I profusely apologize to my readers for not updating this page for almost a month. Some sort of lame writer's block (lame because I'm not really a writer and hence shouldn't have such problems) took over and its evil spirit kept me away from the blog.
I am, however, back and have quite a bit to tell. The next couple of entries I will post as I write them, which means some of the events described will be out of chronological order. To alleviate this problem, dates of the events will be mentioned in every post.
I am currently writing this out of a computer classroom in a University of Sussex dorm and thus I will start with the story of how I arrived at this location and what things are like here. As I am reluctant to purchase a camera of my own (I think it will be too much hassle trying not to lose it and also a hindrance to interacting with people, a challenge for me on its own), and my friend's camera died during the first day of my stay, this blog entry along with some private notes and memories are all that will remain from the trip.
In the morning of October 5th (a Wednesday) I flew with RyanAir from Baden Airpark to London Stansted Airport. In order to save money, however, I took a train from Konstanz to Karlsruhe the night before and had to spend about 7 hours at the latter's main train station. This stretch of time was actually welcome, because a lot had accumulated on my mind over the past three weeks or so and I had no real opportunity to mill it all over until that night. I also managed to grab a couple of hours of sleep on a stone bench, an extremely cheap and dry croissant from some eatery, two cheeseburgers from McDonnalds (compensation for using their wireless). Overall, putting aside a sore neck and a slightly chilled shoulder (both were fine the next day), it was not as bad as I had expected.
The bus express that was to take me from the train station to the airport was half an hour late, but luckily, there was still enough time to register for my flight. Honestly, I have no idea how I managed to get my backpack through as carry-on luggage. RyanAir has a very strict cabin baggage policy that only allows bags of certain dimensions to be taken on the plane. My guess is that this is to prevent people from taking suitcases with them and not checking them in as baggage to avoid fees. There was an evaluation box set up in front of check-in that allowed one to test if one's carry-on met the dimension requirements. My backpack barely fit into this box all on its own. Then there was the sleeping bag attached to it that did not fit at all. I guess what saved me was that the weight was under 10 kilograms and that seemed to be what was being checked most stringently.
It was my first RyanAir flight but I have to say there was nothing special about it. I chatted with an old German couple headed to London for a pan-England tour ending at York. I listened to Credence Clearwater Revival for about 30 minutes. I stared at the yellow seat in front of me. That was it. The plane set wheel in Stansted and I was on British soil.
I will now digress slightly to say a couple of words about how small I think the world is. Because this particular trip was organized slightly haphazardly and I didn't advertise it as much or as well to my fellow exchange students in Konstanz, I was to undertake my journeys alone. To my surprise and joy, however, I discovered that Susan, a South-African girl from my September orientation was on my train to Karlsruhe and Mikolt, a fellow fencer and also someone I knew from the orientation program, was on the same plane to London. Hurray to my friends being everywhere I go!
I originally was going to take a train from Stansted to Brighton. Upon talking to the ticket sellers, however, I discovered that it would be almost two times cheaper to take a bus to Victoria Station and from there to Brighton. I decided to do that.
The bus I took from Stansted to Victoria came equipped with wireless (very useful for notifying friends about changes in travel plans), seat-belts (apparently, it's law in Brittain to wear them in buses) and a driver possessing a very Brittish sense of humor. He started out by describing one of the stickers on the windows as a "hammer, but not really a hammer... Noone really knows what it is, so I just call it that.", then proceeded to mention a phone number that we could text with our opinion of his driving. He asked that if we had something good to say about him, his name was Paul, if not - Roger.
The passengers on the bus were not quite so jolly. There was an old couple behind me who were arguing about everything possible and mentioning divorce from time to time. Then there was a man who started talking into his phone to some Steve on the other end. There happened to be a Steve on the bus, who, having heard his name, thought he was being addressed and was very put out once he found out this was not the case. He complained for at least twenty minutes about how people answer their phones too loudly in public transportation or how that they answer them at all, or that there are too many Steves roaming the country... I didn't quite understand, because he spoke cockney. Overall, I have yet to hear English used to produce so much miserable and grumbling talk as on that bus ride. Luckily for me, my iPod still had some battery left, so after a while I drowned all of this noise in Dire Straits.
The traffic in London was quite insane and so I got to Victoria station just in time for my connection to Brighton, not with 55 minutes to spare, as the lady that sold me the ticket said. After that it took a more than an hour to get out of London onto the highway headed south.
The long time I spent busing around London let me make some first observations of the city. First of all, it's big and busy, much busier than I thought it would be. The traffic is comparable, I think, to that of New York City, with constant congestion and chaos reigning the streets. The same can be said about the plethora of shops and human characters crowding the streets with their bright (and not so bright) colors.
Secondly, the architecture is almost uniformly of classical (often) empire style. This left me with a feeling of cold grandeur associated with the city in general, similar to the feeling I got from the bus tours of Berlin that I went on between in 2004 and 2006. Another thing I noticed were the rows of townhouses marching along the side streets somewhere into the innards of the megapolis. Their monotonous uniformity made one think of a drearily industrial dystopia.
I didn't really get to see the countryside because in Britain, just like in the US (and perhaps every country that has them), the highways were almost always enveloped in a sheath of trees. In addition, it was four in the afternoon and the day, being cloudy, was starting to turn into night.
I arrived at Brighton Coach Station shortly after half past four and was greeted by chilly wind and rain from the sea and my friend, Caity.
We went to the university of Sussex, a 30 minute bus ride north of the city, deposited my backpack and sleeping bag there, and came back for a short introductory tour of the city. I will give more details about Brighton in a future blog post. For now it will suffice to say that we stumbled around for a bit, mostly looking for cheap dinner. We ended up settling for a 7 pound all-you-can-eat buffet at some Italian place in the center of town, then stuffed ourselves with impressively tasteless pizza and pasta along with some decent salads and boiled eggs. We then went home, to bed.
Thus, after spending 20 hours on the road and using 3 forms of transportation (4, if one counts walking), I began my stay in the UK.
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