Last weekend I dashed home for a quick bureacracy-busting day - paying for/sorting out paperwork for my impending PGCE course, mainly relating to criminal records checks. It's complicated when you have to run checks in 3 different countries (note to future PGCE candidates: don't bother living abroad, it's not worth the faff).
I rushed to the airport straight from work on thursday evening, arrived at Stansted after midnight and was met by my VERY dedicated, patient and self-sacrificing dad at Liverpool Street at 1.45AM! Thanks Gerald, what a legend. Then Friday morning I was up at 8 to head to New Scotland Yard to be fingerprinted (the Australian police want my fingerprints). As you can imagine, the whole weekend was experienced through a slight haze of tiredness.
I think it was partly the sleep-deprivation that made me feel I was experiencing London very much as a non-resident. Navigating the streets on friday morning was confusing. I kept looking the wrong way before crossing roads and jumping with terror when cars appeared from directions I wasn't expecting. I fumbled with my Oyster card, forgetting I had to swipe out as well as in on the tube. Paying for anything was a hassle (due to my having forgotten all my PIN numbers in the 6 months I'd been out of the UK) and I saw my funds dwindle as I changed my newly weakened Euros to pounds (damn you, Greece!) I wandered through Victoria looking for a suitable bus and obviously looked so pathetic that a kindly man asked if he could help me.
This befuddlement made other cultural differences stand out more sharply too, though. I was struck by how tall everyone was and how many blondes and generally light-coloured people there were. (Oh god, I sound like I'm building up to an Aryan-loving neo-Nazi speech. I assure you I'm not. I'm just neutrally and with absolutely no ethnic bias commenting that the average Brit is still lighter-coloured than the average Italian, no matter how many sunbeds we abuse). And I was struck by how polite and friendly everyone was. I think I've become accustomed to telling people that Londoners are cold and not as chatty as Romans, and have come to take it as set in stone fact, whereas this visit shook my tidy stereotype. It's not true! Brits are incredibly talkative: almost every shopkeeper and security guard and admin assistant I encountered chatted away to me. There were 3 security steps involved in accessing New Scotland Yard - bag scan, security pass etc, and each member of staff greeted me, asked what I was there for, when my appointment was etc, and then explained in several sentences where I needed to go for the next stage. Since in general it was "walk over there and ask that man to scan your bag" I felt that pointing would have sufficed, but...hey. It's good to talk. Clearly.
On the other hand, I still felt stupid for saying "hello" when I entered a shop - in Rome you have to do that, but in London I felt like I might as well have carried a massive "Weirdo" sign with me, from the baffled reaction of the shop staff.
The other thing that really stood out was the ploriferation of incredibly drunk people in the evenings. On Friday evening, I was in Clapham for a drink with some lovely friends and made my way home on the good old number 37. On Saturday, I was in central London and took the tube and bus. Both times, walking through the weekend-night streets I was surrounded, stunned and occasionally accosted by massively inebriated hordes...moving me to exclaim "Mamma mia, the Daily Mail is right, this really is Binge Drink Britain" or "Broken Britain", as David Cameron would have it. Obviously I'm in no position to criticise drunkeness, excessive drinking or...well, anything really: those in glass houses, etc...But there certainly aren't the same levels of drunkeness in Roman streets or on Roman nightbuses. I don't know what it is exactly about Italian culture that doesn't encourage such reliance on alcohol for social purposes, but I will be giving it some thought over the next few months.
