for the sixth year in a row, ‘with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.’ Everybody wrote that down.

Loved this passage.

When I was first given this book, I explained to my friend that I typically don’t care to read books in which the voice of the author is highly different than my own; that when I read, I want to imagine that the dialogue lives in another part of my own psyche that I can identify with, make my own, meld myself to. I began this book with no context, did not like the introduction, but continued to read regardless. I’ve found that although the characters and plot are highly different to my own character, my own life plot, I find constant nuggets of literary mastery that do end up resonating with my voice.

I guess the same thing has happened already since entering London..

I will keep reading, keep experiencing London, and I will find the nuggets of this society, this city, maybe even some people, that resonate with me.

British Library, Saturday Morning.