Stuff you hardly stop to think about...

Hello Everybody!  So if you were wondering about my London living conditions...


...for my social spaces assignment I made a rough (emphasis here) drawing of Carol's apartment where I live, labeled it, and made some notes about the space and it's uses.  I also talked to Richard (my roommate) about it and he added some interesting comments that helped shape my thinking. Hope you enjoy it:

One thing is for sure: Carol's flat is really small. Composed of a living room, a small kitchen, two bedrooms, a small outside porch, and a uniquely split bathroom composed of a small room with a toilet and another with the shower and sink, the resulting lack of space means, as Richard put it, that “everything in it is multipurpose.” The small outside porch is for food storage and for the clothes dryer. The washing machine is in the kitchen instead of a dishwasher. The second bedroom is also the library. The living room, which is equipped with a small fold-down wooden table and several fold-up wooden chairs, is also the dining room. However, due to the unique rental situation that has placed Richard in the small bedroom and me in the larger, double-bed bedroom, the living room moonlights (literally) as a double bedroom for Carol and her daughter Alana. This means that the primary public gathering place in the house is also a private space depending on the time of day.


Furthermore, and partly as a result of the semi-public nature of the living room, the kitchen serves as a secondary public gathering place. The only problem is that the kitchen is very small, and there is only a place to sit if you hop up on the large countertop by the window or if you bring in one of the wooden folding chairs from the living room. Hence, while the kitchen does serve as an additional place of social refuge, its sore lack of comfortable furnishings only makes it survivable for about a half hour before everyone either moves to the living room or gives up on the conversation entirely.


That being said, since my bedroom is the larger of the two it has become a private social gathering place for Richard and I when we hang out in the evenings. The double bed works as a mostly-comfortable platform for watching Youtube videos and Avatar episodes, and we have exchanged many stories while one of us sat on the one wooden chair and the other on the bed. When I get tired of sitting on the bed I often just sit on the floor. That's why we have carpet, right?

Perhaps the most interesting social space in the house is the entryway, which could be renamed “the transition zone,” because nothing occurs in it for it's own sake. Instead, the entryway is just a passage from one part of the house to other: from the kitchen to the living room, from the kitchen to the bedroom, from the bedroom to the sink, and for leaving from or arriving at the apartment. The list of uses goes on and on. Yet this ambiguous nature of entryway activity turns it something akin to the stack of “Chance” cards in monopoly. The slightest sound coming from it sends all the heads turning. After all, just what could be going on in there? Is it someone going out? Is Carol making food? Has the mail arrived? Is someone trying to break in? Make no doubt about it, noises in the entryway means something is about to happen and nobody can be quite sure exactly what it is, making it, ironically, the greatest point of interest in the whole flat.

The last, and perhaps most curious element of Carol's house is her bathroom. Because, well, it's split in two: the small room with the toilet and the other with the bathtub, sink, and cupboards. You may not think much of it, but I am not used to using the restroom being a two-room activity. Although I suppose it's useful since it makes it possible for someone to be using the toilet while the other is using the sink or shower. I still think it's a little weird though.

A note from Ben

Hello everyone, it's Ben here.

So I've been a little lax on this blog lately--I've really only been posting some of the more interesting and universal parts of my journal here for everyone to see.  But I think I will repost part of a message I sent to my family here because it gives a better idea of the way things are going here in London generally.  I promise that I'll be preparing some more posts in the near future that will have a greater sense of direction and clarity than the last few have been.

So thanks for still listening, and I hope you enjoy this letter (it was originally written to my Mom with my family in mind as well):

I guess I'll give you a quick update now that I'm already writing you. So this past week has been quite good, and it feels like time is really starting to fly now. Can you believe I've already been gone for three and a half weeks? If I was at the ranch I would be coming home Wednesday! 

I have a pretty good routine now, but I'm working to spend more time on homework and my project during the mornings and afternoons so I don't have to work on things in the evenings (like I am today). I go to church at rhe Whitechapel family ward on Sundays of course, then Monday evenings Richard (my roommate who served his mission here and now is going to University at Imperial College, which is a very good school, studying Biology) and I go to Family Home Evening either at one of the group FHE's that are put on by leaders in the YSA ward or ward FHEs at the chapel (it switches between the two every week). Tuesdays are my free day for getting work done, and it's the best day for going and seeing a play or something because I have the evening open. On Wednesday I go to Institute at the Wandsworth chapel in South London. It's actually with another stake but Richard goes that day because he sings in his university choir on Thursday nights, which is when the local YSA ward has Institute. For that reason I have been going on Wednesdays for the last couple of weeks, and I've really loved the group that goes there. The pre-mission young men are really friendly and I've actually been spending more time in the mission prep class with them rather than the normal Institute class so they have more ppl in the class. Plus I just love talking about missionary work :) Afterwards ppl always stay and play either indoor soccer (football) or volleyball :) :)  So Thursdays have been somewhat free for the past few weeks, and I went and saw "Antigone" last week (Greek play, really cool, had the actor for Dean Thomas in it) and War Horse the week before that because we got free tickets from a married couple who are serving as missionaries. That play was also really cool, so I guess I'll have to see the movie now :)  This week I did make it out to the local YSA ward's Institute on Thursday, so that was fun, and because my roommate Richard has his hands in everything in the church around here (he's also ward mission leader and meets with several companionships on a weekly basis), I'm now helping out with the choir and a small six person male choir that will be singing Be Still My Soul on the 27th for the Hyde Park Chapel open house, since the building just got renovated to act as both a chapel and visiter's center (the chapel is right across the street from the London Science Museum, and the Natural History Museum is on the same road just a little further down). So yeah, having Richard as a roommate has been a really amazing blessing. I feel very involved! 

Oh yes, and Thursday mornings we also have our weekly meeting as a field study group, so thats always fun because whoever is in charge can choose a place to meet and an activity to do for a couple hours or so before we get food and talk about how our weeks and our projects are doing. We've been to Westminster Abbey, the Borough Market (really good food and loads of free samples), the London Museum, and Trafalgar Square/Picadilly Circus. I've really seen our group grow close together over the last couple weeks as well, which is really neat :)

On Fridays there have been a couple of YSA activities that I have gone to, including the May Ball (formal dance) which was last Friday, and yesterday I went to a dance/fiesta put on by members of the Spanish branch that I was invited to. Haha, luckily there were a group of brazilians who were there (I felt quite at home with them) and two people who spoke only English, haha, so between the three languages of Spanish, Portugues, and English, it was the craziest night ever. One of the activities was to play act a fairy tale, and our group got chosen to put on Snow White. Just try to imagine a Mirror that spoke only Spanish, a Dwarf that spoke only English, a snow white that spoke only Portuguese, and the rest of us switching between the three languages depending on which version of the movie we had watched growing up....haha, it was quite a mad spectacle, but really fun :) And man, I wish I could Latin dance better. 

So that's pretty much it. My Saturdays have been pretty quiet, and like today I have tended to use them to catch up on school work for the week. This next week should be quieter with Richard on a family vacation until next Sunday, although that means he put me in charge of teaching the investigator class at the YSA ward tomorrow, so that should be fun :)
So that's pretty much it. 

 
Life couldn't seem any less exciting, that's for sure.

Picadilly, Indian food, and religious freedom

Thursday, May 31

Today was a pretty good one. I got up and got my journal entry from yesterday typed up before I got showered and changed so I could leave to the meeting. I was in charge this week, and we met at Trafalgar Square below the Nelson Column, and from there we walked to the Picadilly Circus and walked around the neighborhood for a bit. The wide boulevards had been brilliantly arrayed with hanging British flags hung from wires across the streets at about fifty foot intervals, preparations for the Diamond Jubilee that would commence tomorrow and continue until Tuesday. The area is decorated enough as it is, and in our half-hour walk around the area I saw at least seven or eight different threatres showing musicals and plays like Thriller, Les Miserables, The 39 Steps, and Chariots of Fire. We wound our way back through a side street that was part of Chinatown—the entire street was lined with Chinese restaurants, and every window sported silver spits where various types of meat, chicken, and seafood hung shining with oil. It was a very mouthwatering spectacle, but I couldn't see prices and none of us were particularly in the mood for chinese. We dropped by a gigantic, five-floor bookstore that Natalie (the creative writer in the group) was extremely fond of, but after finding only a few spots to sit down inside, we decided to go sit on the steps below the statued fountain in the middle of the square. We talked about our highs and lows, and I was pleased to hear how everyone was doing—I would say it was our most cheerful meeting so far. I led a short discussion about personal organization of a field study, and although I don't think I did a great job (if I could do it again I would do it very differently...), I feel like it was still useful.

When we were finished we went a found a pretty decent Indian restaurant that had a lunch special going on for only 5 pounds. I think we surprised the rest of the customers in the restaurant by how much we talked and laughed together while we were there ;)

We all had things to do afterward, so I made my way home and got my scripture study done. I got thoroughly distracted by the news afterwards, but to be honest there are a half a million interesting things that are going on in the world.

Of greatest note was a religious conference in the United States where representatives from almost every large religion was present: Catholics, Mainline Christian, Protestant, Evangelical, Jewish, and LDS. The topic being discussed was the threat to religious freedom in the public square that has been made in recent years. Most worrying have been subtle moves in government hat have threatened the validity of religious arguments as a legitimate basis for rational decision-making in the public square, an argument highlighted by a statement made by President Obama in 2009 where he asserted that noone can know with “certainty” what God asks of us. This development is especially interesting to me in light of the interview that I conducted yesterday with Richard. In the opinion of many people that he knows and interacts with there simply isn't a place for religion in the modern world. People with religious beliefs are considered old-fashioned, and many religious teachings are considered ridiculous. Those that follow them are seen as “blind followers”. Richard also spoke about prevalent negative stereotypes that exist for Pentacostals and hardliners in Christian churches, and how for many people mentioning those religions conjures up images of people speaking in tongues and writhing on the floor or refusing to read Harry Potter books because they have spells in them. Then there are the well-documented incidents of sexual abuse in the Catholic church, and Richard mentioned some people he talked to on his mission who had gone to Catholic schools when they were younger and had been beaten by the Catholic nuns. Today, they wanted nothing more to do with religion. All of these arguments and stereotypes become very convincing, especially in the face of some very convincing rhetoric from the other side about gay marriage and “fairness”, or evolution and the scientific explanation for the universe. In the wake of all this, it makes sense why religion is in decline in Europe and will most likely continue to decline in the years to come.

-Ben

Excerpt from Journal - 25/5

Today was my turnaround day. With the echoes of yesterday's lack of direction still in my system, I found it difficult to find any more sense of purpose this morning after waking up around 10 am. Richard and I were both here, and we carefully avoided seeing each other, and both of us actually managed to shower and eat breakfast without seeing the other. I finally said good morning, and he quickly left for school, leaving me in my mode of hazed distraction for another hour or so before I shook myself out of it. Something interesting to note here though: I made a goal last Saturday that I wouldn't listen to any “normal” music until I went to the temple, and this morning, despite how distracted I was, I was still loyal to that commitment, which probably made it a lot easier for me to shake myself out of my state of distraction. I felt terrible after being distracted and directionless for so long though, and I made a series of short-term goals of things that I could do in the few hours before the May Ball, which I had to be at 6:30 pm at the Wandsworth chapel. I didn't do too bad either, although I nearly fainted after working out: a set of fifty-seven pushups followed by 120 crunches had me breathing hard, but the second set of forty-three pushups floored me (literally), and I hardly survived the set of forty-five second bridges that finished my four sets. Man, I am weak!! I left the apartment afterward and made my way across the street to pick up a Boris Bike to ride to Victoria station with my ears still ringing, and my whole body felt like I had just finished a track workout when I had actually completed a puny set of exercises. It was a good wake-up call though—I can't keep living my life in this lazy way or I'll be a dead man next time I try to heft any object heavier than a large book.

The ride on the Boris Bike to Victoria station was actually quite exciting. Driving on the left side of the road is really, really strange, but I found it strangely exhilarating to be on the road in such crazy traffic. It took me a good ten minutes to find my way around the bendy, unintuitive streets to the HSBC bank, where I got out 260 pounds to pay Carol for two more weeks rent. The way back was a piece of cake—just a straight shot down Charlswood Street. I wish I had figured out that path on the way over :P 

The rest of the afternoon had me doing my wash and cleaning my room, but most of it was spent working on a personal budget for the summer. First I counted up all my expenditures for the summer so far, and although I still ended up with about thirty pounds unaccounted for, I haven't kept a very good record of my expenditures. To be frank, I have never kept a good record of my expenditures, despite having attempted to do so at least four times before. I've just never had the time or the patience to do it, and I felt today that if I ever had time, I have it now, so I might as well do it and make a good job of it. I decided, in the end, on a $900 budget. That translates to about 562 pounds. With the days that I have left, that ends up being at about 5 pounds a day for every day except Sundays (when I don't spend money, of course), and excludes transport, which should be taken care of by purchasing season passes for each month until the last couple of weeks.  

Of course, this plan will only work if I'm committed, so that's part of why I'm posting this here today, as a part of that commitment.  This is going to work.  For the first time in my life, I'm going to live on a budget :)  So, although these first weeks haven't been characterized by perfect discipline or organization, I feel like I"m getting there piece by piece.  This budget is just one more piece.

Who knew? London reminds me of...Brasil?

I've been wanting to write a post about this for a while now :)

Because the fact is, London is far more like São Paulo than it is like the United States.  Or at least like Utah.  

Let's start with the general big-cityness of the two places.  People call London a crazy place, full of too many people and hard to understand streets. Well, London is absolutely gorgeous and the streets are a piece of cake in comparison to São Paulo.  However, a labyrinthine network of buses, subway, and trains that can be found in both cities, with the main differences being that Sao Paulo mass transit has a far greater emphasis on buses than the subway (London has so many underground lines the map looks almost like a Jackson Pollock painting).  

Beyond the makeup of the city itself, the cars are incredibly similar.  Car makers strange to any American, such as Peugeot, Citroen, Fiat, and Renault, are everywhere in Brasil and in London too.  Granted, the cars in London tend to be a bit nicer, and include a large variety of BMW's, Lexus, and Mercedes-Benz that I've never seen before, but the diverse small-car selection of Volkswagons, Chevrolets, and Fords are include many of the same cars I saw in Brasil. 

Then there is the food.  I remember being so taken aback by the strange food choices in supermarkets that I would find in Brasil.  Coming to London has helped me appreciate the impact of the European food market on the country.  Like in Brasil, in London there are those cream crackers that are like soda crackers except that they are far more refined and delicious.  And I used to laugh when people would say "bolo" in Brasil and think of these stout little cakes (usually about 10 inches long and 3 inches wide), when I would immediately think of a big, tall birthday cake, or at least a cake made in a pan.  Well, it turns out they sell those stout cakes in London too; in fact, I bought one yesterday just for the nostalgia of eating one again--it tasted exactly the same as the ones in Brasil!  

I don't even have time to address the massive amount of tea that is sold in Brasil, which of course is also sold in Great Britain, which is the world capital of tea, if there is one.  The only thing London is missing is the delicious french bread that is sold all over Brasil, but I guess I can understand them by not embracing that menu choice with open arms...national pride, I suppose.

The cell phone services are remarkably similar to the ones in Brasil as well.  I was surprised two times in the last few days because I heard someone's cell phone ring with a tone exactly like ones I had heard during my mission.  I don't know for sure, but I'm almost positive the same cell phone companies that exist in London own the companies Vivo, Oi, Tim, and Claro that dominate in Brasil, and the popularity of 'pay as you go' systems that are so common in Brasil (as big a ripoff as they are...it's what I'm using and it hurts) are common here as well.  I'm probably ignorant, but I've never even heard of someone using such a system in the US.  

Lastly, and this one applies less to England particularly but to Europe generally, but the most common greeting between a man and a woman in Brasil is a light kiss on the cheek, or rather a light touching of the cheeks while kissing the air next to the cheek.  While I was visiting in Brasil (no longer a missionary, and therefore no longer restricted to just shaking everyone's hand), I tried to perfect this approach.  Although I'm sure I wasn't that good at it, after 12 days it felt quite normal to give a kiss and sometimes also a hug when saying hello or goodbye to someone I was friends with.  I can't be more grateful for this, because when I said goodbye to Eliza (the Polish girl I met the other day), she turned her head toward me in the exact same manner as I had become used to while I was visiting Brasil, and almost without thinking I gave her a light kiss on the cheek.  

But listen folks, can you imagine how awkward that would have been had I not gotten all that practicing out in Brasil??  I could have thought any number of things had I not known what Eliza meant in that moment, and if I hadn't made a complete fool of myself, I would have at least hesitated for several moments and risked offending someone who I had just met.  Thankfully, London reminds me a lot of Brasil.  Indeed, going to Brasil for a dozen days before going to London was certainly the most effective preparation for going to London that I could have had, for it not only got me used to constant change, moving around, and living out of a suitcase again, but it prepared me for the culture shock of being in a new place among new people.  

In my case, similarities meant strengths.

Six days in, football-ed out

So, it's been a long while since I made a post here, and it's high time I did, since today marks the end of my sixth day here in London. The experience so far has been extremely positive for me. I love the host family I'm staying with, my roommate Richard, and all the people I have met here so far. I'm living here in the neighborhood near Pimlico station, which, incredibly, is in Zone 1 of London, and close to almost EVERYTHING. I've been able to get out and see Westminster Abbey, the Globe Theatre, the Roman Wall, and a few other scattered attractions with the group last Thursday, but I haven't ventured out much since. Now that things are settled here at the flat and I feel better organized in terms of my classes and project, I feel like it is time to hit the streets on my own.

I had a cool experience on Saturday. I had some free time during the afternoon, and there was a group of guys (I guess they would say "chaps" or "blokes" here) who were playing football in the cement area outside the apartment building. I watched them for a while from the kitchen window and realized they were playing with essentially the same rules as I used to play in Brasil. After a few minutes I couldn't stand to watch any longer, and with some encouragement from Carol (my host mum), I changed into basketball shorts and went outside and asked them if they would let an American play. They said yes, and I was surprised to find out only a couple of them were actually English. Most of them were immigrants, and they switched a lot between speaking in Arabic to each other and yelling out swearwords in English. Although it was foul, their language didn't bother me so much as it could have--they really didn't use the words for anything else except to have something to yell out when they were upset or excited about something.

With regards to the actual gameplay, I learned that using a large, very pumped-up football is quite different from using a small, half-flat ball like the ones we would play with in Brasil (new balls were a rarity there). This unforgiving ball tended to bounce off my foot at a random trajectory just as often as it would go where I intended it to, and I'm afraid I was unable to convince any of the players who were there that I had skills worth mentioning like I had been able to do with my Brazilian friends. I tend to play aggressive and run around a lot, but ironically I was the most help to my team while I was in goal--in the field I just got creamed. Still, many of the guys were very welcoming (including one nice guy in the group named "Osama"), and a couple of them invited me back to play with them the next Saturday. I think I'll take them up on it. While of course it's a ton of fun for me to play, it's also a way to be a part of a group of people I would never have access to otherwise. Lucky for me the field study is in London--if I was in New York City they'd have been playing basketball, and I would have been hopeless!

Journal Entry #34 - 4/9/12

Yes, this is #34, because technically, I was supposed to do a journal entry for last Friday, but I actually spaced doing it while I was in Las Vegas over the weekend. All that sun and dry air just makes me extra forgetful I guess.

In other things, I was able to do a lot of reading for my History of England since 1689 class. I love the section we're on now, because it's the 20th century, and involves a lot more of the recent history that I have become somewhat acquainted with as I've been preparing to go to London, and the events in the last fifty years have a lot more to do with the current state of England than anything else I have read about in the class.

I am particularly interested in the effect of the welfare state on the people in England. I wonder if it has anything to do with how religious they are. Did the "swinging sixties" throw the populace into a state of moral and religious disinterest that they've never really come out of it. That wouldn't seem to be the case, because the loss of religiousness that I have researched has been since 1983, which was the year that Margaret Thatcher won her second election as Prime Minister. Margaret Thatcher was said to have brought back an emphasis on Victorian Era values of home, family, and respectability, that seem in my mind to be connected to traditional religion. Hmm, I guess I should try to find more information from the UK census or other polls about the levels of religiosity in the 1960s and 1970s. I really haven't been paying much attention. I do know from a book about religion in the UK that religiosity took a serious hit in the 1960s. Perhaps it was the attendance that took the hit then, and more recently the loss has simply been in open affiliation. Perhaps the loss of open affiliation, too, is just a more open acceptance of the true lack of religiosity that already existed in the 1980s, but that the British were simply less willing to admit.

Looks like there's more reading for me to do...