Memories of England

Notice: You may note a proliferation of tags in the sidebar. I am attempting to make these more specific, but stopped labeling posts on April 27th's "I in the Me" entry.

I remember going through the British Museum for the first time. I was young, still in elementary school, and I hated the place. I disliked dark and dreary England, and I hated the British Museum. My aunt Roseabelle had been kind enough to let us use her apartment for the duration of our stay, but the cramped quarters with the laundry mat a block away and little food were less than cheery. For one person the house was perfect, but for the three people staying there it was far from. I had a nightmare involving Colombo which terrified me, and my circadian rhythms had been all but destroyed by the time change.

The huge museum scared me. At first I was intrigued by the Egyptian collection, but as we passed by mummy after mummy the reality that these were actually dead bodies sunk in and made me uncomfortable. I felt as though these people and animals should be beneath the ground, not on gratuitous display. The value of the culture and artifacts present around me had not become apparent yet, and I wanted to go back to the natural history museum, which we had already visited twice. Thinking about it even now, I want to go back to that place with its towering fully grown T-Rex and other fossils in its lobby. It was that skeleton which taught me how impressive a T-Rex actually was. The only highlight was seeing the Rosetta stone, which made me quiver with excitement. I couldn't help myself and brushed my finger against it, knowing while I did that if everyone were to do that it would crumble into dust much sooner than it should. Apparently the same thought crossed the curator's mind, and the Stone is now in a glass case. I feel strangely lucky to have done what I did, though also ashamed.

The food in the museum was horrible, which still hasn't changed.

I felt a bit better in the gift shop, where everything was horribly expensive except for a small, black cat that now resides in the teen room. The gift shop is different now, as I surmised from the thirty seconds I spent in there on my last visit before it closed.

I kept throwing up on the plane long after my stomach was empty and when we got back was sick for two weeks. When I finally woke up it was in the middle of the night craving Dorritos, which my dad gave to me.

The second time I went to England I noted all the ways it was better than America; the extremely efficent public transportation throughout London, the proliferation of cheap bookshops and plays, the healthy snacks readily available as an alternative to chips, and the focus on green energy. That sentence is short and simplified in comparison to the cultural imbibation which took place. I got Jane, then several other people, hooked on these smoothies that are only available in Europe and were one of my few good memories from my first time in England. A LOT of things happened and a lot of things were done while we were there, but overall the experience was very positive. Except for that play which gave me nightmares.

The third time I went to England was right in the middle of a xenophobic scare. People were discussing "the Muslim problem". According the the journalists, the fact that the Muslim community preferred to keep themselves separate from mainstream society encouraged radical and anti-British thinking. It seems like half of London is Indian, so this reaction puzzled me. But, of course, much of LA is Latino, and there is rampant racism against them. The things which impressed me were there, but cracks in the image that had formed before showed. And, of course, if you listen to citizens and the newspaper, there is a large amount of discontent there. England always has been a country of freer speech; Mary would not have survived well even if Elizabeth had not been around. So, in part, this simply is the way of the culture, but it also was reflective of the realities in the country at the time. And England is not an intellectual haven. There are plenty of ribald and other such folks there. I also didn't particularly like the fashions at the time, which were very girly.

I still want to at least visit England for a prolonged period of time. I felt and feel more in tune with their culture than the one I grew up in. This isn't a general overview, more my writing about selected memories which are rising in my mind.

PS: This site any good?