Orientating

Monday started orientation at school, though my first order of business was to get over to the student affairs office and ask them to give me a forward on my student loan to cover the deposit and first months' rent on the studio. As it turns out, they were able to direct deposit the money to the letting agents, only it would take a day or so. Another couple of nights at the Globe - eh, I guess I can take it. The student coordinator also warned me that these temporary loans are usually due back in 28 days; the fact that my loan still may not have cleared by then is something I will choose deal with in 27 days or so.

That done, I went to the various orientation sessions. Aside from one talk to the entire group of LSHTM masters students (several hundred of us altogether), we mostly met in course groups. My course - Control of Infectious Diseases (CID) - has about 40 people in it, about the second largest course. My class group seems diverse and overall very nice, though I did have a couple of funny moments:

* One gal wandered in 15 minutes late for registration, sat down next to me, and went to fill out the (wrong) paperwork, until she realized she didn't have a pen. So she asked me for one. I fished one out and handed it to her. She thanked me for it, then promptly stuck it deep in her mouth and chewed thoughtfully on it. Eventually she tried to give it back to me; I politely told her she could keep it. Hmm...this is an infectious disease course; there's something almost too perfectly ironic about that.

* I came into the room early for the first course meeting and snuck onto the computer to check my email, which included a somewhat thoughtful bit of news. I took a seat and started drafting a reply email on the back side of my to-do list. The second person to arrive came in, asked if it was the right course, and sat down behind me. Then he got up, gathered up his stuff, and re-seated himself approximately 1.5 inches away from my right elbow. I made a bit of small talk, and when that ran out, I went back to what I was doing. At which point, this dude looks over my shoulder and asks what I'm doing. "Catching up on personal stuff," I tell him, hoping that will be sufficient hint that this is not his business. I go back to what I'm doing again. He proceeds to keep reading over my shoulder. Except that he wasn't really reading over my shoulder so much as he was sticking his head between me and my papers and openly reading them.

OK. Now. You may or may not know about my List. My list of things to do is a documentary of my life. It is my near future coded in ballpoint and sharpie. Without it, I just might die. I have been known to tear apart my apartment top to bottom trying to find a lost copy of it. I have considered keeping a spare copy of my list in the freezer so that if a fire destroys my living quarters, I will still know that I need to email my advisor and do a load of white laundry and pay the cell phone bill. People without frontal lobe disease should know better than to get between me and my list.

Kidding aside, I did not appreciate this maneuver on his part, nor that I reaffirmed several times that this was personal stuff, and he just kept craning his neck into my space. I finally covered it up, though I wondered if he wasn't going to literally reach over and turn it back over. So I tried my old tactic - that never seems to work, though I still feel quite sure that it should - that if I am unpleasant enough to a person, they will decide on their own to quit bothering me. Funny, it actually worked this time. I turned cold, and he quit bothering me. However, the course director - after lengthy logistical discussion - decided that we should turn to the person next to us, discuss our origins and hope and dreams and favorite colors, then introduce one another to the crowd. Who do I get stuck with? The dude with no sense of personal space. After all, he was still sitting with 2 inches of my right side.

Which returns again to the age-old question of whether this is to be chalked up to a cultural misunderstanding - as we were again duly instructed to do - or a personal issue. I spent time in Spain a couple of years ago (where this guy is from), and it's funny, I don't remember noticing a strange norm of everyone getting all up in each other's faces when they have been distinctly invited not to do so. Anyhow, this wasn't my finest moment of social graces, but since the other option was to tell this dude to get out of my face (since him continuing to read my personal stuff was not an option as far as I was concerned, and I had already tried the nice & subtle route), I figured that this was more or less a happy medium.

The rest of the class seems passably nice, most moreso than that. In any case, my main goal for the week was to get out of the divey hotel and into a place where, at least, the rings in the bath tub aren't actually sticky. I called Tuesday, but the letting agents hadn't received the deposit yet; on Wednesday they had received it, so I went back to Bayswater to sign a lease and get the keys.

Back at the lovely Globe, I packed up quickly - though I discovered that my volume of stuff had already begun to expand beyond all reasonable means. Things just pile up: the new cell phone (which I got when I returned the first one 'cause the battery never would charge), paperwork from school, notebooks. I thought about the best way to get all that through the 10-minute walk to North Gower - walking one rolling bag at a time, in a cab, by tube, whatever. What I had not intended to do was lug all that stuff by hand in the rain, and that's exactly what ended up happening. I managed to be ready to leave precisely at the start of rush hour, and the three cab companies I called didn't have any drivers for half an hour. I was already outside in the light rain, and I did not want to go back into the hotel at that point - largely because, to add insult to verbal abuse, just as I was leaving the friendly older manager of the hotel told me he just assumed I was drunk a lot. Huh? Apparently this had to do with the fact that as I was moving my stuff out, I dropped the key on a table inside as I was carrying heavy luggage out, and when the door slammed it locked shut, so I had to go get the master key from him twice. Ok, that's vaguely flakey on my part, but after all the garbage I put up with at this place, being told I must be drunk was just over a line I didn't think could possibly exist.

So instead of waiting inside for a cab, I started lugging. One hundred forty three pounds of capacity in the two rolling bags, and did I mention the carry-on too? I made it about half-way there, soaking with sweat and that misty rain stuff that leaves you wetter than actual rain drops, until I finally got to a stretch of Euston Road where there were black cabs going by regularly. I hailed the first one and he ran me the rest of the five blocks or so to North Gower. I think I tipped the driver about double his charged rate for actually being nice about this scenario, since a good number of people I'd encountered so far (woman in front of me at the counter at SFO, the cab driver from Heathrow), had sneered at me, "What, are you moving to London or something?" I was quite happy to be able to smile sweetly back and say, "Why yes, actually, I am."

At North Gower, I did a final gear haul up several flights of stairs, and I was home. This was actually my first view of my room, since I had switched after the last time I had been here. I'm glad I did - this one is substantially larger, and has a large window opening onto the street. Let me define "substantially larger": the whole thing is substantially smaller than my bedroom in Portland, including the kitchenette in the corner. And that's larger than the other one I had looked at. But it's very comfortable, and sometimes it seems to me that this is the way young, single people should live - it's efficient, it's high-density, it's minimally resource using but still very live-able. I wouldn't want to be in a place like this forever, but it's going to make my condo in Portland look like overkill when I go back.

The studio appears to be furnished head to heel in Ikea, including the fridge which did not work until they got workmen in there to jimmy it around. But it's all very new, and better yet, clean. What dust and dirt there was is perhaps the best kind: sawdust, indicating that no one has lived here since the contractors were in here to remodel it. Great contrast to the Globe, where all the stains and muck gave off a constant, vague sense of TMI about the activities of the former occupants. I ran several loads of laundry, took a long shower, broke out my down comforter from home, and felt clean for the first time in week.

And so the week went along, mostly filled with logistical catch-up - since I have an address now, I could get renter insurance, open a bank account, and get my parents to ship me the cord to my laptop, which I kindly left plugged into the wall at their house. With those things getting done, I finally felt like I had a home here in London.

Invisible Mazes

Tourists are kind of a weird breed, and I count myself among them. I spent the remained of the weekend having a look around London, particularly around the well-known sites down by the river. Even after the high season is well over, the crowds are thick - even wall-to-wall on some of the bridges - with people tripping over each other because half of them are only looking where they're going through the pixelated lens of digital cameras. And cameras are a funny thing too - I can wrap my mind around the idea of taking pictures of people you know in front of cliched monuments. I got that part. The part I don't so much get is the part about taking pictures of still objects in museums and the like - I think I used to do that kind of thing when I got ahold of a camera as a kid; I think I remember being told to quit wasting film.

This whole affair makes tourist destinations into a maze. There's the maze of people who have stopped mid-stream to take whatever has captured their attention that moment, and then there's the secondary and more invisible maze made out of the line of sight between the camera and its destination, and you stumble blindly through this maze at the peril of getting brow-furrowed looks from people who were hoping you would not be included in their vacation memories. In the British Museum, I found myself cornered as a digital video-wielding man closed in on me. leaving me know way out but through his line of site, as he walked along taping, of all random things, a shelf books. The advantage to all this technical overload (besides not being related to anyone who brings home digital video to bore their family with) is that with this amassing of tantalizing hardware hanging loosely off everyone else's shoulder, I feel pretty certain that petty thieves aren't going to be coming after me with my beat-up back-pack and twice-worn jearns.

In any case, I made the rounds: through Trafalgar Square, toward the river, back north along the western bank, past Westminster Abbey and the houses of parliament and 10 Downing Street. It's too much to take in at once; it seems like an immense privilege to know that I can stroll past here any time I have a few minutes to myself, for the whole year to come. Maybe that's part of what separates tourists from residents - the relax aspect, the lack of rush, the sense that I don't have to see everything today because it will still be here next month.

Which also brings up the question of how long I plan to stay in tourist mode, trekking miles a day to see as much as I can. I've always prided myself on being able to walk all day, no matter how bad shape I might be in for anything more strenuous. And that's still true, but then the question comes up of how many days in a row I can do this before I wear out my feet. And truthfully, the endless trudge around the city does start to get - dare I admit - somewhat tiresome after a while. I look forward to things starting up at school to give me a little more to do that is not entirely on my feet.

Meanwhile, things remain quiet but uncomfortable back at the lovely Globe Hotel. No further altercations yet. I really don't like being there - it's dirty, it's loud being on the ground floor, I don't feel like I can make the trek as far as the bathroom without risking a confrontation, and I just don't want to hang around there. At the same time, I'm not entirely sure how safe my stuff is without me there, and I can't even get insurance on the laptop and other assorted goodies until I get a more permanent address. Oh, and the laptop - that's another occasion for eye-rolling on my parts. Apparently, in the 143 pounds of junk I managed to stuff into my two suitcases, I did not bother to include the power cord, which my parents found still plugged into the wall in the room where I had been staying before I left to come here. D'oh! That means I have a couple hours of battery, but for the most part I have to hit up the local internet cafe for a pound or two per hour of online access. Another reason to get started with the school thing: they must have computer labs there, right?!

Altercations with Strangers in Foreign Lands

My reservation at the Meridiana only lasted til Firday night, and wouldn't you know it, they were booked full on Saturday night. After scrambling to get the deposit down on the flat most of the day Friday (heh, it turns out, if you want to wire money from an American account, you have to do some leg work ahead of time, which of course I did not do), I sobered up to the possibility of being homeless come Saturday morning. But Argyle Square is rife with B&B's, so I started my search right there. It just so happens that right around the corner was a little place called the Globe Hotel.


Now, this is probably one of those "universal signs for RUN AWAY!!", but the hand-lettered sign on the door said "Single Room, 20 pounds per night". That's about $36 bucks a night, very close to the center of London - a suspiciously great bargain, cheaper even than some of the hostels. It looked a bit divey, but they said there was room Saturday night, so I told them to hold it for me and I'd be over in the morning.

So the divey part - dark lighting, ancient creaking furniture, and what were those sticky spots on the carpet - is not new to me. This beat the room I stayed at in La Paz for $2 a night per person, where the door was just set into the frame without hinges and the bathroom was mostly just a sloped tile floor with a drain in the middle. In several stages I hauled my gear from the Meridiana to the Globe, where I had (big bonus) got a room on the ground floor, thus avoiding a repeat of my jet-lagged gear haul up two flights of narrow stairs at the previous hotel. All was good, I was moved in and set to spend the sunny afternoon exploring, until I walked out of my room.

On the staircase, a man was staring at me. Not the just-glancing benign kind of stare. The stare that makes you understand that someone hates you, very much, for reasons that I was entirely unclear on. After all, I had never seen this dude before.

So he's staring.

So I ask him, "Can I help you?"

He looks confused.

I say, "You're staring at me. Is there something I can do for you?"

"Uh, no."

"Then quit staring at me."

And at that he blows his top. I can't remember what his first words were, but within a couple of sentences (with no further input from me) he is shouting over and over, "I stare at you because you are girl! I stare at you because you are girl!"

I should interject here to say that I'm not aping his accent; this is exactly what he said. And I couldn't say for sure where he was from, but he was definitely of Arabic origin. And actually, I think what he really meant was "I stare at you because you are white girl," since I sincerely doubt he would have done this to someone of his own race. I should also interject that while I have an occasional tendency to dress outlandishly (as anyone knows who has seen my gold lame pants), at the moment I was in the rather frumpy combination of unflattering-at-any-weight jeans and a black fleece sweatshirt - really, not a whole lot to stare at.

I didn't say much more - probably told him to cut it out again - but he just got more enraged. He's on the stairs shouting, "What, do I insult you?" - a prospect which seemed to please him very much. After harping on that theme several times over (to which I replied "Nah, you just annoy me," which did not seem to help the situation), he changed his tune. "What, you are one of those weird people?" This, on the other hand, seemed to horrify him. I'm not entirely sure what he considers "weird", but after a few go-rounds on this theme, I sort of got the idea that he meant something along the lines of - well, she doesn't like men staring at her, she must be - oh, horror of horror! - gay. Which is always kind of a funny assumption on the part of homophobic men - as if my not wanting big, paunchy, balding, middle-aged men with anger management problems staring at me has any kind of bearing on my orientation...clearly, if I'm not attracted to that winning package, I must be gay!. It's also funny, 'cause, ya know, I'm boringly straight.

During all this yelling the manager (also with a thick accent, but probably more eastern European) had happened onto the scene, at which point the dude on the stairs started barreling down the stairs and toward me. I'm not sure I had time to consider what exactly he planned to do when he got to me, but in any case, he flew by me and through a doorway and down a flight of stairs to the basement. The manager was still standing there - he shrugged and told me that this guy had been living there for a year and was really a nice person. Uh huh. To paraphrase - oh, I don't know, it was probably Elizabeth Wurtzel or someone like that? - the guy who is nice to you but mean to the waiter is not a nice person. Similarly, the guy who is nice to men of his background but a raging jerk to women of other backgrounds - ya know, not on my list of "nice" people.

I asked the manager if I had reason to feel that I and my stuff would be safe staying here, and he said, "No." I must have looked really surprised, because he immediately asked what I'd said again and then said, "You should be fine." OK, I guess I'll have to take that on faith.

So I go out, half expecting my room to be trashed (not that I'd know how to tell...maybe more stains on the carpet?) when I get back. I considered moving again, but really just didn't have the energy for it, and besides, I was adamantly not giving up the 20-pound-a-night bargain for some guy who couldn't keep his hostility to himself.

Of course, this interaction begs the question underlying all intercultural conflict: I know, I know, I'm supposed to take weird interactions with strangers as a sign of clashing cultures, of misunderstandings based on different norms, things that could be worked out with open communication, all that cliche. Just like they told us at the international students' orientation, eh? But chalking this up to cultural norms pretty much means claiming that grossly a**h***-ish behavior is a norm for Middle Eastern culture, and I'm not really willing to go there either. It also helps to remember that every society, every culture, every group of people has its jerks - individuals that bother the heck out of everyone even within the cultural group.

So I don't know what this guy's deal is. I'm sure he's been through something that gives him the feeling that it's ok to take out his aggro thing on white chicks; I'm also quite sure that I have no intention of putting up with that quietly. But at least for the day, he hasn't trashed my stuff or shown up on the stairs to glare at me again. It'll be a few days before I can move into the studio, so we'll see how it goes until then...

The Subways of London

Today being the first day of international students' orientation at the school (which turned out to be rather optional), I planned to get over to Bayswater to the office of the letting agent from last night, put down the hold money, and bust back to school for the morning sessions. Knowing that there might a bit of a cash flow issue going on, I started out early, walking down Euston Road and hitting every ATM machine along the way. At least half a dozen refused me, with a message on the screen saying that my bank would not allow the transaction. Finally, outside the Euston rail station, I scrounged 100 pounds out of one - better than total denial, but not enough for the 165 pounds I needed to give the letting agent. I tried a couple more machines to no avail. Finally, I tried an ATM inside the station. The first two times I got a message saying that my bank refused the transaction. I tried once more. Same message. I swore under my breath (ok, not entirely under my breath!), grabbed the card, and headed down the escalator into the tube station.

Down several flights, on the platform level, I was trying to figure out how to get the ticket I needed to Bayswater, when a young man in a casual suit walked up behind me, excused himself, and said he believed what he had in his hand belonged to me. It was a wad of cash and a receipt - 70 pounds, about $120. I was speechless. And then I gushed about two dozen thank-yous (I think I even used a phrase like, "Bless you for doing this," gak!) before he finally smiled and walked away. The ATM machine must have spit out the cash desp5te the message to the contrary, and he must have followed me all the way down the escalators and around several corners to catch up. I was still in disbelief as I got my ticket together, passed through the gates, and continued toward the platform, where a man was belting out a rendition of "All You Need Is Love" on a saxophone. I smiled and thought: wow, I guess I'm in London. And somewhere, tonight, in London, there is a young man with glowing karma. I wish I could thank him again.

At the letting agent's office, I ran into a Czech couple I'd seen the night before at the building; they were there for the same reason I was. We chatted for most of an hour, waiting for the office staff, who were rather late. So much for the orientation program - this seemed more important to get taken care of. When I finally spoke with them in more detail, I ended up taking a slightly more pricey room. This is going to kill my budget, but I think it will be worth it for a full kitchen inside the unit, as well as getting off the ground floor where the smallest unit is. The larger room doesn't have a bathroom inside, but it was pointed out to me by my well-traveled father that sometimes, in these old buildings, there's no disadvantage to having a little distance between your room and your aged toilet. That probably wouldn't be a problem in this newly refurbished building, but that also means that more of the room is dedicated to living space, with the bathroom not counted in the square footage of the studio itself. I was short a few pounds with the higher price, but the agents took what I had for the hold, and - satisfied that I was no longer homeless - I finally headed back to school in time to catch a rather amusing presentation on street safety by a local police officer who appears to have taken a clue from Monty Python.

The rest of the day was uneventful except for ongoing ruminations on just how I was going to pull together the cash to actually get into the place, which was solved by arranging to meet with the student affairs coordinator on Monday to get an advance on my very delayed financial aid check. Which, you guessed it, has to be cashed back in the states, which will take an estimated 3-5 weeks even after signing it over to the school. What I'm going to live on in the mean while will be an interesting question, though long gone are the days when intrepid travelers like Hemingway made their way by pinching pigeons from Parisian parks to fill their stomachs: like any savvy modern traveler, I have Mastercard.

In the meanwhile, I am ashamed to admit that I have been eating an ungodly number of meals at the local Subway sandwich franchise, partly because I can get half a sandwich for 1.80 pounds, and partly because they're the cheapest eatery around that takes credit cards. Walking for miles every day and eating Subway...didn't someone famous lose, like, 200 pounds doing that?!

First Day on the Ground

I’m not sure exactly what I thought would be enough to keep my material needs satisfied for an entire year abroad, but apparently the sum of those goods weighs exactly 143 pounds. Somehow the Virgin Atlantic desk at SFO let me slide with that weight of goods - their limit technically being 70 pounds per bag - although I think this was largely due to the fact that my mother was holding much of my carry-on volume (come on, I couldn’t be the only person to ever wear two jackets onto an airplane!) during my check-in.

Sandwiched between an hour sitting on the ground at SFO before taking off and a half-hour sitting on the ground at Heathrow before de-planing was a largely uneventful 10-hour flight, during which I discovered two things I probably should have long since figured out about travel by flight: one, non-stop itineraries are worth any extra cost; and two, fuzzy slippers that you can sleep in as well as visit the bathroom in are well worth the space in your carry-on luggage.

At Heathrow I rapidly gave up on my plan to take public transportation into the center of town and hailed a cab for a mere £70 (roughly $125). Worth every last penny, I decided, when I realized that there was little reason to think I was going to be able to wrestle 143 pounds of gear up and down the escalators of the London underground, especially after a sleepless night in flight.

The hotel I’m staying at is tightly ensconced in the border between Bloomsbury – one of the fancier areas of London – and King’s Cross, which was once described to me by a London native as such: “You’ve lived in San Francisco, you know the Tenderloin, right? It’s like the Tenderloin.” Argyle Square is quite a find though – the small central square is surrounded on all sides by reasonably priced B&B’s (some more reasonable than others – especially now, after the high season has largely ended), and is yet within walking distance to the center of the city. The Hotel Meridiana is probably typical: small utilitarian rooms, but very clean and comfortable. And only £32 a night.

And they take credit cards – which is a good thing, because my first full day here has presented me with something of a cash-flow problem. I successfully pulled a couple hundred dollars out of an ATM machine at the airport, but this was largely used up by the taxi ride into town. This evening, every ATM I visited staunchly refused to give me anything, not even an explanation as to why. However, I stuffed this issue into the back of my mind and went about the day’s activities, which were mostly centered on a) figuring out exactly how to get to the school, at which orientation for foreign students begins tomorrow; b) finding myself a cell phone; c) looking into the housing situation; and d) generally making up for having done nothing yesterday despite my early arrival around noon (it occurred to me that while some people hit the ground running, I tend to hit the ground napping – which I happily did for most of the afternoon yesterday, time which I had intended to use to start getting settled).

So I bought myself a Vodaphone setup, located the school and used their internet connections to make a few appointments with letting agents, and in the evening I went to see the first of several places I had made contact with. The letting agent had said to come at 7 pm, which seemed like a strange time of day, but I arrived as planned on North Gower Street – only to find a line of people out the door waiting to see whatever waited inside. I figured whatever flats were left would be gone by the time I got to the head of the line (an hour later), but this turned out not to be the case. The studio flats (“bedsits,” as they are called) are tiny and expensive – but they have the advantage of being new (ie. clean) and within walking distance of the school. I reserved one on the spot – a ground-floor version of the smallest studio – and then began considering how I might come up with that sort of money in British cash. That little question might haunt me in the morning, but can wait for now. I headed back to the Meridiana and slept the blissful sleep of someone who has bothered to obtain full-strength sleeping pills before departing on a jet lag-inducing journey.

Sometimes the fast lane hits a fork

Since I started medical school, I have always planned to take a year off to complete a masters in public health degree. Last fall I applied to four schools for this program - my home medical (OHSU), Harvard, Tulane, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). I was accepted in the early spring to OHSU and Tulane, and Harvard took the opportunity to reject me for no less than the second time in my short academic career (the fist time was as a med school applicant). LSHTM rejected me from half a dozen different tracks (several of which I had never applied to in the first place), so I chose Tulane, put a deposit down on campus housing, and planned to move to New Orleans in August.

But then in May, an email came from London granting me a place in the program for Control of Infectious Disease. I accepted, and after a lengthy battle with financial aid offices, the UK consulate, and my own school, I pulled out of Tulane and accepted at LSHTM. And so, to quote a song you've probably never heard, Sometimes the fast lane hits a fork. Sometimes you're going along at a steady clip, and then comes a quick veer, and suddenly you're somewhere very different, and sometimes that is a very good thing. The decision to go to London – where two of the bombs in that recent attack went off within blocks of the school - meant (to paraphrase my father) that I dodged a very large bullet, a category four bullet named Katrina. Classes were scheduled to start at Tulane the day the first hurricane roared into the city, and the website Tulane set up to keep students informed during the storm (http://tulane.edu/students.html) reads eerily like a reverse itinerary of disaster.

So, in deference to the unforeseen fact that I appear to prefer bombs to hurricanes, I am in London for the coming year!