frustrations

• people are going home and i want to go home
• before i dropped my phone in the toilet and almost flushed it down the abyss i was talking to the Brother and we had the usual fight where he accused me of being condescending and i attacked him of not giving a shit about half of society and the child is too cool for facebook so i cannot tell him that i did not mean it but was just tired and stressed and cruel and this guilt is going to give me an ulcer
• estela is coming to london this week but i still have finals that i don’t care about and i just want to take estela too all the nice bridges and quiet cafes and drink mulled wine in a park and talk about impending adulthood and beyonce and disappointing dates and making cool things but I have to write an essay about BRITISH IMPERIALISM (of the why it failed persuasion & not the why it was the worst thing to happen in recent history persuasion) like reading about this doesn’t casually make my insides crawl at how terrible world leaders were/are and i am too done
• looking at flights to claremont and being emotionally unprepared because my favorite people are about to graduate and leave forever and i will be the jaded af senior and i am too young for the job search hustle and bad things happen on campus and there will be new firstyears and firstyears become more optimistic and ambitious and terrifying by the year
• ok actually going to leave internet for a while bye everyone~~

pictures of sunsets + a warning

 

madrid, from a hill. not pictured: all the people kissing around me. there’s proper etiquette in situations like these (i.e., don’t stare) but i sat on my bench and stared shamelessly. i witnessed gentle kisses to brows and painstakingly staged cheek kisses for the selfie shot and the world may care kisses full of teeth and tongue and i didn’t feel embarrassed or jealous or lonely or whatever it is that people usually feel when they find themselves suddenly surrounded by people kissing each other in the sunset. (ok maybe i felt a little bit of all those things for a sliver of a second but it’d be inhuman if i didn’t)

barcelona, in a park. the sunset looked like spilled wine in the sky. conclusion: sunsets are heart-wrenching anywhere (even in minnesota, even in claremont, no matter what the brutal season)  but they can only be appreciated when you are in the mood to do so. conclusion based on previous conclusion: what a shame.

brighton, overlooking the english channel. gradient of gray blue pink orange gray / hands numb from the cold /  shoulders stiff from the load i brought from london / thinking about the pebble beach behind a mountain tunnel in korea / thinking about the pebble beach i wanted to visit in northern california last semester but never found the motivation or the money (but mostly the motivation) to go / thinking about keeping this to myself because that would the selfish and safe thing to do but i wish you could have seen this too. london’s all right but you should really just go to brighton carrying nothing and see the sunset and then take the 9:50pm train back to my kitchen and then i will make you tea and we can talk about how the world is not so shitty sometimes–

warning: watching too many sunsets inadequately dressed will make you sick. this should not deter you from going outside but take care to dress warmly and eat your vitamins and remember your umbrella so you don’t get rained on because that will make everything worse

month report

in brand-new list form!!!

new additions to my general vocabulary:
brilliant
queue
aubergine
f**ker
courgettes
all right
quid

most used word of the month (by a very wide margin):
f**ker

a morbid recognition:
at first, the daily dose of ambulance sirens blaring down the street was another coarse aspect of city life—annoying and sudden (yet not surprising) and forgotten in seconds. lately, this reminder takes longer and longer to shrug off: somewhere, someone is very hurt and in all probability, dying. something in me that is very sheltered and very small town makes living here unnecessarily difficult.

perceptions of me / them:
several strangers in the past month have approached me in public asking two things:
1) do you speak English
2) are you all right
apparently, my resting face is a look of distress—to the point that Londoners, famous for not seeking interpersonal contact if they can help it, are compelled to ask such things. as for the English thing—I use this to my advantage. people give up on you so quickly when they think you can’t communicate.

books read:
how to live in a city (impulse buy out of desperation / very useless)
white teeth, zadie smith (love for london increased by 500%)
slouching toward bethlehem, joan didion
a year of magical thinking, joan didion

things I am starting to miss:
dining hall breakfast
ITS printers
free coffee in lincoln
sunlight
the brother

favorite things about the city:
mornings*
tea
wellcome center library
psych & lang library
british library**
walking everywhere
st. george’s gardens

*mornings in claremont in the last half of last semester felt a lot like dread and defeat (‘oh no, not another perfect day’, ‘oh no I didn’t finish readings/essay/studying last night’, ‘there’s so much to do today I can’t even’, ‘shit it’s 11am and I’m still in bed’, etc) but in London, i feel pretty euphoric. it is a combination of better sleeping habits and dreary weather. overcast skies makes it easier to fool myself that I beat the sun / it is okay to stay in and not do much

**but goeun, you didn’t go half-way across the world to fawn over libraries! um, do you know me?

moral/emotional/intellectual progress:
not much
very little
satisfactory
still can’t see myself telling anyone ‘omg SA was the best experience of my life / I changed and grew so much / yada yada yada’ in 5 mo but it’s nice. not being stressed and having free time is nice. getting to know London better is nice. feeling all this niceness will hopefully make me into a nicer person but that might be just wishful thinking.

adventures in trying not to starve

alex and goeun does lunch featuring:

• half cooked dumplings
• oil and cabbage and oil
• microwaved soup
• cold and dry kimbap

we’re usually healthier when we cook together but today is a friday (days of the week mean nothing when you only have lecture two days a week) and i cooked at least five times this week and that is nearing my limit. it’s been 3 weeks so it might be about time i give up hope in any hidden culinary prowess.

bless flatmates who encourage my lackadaisical culinary endeavors / take pity and feed me. (i’m going to brag a little bit real quick: i won the flatmate lottery this semester. they are great humans.)

i am up to 3-4 cups of tea a day. i eat a lot of biscuits and eggs and generic cereal. london is a good place for ethiopian, indian, and microwave food. i had fish and chips once and my stomach didn’t like it. there’s a good sushi place nearby. yesterday kathie and i was supposed to have breakfast but she slept in (typical tangycat) and i had to wait in a cafe for like an hour but i wasn’t even mad because the espresso and decor was on point (also i’m always late so i can’t really judge).

this is alex’s kitchen window.

the window says to not feed the birds which is a little excessive but there are birds everywhere. every time i see a chubby pigeon waddling down the street (which is every 15 seconds tbh) i think about apocalypse and meat pies and how alex is not impressed with them. i like them though, not in a hungry kind of way but in a ‘you’re so dumb’ kind of a way. would you cook pigeons like you cook chicken? not like i would know how to do that either. i used to think i was anxious about cooking meat but then i realized that i was just lazy.

this, i realize, is what might lead to any impending starvation.

in other words, the food in england is fine.

 

remember to eat friends,

g

hello from københavn

kathie, alex and i are at the airport, waiting for our flight back to london from copenhagen and i am sad because i’m madly in love with this city and i don’t get to live here. in fact, i am a little salty about this (certain people may now tell me i told u so).

naturally, if i did actually live here i’m sure i would find something to ruminate over eventually. but copenhagen in a day is perfection if you don’t mind the cold (thnx minnesota) and everyone is beautiful (western standards of beauty = northern europe, i shit u not) and i got to eat some amazing bread and butter which my favorite people because if eating with people you love isn’t your idea of perfection, i don’t know what is.

thank you justin for letting us crash for the night and also showing us around your new neighborhood! (check him out @ http://www.jjabroad.wordpress.com where there are actual nice photos + commentary of copenhagen and not just me gushing about it)

pictures are a thousand words so enjoy some pictures–

one of the first things justin told us as we were walking around was to slow down and take our time which is not a think i am used to in london and he’s only been in town for a couple days but he seems to fit in with the mood of the place already. he took us to this beautiful cafe from heaven and we had beer and bread and butter and i was so full and light and i’m convinced that i’ll never leave a cafe as happy as i was back then ever again

this is alex/suhjin who is actually the best travel companion if she tries to tell you otherwise (and she probably will) don’t believe her. she lies

kathie tang aka sqrmont homegirl #1 makes europe look so much better

like copenhagen is hella cute but copenhagen + alex + kathie = best place!

i told you

alex rly wanted open sandwiches so we went to this food market and we got 1/2 off because it was almost closing time and they were so good (i mean duh look at this picture it doens’t even need explanation  doesn’t it look good?!?!)

me: ‘look european!’ (regrets saying it immediately afterwards because white supremacy also possibly weird cultural overstep because nationalities/ethnicities in europe =/= euro-american but will reflect on this reaction later)

ok that’s all thnx for reading

g

Henry James and I agree on something for once

Before I tried and failed to register for a London geography class (for anyone reading this who is interested in going to UCL in the future, please do yourself a favor and take London: A Geographical Introduction. I’m still a little heartbroken that the class was full), I picked up a few things from the introductory lecture. First, I should definitely invest in a physical map. Two, if I didn’t already sell my soul to psychology, I imagine I would have given it to geography. Three, I will never, ever, ever be able to write about being in this city justice on this blog.

There’s a lot of bullshit descriptions of London in literature. The one I hate the most so far is by Samuel Johnson which goes, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” It reeks of so much Enlightened Euro-centric pretentiousness that it makes me want to gag. That aside, there was a slide from the lecture that I felt the need to note down and share. Henry James, whose writing style I find simultaneously beautiful and painful (usually more painful), wrote this about London in 1881:

“It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent. You can draw up a tremendous list of reasons why it should be insupportable. The fogs, the smoke, the dirt, the darkness, the wet, the distances, the ugliness, the brutal size of the place, the horrible numerosity of society … You may call it dreary, heavy, stupid, dull, inhuman, vulgar at heart and tiresome in form. I have felt these things at times so strongly that I have said – ‘Ah London, you too then are impossible?’ But for one who takes it as I take it, London is on the whole the most possible form of life. I take it as an artist and as a bachelor; as one who has the passion of observation and whose business is the study of human life – the most complete compendium of the world. The human race is better represented there than anywhere else, and if you learn to know your London you learn a great many things.”

Of course, I am skeptical that humanity is somehow more concrete here than anywhere else, but I can’t name another city off the top of my head where I’ve seen the kind of diversity I see in the streets here. I’m constantly critical of at what (who’s) cost London became such an incredibly wealthy and, as James puts it, only magnificent city. I do not give this place a break, even though the London that I occupy is actually a very pleasant place because certain people paid a great deal of money for me to have this very pleasant experience.

Some things do not change in 135 years and London is still dark and wet and so, so, so large. You can get lost in the roads so easily here. Much of the past week has involved me getting lost and looking for directions and bitching about wearing terrible shoes. And when I’m not fumbling on the streets, I’ve mostly kept to my flat, trying to make the room I live in into a room I can live in. The city is too loud and large right now so I try to mark my presence in my room, where I drink disgusting amounts of tea and brood about being insignificant and alone. (That’s not because I’m adjusting abysmally, I’m just being neurotic, like usual. Seriously, please don’t bother sending concerned messages. I’m doing great. Certainly, I’m not doing worse.)

Even as I write this in my room, I am acutely aware of the city outside. This place does not give me a break either. London takes up so much physical and mental space, in a way, it really is quite vulgar and tiresome. But it is a good place to be when you’re young and trying to get lost in something other than yourself. Here, I hope to learn a great many things.

selected misadventures and lessons in the first 8 hours

• there’s a small patch of green near a church right across from my building and it serves as both a playground and a cemetery. this one famous dead guy that the church is named after or somehow indebted to is buried there. he used to dress up as a clown back in the middle ages or something so every year, to celebrate his memory, the people of the church dress up as clowns. those poor children. 

• the wifi at costa is free but you need a cell number to get the activation code. i have yet to acquire a sim card. i contemplated for a very long time over the flat white i ordered to justify my presence in what i assumed was a phone-number-free-wifi-hotspot establishment on how to ask the man sitting next to me for his number without him jumping to conclusions. he left before i could get around to it. i don’t particularly like flat whites.

• men’s fashion has me drooling with admiration and, let’s be honest, envy. they wear loafers and wool overcoats and scarves. everything fits perfectly. they all look like they’re out of a j crew catalog. i want their clothes.

• euston road, the most efficient way to class, is one of the most polluted street in london and therefore england. it certainly has the most traffic. londoners do not seem very concerned (see alex’s observations on pedestrians). i fear that the road may be the death of me, whether it comes for my spine or my lungs.

• pret is a coffeeshop and it is everywhere. there are so many of them that i have started assigning them names so i won’t get all the prets mixed up. several have come in handy when i try to find direction. a sim card with a data plan would be better but their english breakfast tea is good.

• there is no toilet paper in my flat. there is no wifi (see point 2). i have no cluewhere people buy toilet paper in this city and i am concerned that my mother is imagining the worst. the sky is getting dark. i am getting desperate. euston road is fucking terrifying. i stumble into the british library. they have a beautiful bathroom. i steal half a roll. they also have wifi. mother did not sound terribly concerned. i have decided that the british library is my favorite place in the city. nothing else in london will ever, ever come close.

test

this is a test. this is a test. wee. wee. weeeee.