Make new friends, but keep the old...

...one is silver, and the other gets yelled at with you in the Tate Modern when you both blow on an 80-year-old Alexander Calder mobile.

As most members of TBE could probably guess from that sentence, the lovely Laura is visiting London for a few days.

Paris: Where even the children are cooler than I am

This past weekend I went to Paris for a beautiful and delicious 2.5 days. Here is my serious attempt at presenting my holiday in a brief and hopefully entertaining manner:

Yes, Parisians act as though they're better than you. But this really didn't bother me, because they are better than you. They look more tasteful than you do, eat better than you do, live in houses more beautiful than you

rs are, sound better than you do when they talk, and will age be

tter than you will (I did not see a single grundgy looking old person in the entire city. Maybe t

h

ey're banished when they start needing help putting on lipstick or develop a cough). In Montmartre, the gorgeous and relatively non-touristy area we stayed in, I felt like I was in a magical land where people literally walked around with baguettes, Evian was the cheapest water bottle, and little girls with tailored coats and ribbons in their hair chased one another down cobblestone streets laughing and shouting in French. Couples drank espressos and ate small cookies in cafés, watched on by a tremendously chic woman in her twenties casually leaning on her wrought iron balcony with open french windows behind her, smoking and looking damn cool. Everywhere I went I felt like I was on a movie set - do young women really bike with flowers in their bike baskets to the fruit market? Do old men really wear berets and order glasses of red wine with huge cigars in their mouths? Does that really happen? In Paris, apparently it does.

Cristine and I went to the Louvre and to l'orangerie to see some of Paris' artistic treasures (and thankfully we had Laura along to wear a huge scarf, know art history, and speak French, so we looked a little like we belonged). We did the main stuff - hit up the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, and walked briskly down the Seine.

Things Paris is better at than London is:

• Having trash cans

One of my British friends told me that London doesn't have "rubbish bins" practically anywhere because they're prime places for terrorists to put bombs. So maybe I feel safer, but I come home at the end of every day with more crap in my bookbag than I would prefer.

• Feeding its citizens

Okay, so this may not be entirely fair to London. As cities go, I'd be willing to bet London has some of the finest food in the world - realizing that all English cuisine has to offer is bread and a host of questionably prepared meat byproducts, Londoners have given the full responsibility of food preparation to their ethnic population. This means that is you ever want Indian, Chinese, tapas, etc., you're so, so set in London. But if we're comparing, I mean, it's Paris. At the end of the day this is a competition between the birthplace of pain au chocolat and the birthplace of blood pudding. All you have to do is get a whiff of a Parisian patisserie and the competition is over.

• Looking cool

Brits are kind of dorky. In an incredibly adorable way, but when you look at the old man in the newsboy hat and tweed jacket on the tube you just want to pinch his cheeks (or maybe that's just me). Parisians, on the other hand, are cool. They smoke, with seemingly no ill side effects, wear lots of black and huge scarves that you could never pull off, and all seem to work about 2.45 hours a day, leaving plenty of time for frequenting cafés and walking around looking generally satisfied with themselves.

Things London is better at than Paris is

• Devising an underground subway system

God bless the tube. Sure, its weekend closures and impossibly high fares are a pain, but when you enter an underground station you know your train is going to be clean, fast, and efficient. The Paris metro, with its colors and numbers and labyrinthine halls, was impossible to figure out (granted, it probably didn't help that combined Cristine and I had a working knowledge of about 10 French words). Also, it smelled like pee and you had to manually open the car doors if you wanted to get in or out. Now that's just silly.

• Being affordable

Kind of a silly thing to say considering that the words "London" and "affordable" don't generally go together, but actually in the East End things are hella cheap. 9 pounds can easily get me a week and a half's worth of groceries...wheras it will cover one meal in Paris. Cristine and I, shocked and appalled by French prices, survived off a pastry + 1 meal a day during our stay. Fortunately the frequent hot chocolate purchases kept us going.

• Writing literature

Maybe as an English major I'm biased, but did William Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, John Donne, or even Philip Pullman come from France? Not so much. Sure, France can claim trendy authors like Muriel Barbery (and I did feel cool and cultured for seeing someone on the metro reading l'elegance du herisson right after I've just finished reading the English translation), But it's just not the same. Also, we have the French to blame for Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett, as well as some seriously atrocious surrealist poetry. Maybe the guillotine wasn't such a bad thing to have in Paris after all...

In conclusion (at last), Paris = awesome. London = awesome. Studying abroad = the best.

you thought I was done...

While procrastinating, I looked up some wikipedia facts on Bethnal Green. It's a winner of a neighborhood!

1. Jack the Ripper lived there (and in Whitechapel next door - the neighborhood where I get groceries! Holla!)

2. A large amount of unexploded bombs remain in the area from the Battle of Britain in WWII, but because it's a slum the city can't be bothered to excavate them

3. The band the Libertines lived there and used to throw "Guerilla Gigs" in their flat with lots of sex, drugs, and (obviously) rock 'n roll

4. The only people listed under "notable residents" were gangsters, musicians, and Jack the Ripper.

That was fun. Maybe I'll do Mile End (my neighborhood!) after I write a few more pages...

"there aren't many salons around here, dearie, so I dunno why I hadn't heard of that one"

Today was a Big Day.

I ran out of my magical hair product that I use every day a few days ago, so I've been sporting ponytails and googling salons that carry my brand. Fortunately, they're all over London (a quick pop in at a Toni & Guy on Liverpool Street taught me that apparently only the smaller, independent salons are carrying that brand now, though) so I was planning on walking the two miles or so to Bethnal Green Road after class today to pick up a few bottles. Seemed simple enough.

I was largely enjoying my jaunt down Roman Road/Bethnal Green -- it's a pretty grundgy neighborhood with government housing and countless halal fried chicken shops, but it's currently going through some kind of hipster rebirth (I passed more than one used clothing store that looked like something in the Haight and spotted a group of twenty somethings with large black glasses frames and striped retro sweatshirts carrying a dismembered mannequin) so it was a fun walk to take.

But then came the part where I was supposed to find the salon, and found instead that it did not exist.

I'm not kidding -- I paced the the place it should have been as well as a five block radius on all sides, and found nothing. I asked inside two stores -- they'd never heard of it. It was getting dark. And started to rain. And the salon did not exist.

I was just about to give up and take the walk of shame home, when I by the grace of god saw a tiny plastic sign next to a buzzer on a building that said "for Beauty Island: ring 242A." I was too busy rejoicing to think that was sketch.

So I rang 242A and waited a few minutes for a nice young Portuguese girl to let me in and lead me up to the salon. Upon entering the one room salon devoid of any clientele whatsoever, I realized they only had my product as a part of a set and would only sell it to me along with two other useless products. This would not do at this point. I begged her to let me have it individually -- this, of course, leading to half an hour of her and her brother? boyfriend? speaking to each other in Portuguese, calling their manager? mother? on multiple cell phones, speaking in more Portuguese, inviting me to sit down and have a cup of tea, calling more people on cell phones, then finally conceding and letting me buy my one stupid bottle of hair product and get the hell out of there.

So now I'm home, a few hours later than I was anticipating and a little damper than I would have hoped, but excited nonetheless to finish this essay tonight and start packing for PARIS on Saturday! I'll update on that next week!

Fact of Life

If you're fighting the urge to nap because you have two books to read before tomorrow, changing into sweats and making a cup of tea is not advisable.

Well, there went my productive lunch hour.

Wales, Opera, and Toilets

This past weekend Arcadia took us to Wales. It was Welsh. There wasn't a lot to do, but the scenery was absolutely gorgeous and our host dad made us sit and watch a bootleg of Hairspray because he thought we'd enjoy a "girly film" so all in all it was a grand adventure.

One awkward moment did arise when our host mom served beef lasagna and fries for dinner...and two out of the four of us staying with them were vegetarians. I didn't want to be rude, so I ate a few polite bites. After a few minutes she left the kitchen, at which point all four of us turned into five year olds and the two meat-eaters thrust their plates in our vegetarian direction and we started transferring lasagna as quickly as possible - as our forks shoveled it onto their plates, their forks shoveled it into their mouths. That activity, coupled with living out my nine year old fantasy of having fries and rolls for dinner, really brought me back to single digits.

Today I'm having another grand adventure, but with more of a metropolitan tilt. It's a very triumphant adventure, because it includes 4 goals I've had since coming to London.

1) Make a trendy British friend

2) Go to the Royal Opera House

3) Buy something pretentiously European for 48 Sunset

4) Get handed a rose by a British boy

Okay so the last one is a bit misleading. But basically I've made friends with a Brit from Surrey who thinks the American revelation of grilled cheese and tomato soup is the most magnificent thing in the world, and who is taking me in two weeks to her hometown, where The Holiday was filmed (!!). We, along with an American boy, got tickets to go see Cosi fan tutte at the ROH tonight (10 quid standing room tickets..I feel so British), so that's two checks down. On our way back to QM from the box office I purchased a small metal sign that says "Toilet" for the bathroom at 48 (you're gonna love it, E, E, and J, I swear!) so that's number 3 down. Then, as we were nearing the tube stop, a Brit standing in the road with two pink roses handed them to me and the girl from Surrey, muttering something about breast cancer. I don't quite get the connection (here's hoping he's not some soothsayer or something...touch what it won't), but I'm thrilled all the same.

I leave you now with a list of British phrases I have begun using and am not apologetic for:

-lovely

-keen

-touch what it won't (instead of knock on wood you say this and touch your head - I find that incredibly adorable)

-d'you reckon?

-an excessive use of "quite"

That's the list so far. And on a completely random note - does anyone know how to put photos up on this darned modern blog thing? Because I know as much as you all must love staring at a block of text, pictures may make your blog reading experience more pleasurable (as well as likely to happen). Thanks!