Tuppence a Bag

Earlier this year, Sunny and I went to St. Paul's to see the steps from Mary Poppins where the little old woman would come to feed the birds (see the original post here). Instead we found the Occupy London movement at the beginning of what turned into a more than four month stay.

This was unexpected, but I promised to come back and take a picture of the steps soon. 'Soon' turned into several months as the occupiers were first turned out of Paternoster Square and then evicted from the space around St. Paul's itself. Returning at the end of January, I found this unexpectedly desolate scene of cattle gates and private security guards filling the square as the protesters' area was restricted more and more.

                                                        

When my friends Mary and Sebastian came to London two weeks ago, St. Paul's was obviously on the list of sights. We arrived and found the space totally returned to normal, as though no protesters had ever been there. Sunny finally got his picture.

Sunny and a little old bird woman at St. Paul's. Wasn't she nice to pose for us?

I have loads more visitors coming in the next month, beginning with my family. Anyone I've met here can probably tell you how much I love London (because I talk about it all the time), and when people ask me what food or 'stuff' from home I miss, I'm hard-pressed to answer. However, I can unequivocally say that there are a lot of important people that I miss and I'm really excited that a few of them are visiting over the coming weeks.

In the mean time, however, I'm going to be very boring and won't be having many adventures. This week I'll be in the library and then shut in my room writing a paper on trauma theory and how it's exhibited in some of Toni Morrison's works (that nifty Shelfari widget at the right of the screen always tells what I'm currently reading if you're interested). 

So if you're looking for me, that's where I am - seated in front of a window, staring wistfully out at the lovely Londony springtime.

St. Patrick's Day in Dublin

Everyone has some sort of life checklist, right? Mine includes an assortment of things, some standard and some more unusual. I wish to

• be in Times Square for New Year's Eve. 
• go to all four tennis grand slam events: the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open. (Ask me sometime about when I went to the US Open...and only got to eat a burrito. I'm not counting that.)
• go to Brazil for Carnival.
• attend both the Summer and Winter Olympics. (I know; two sports-related goals. Weird, right?)
• go to Germany for Oktoberfest.
• live in a foreign country. (Done.)
• travel everywhere else, too. (OK, that's vague, but you get the idea.)

St. Patrick's Cathedral

This week I was lucky enough to cross something off my list: I went to Dublin for St. Patrick's Day. My friends Mary and Sebastian came to London for their spring break, and they kindly invited me to come along to Dublin with them. Who would turn down such an invitation? Not this girl.

St. Patrick's Day is a big deal in many parts of the US. I grew up leaving myself notes for a week before the day so I would remember to wear green and avoid getting pinched (I don't have any idea why that's the custom). But I've always heard that St. Patrick's Day is more of a thing outside Ireland than inside. 

This is not true. 

St. Patrick's Day is a big deal in Dublin. Droves of tourists descend on the city, all wearing green and buying ridiculous shamrock-themed apparel. Leprechauns pop up on the streets for pictures. Bunches of clover are for sale in the flower stands. Public buildings are lit in green floodlights. Irish flags are everywhere: decorating buildings, hanging in strings across streets, and being worn as capes. The city center came to a standstill on the morning of March 17 as streets were shut down for the parade and vendors appeared every ten feet. Pushing my suitcase through the crowds waiting for the parade (I don't recommend this, by the way), I felt like it was New Year's Eve in London again, but with more green than I think I've ever seen in one place. The amount of merchandise for sale and being worn by more than 90% of the crowd made it look like Disney World, but without the mouse ears. It was a truly astonishing spectacle.

All of that said, it wasn't the energy or the crowds or the parade that grabbed a tiny piece of my heart in Dublin. It was, as I suspected it would be, the music. Being able to find six pubs in a three block radius advertising live Irish music is brilliant. An entire pub singing along to "Molly Malone" is an experience you really can't have anywhere else. I so envy Irish culture's integration of song and poetry into everyday life; America, you lost out on something here. 

On March 15 (or St. Patrick's Thursday as it was called...fantastic that the festivities last a whole week), we were in a pub called the Merchant's Arch where we'd also been the night before. (We liked the singer and bought his CD.) It was a bit more crowded than it had been on St. Patrick's Wednesday, so we had to join two men already seated at a table. One of the questions our new friend Paul asked between songs was if any of us could sing. When I said I could, he demanded that I sing for him right then. After I declined (because that's awkward), he asked me 

"What's your party piece?" 

"Um. My what?"

"Your PARTY PIECE. You know, when you're at a party and everyone gets up to sing something, what do you sing?"

"Paul, do you have a party piece?"

"Of course! Everyone does."

This isn't something Americans do, and I think it's a shame. Paul didn't seem like the singing kind of guy (he led off the conversation with the announcement that he had been a professional footballer and then used his iPhone to look himself up on Wikipedia for me. It was the most desperate attempt at impressing a girl I've seen in a long while.) and he agreed that he can't really do it very well, but he does. Because it's Ireland and everyone sings. 

America, when we stole the parts of other cultures we liked best and made them our own, I think we missed out on a good one.

Sunny and Oscar Wilde

It was a joy to be caught up in the songs and writing of Dublin for a few days. The overwhelming presence of so many writers in the city is palpable and it made me feel a little like coming home. Seeing the places that inspired James Joyce, the statue of Oscar Wilde, the cathedral where Jonathan Swift was dean, and the Dublin Writers Museum where all of these are joined with Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, and so many more, illustrates how important their artistic heritage is to the Irish and what an impact they've had on the world and on me personally.

I look forward to a future trip where I can get out into the countryside and meet more of the people and share in their music and culture. I'll even come up with an answer to that age-old question: "What is your party piece?"

Sunny, Molly Malone, and a leprechaun

Click here to see more of my Dublin photos on Facebook.

A Weekend in Norwich

When even the London friends I see every couple of days have told me it's time to update my blog, it must be seriously overdue. And because it's a rainy Wednesday morning when I should be at the library (but it's raining and windy and cold...so I don't want to go), now is the time.

(Yes, mom, I'll go to the library this afternoon. I promise.)

Photo courtesy of Floor Mulder

I've done a reasonably decent job of getting around to the different parts of London since I've been here. Central London, anyway--I may have become a bit of a snob about that, but I'm working on broadening the boundaries of my wanderings. What I hadn't done, however, was get to the rest of England. I've been outside London before, several times, but always to the same few touristy destinations with my students. Oxford, Stonehenge, Bath, Windsor Castle...these are tours I could probably give myself now. On my first trip to the UK I ventured to Wales and Canterbury and Edinburgh, but that's been about a decade, so it was time to add a new destination to the list. For the latest jaunt outside London: Norwich.

Norwich Castle

I'll be honest, all I knew about Norwich before going there was Julian of Norwich; I read her book Revelations of Divine Love in college. What I learned is that (a) St. Julian's Church is quite difficult to get to, a classic case of "you can't get there from here", and (b) Norwich is kind of a big deal. It also looks a bit like the storybook version of European cities that lives in my imagination: cobbled streets, narrow alleys, close-set houses, lots of church steeples, and a castle on the hill.

Norwich Cathedral

We only stayed a couple of days, but we did a lot of wandering, including two visits to the castle and the cathedral. The best deal in town: Norwich Castle. Admission is £6, but if you go an hour before closing (4:30 in the winter months), you can "Pop in for a pound." This is a great way to decide if you want to go back. And, I'll tell you right now, you do. Aside from the super fun costumes and puzzles and models of the castle and dragons, there's a pretty cool collection of art, wildlife, and other various items representing England's history. Even though we went two days in a row, we didn't get to see everything and I'd be delighted to get the chance to go back.

Inside Norwich Cathedral

Extra bonus to the trip (besides my friend Stephanie's fabulous cooking): the train takes you past the construction for the Olympics. (If we've met, you probably know of my deep and abiding love for the Olympics.)

Extra-Extra bonus for the blog entry: I have a new favourite Englishy linguistic construction. Yep, favourite with a u. There is a tendency here to end sentences with the word "do" in a way that Americans ... don't. It makes me giggle every time. Example: 

"Can I write my essay on Toni Morrison's novel Paradise?"

"Yes, I suppose you can do."

OR

"Would it have been OK for me to write about Don DeLillo instead?"

"Yes, you could have done."

Americans either say "Yes, you can" or "Yes, you can do that." We don't stop in the middle. 

Perhaps President Obama should make his campaign slogan "Yes, we still can do."