Hello once again my friends and welcome back for Leah Lugs Crap week 4. I’m happy to report that there wasn’t actually that much crap lugging this weekend, even though my crap did continue to fall apart. I have, however, reached the point where I no longer care to fix my crappy crap and am now as a result walking around fashionable posh London with a duct-tape wrapped plastic watch simply because I’m too lazy to walk five minutes away to replace it (oh, hush, mother, it’ll get it done eveeeeeeentually).
Before I launch into my regular babble, I have been asked by the lazier (ahem ARTHI) of my friends to provide summaries of the week so that they don’t have to read ten pages of me talking about, well, me me ME so for those of you who are in agreement, here is a bulleted list of the week and the entry that follows:
1) I make fun of British people playing softball
2) I make fun of myself protesting Starbucks
3) I make fun of a strange looking woman
4) I make fun of a crazy man who shouts strange things at me in the Caffe Nero I have been driven to thanks to my protest of Starbucks
5) I make fun of British people
6) I stop making fun of people for five minutes to ponder pompously about London’s multiculturalism (this is the “deep” section, for those of you who prefer faux-philosophizing to humor about a relatively shallow lifestyle)
7) I “dance” aka accidentally punch several people in the face on the dance floor
8) I “kickbox” aka accidentally kick several people on the kickboxing floor
9) Arthi did you manage to make it through this list or was it too long? J/k my friend j/k!

Alrighty then, on to the real blog blog of this week’s blog! It was a particularly good week this time around, spent mostly catching up with old friends from my time spent here last year and making new ones to boot. The social week began with a nice rung with the Headband Harriers around Hyde Park, which reignited my love for the park and inspired me to sign up for Run London (http://runlondon.com/ ), a 10K run around Hyde Park come this fall. I came to this decision for several reasons which, for those of you who enjoyed the prior bullets, I have also decided to list below:
1) I run nearly 10K in a given morning anyway, I might as well put it to use
2) The run is North vs. South, and as I have nearly always been a South Londoner and far prefer living beneath the Thames than above it, I must run to defend my city section’s pride. And most importantly,
3) Because I have always lived in London without being a tourist, I refuse to buy any kitschy souvenirs and therefore have no possessions to prove that I have indeed lived or even been here. Run London will fix this problem, as it will provide me with a bright orange South London t-shirt. How’s that for Souf Pride!

As for other sports of the week, this Thursday I went back to my weekly softball game in Hyde Park with the patent agents which was fun as always, even if it was too dominated as always with making fun of me for being American, a woman, and nearly everything else under the sun. Now wait a second, you must be saying, what is this? Leah playing softball in London with a bunch of patent agents? What what whaaaat? How did this come about? To that I feel I must explain on two distinct fronts. For one, one of the aforementioned Headband Harriers, Cassandra, is a patent agent and when I saw people playing softball in the park last year on one of our runs, she suggested I play with her agency’s team. Thus, I became the random 21 year old girl playing softball in Hyde Park with 23-35 year old patent agents and the world will never be the same.
On the second front, for that other question I’m sure you must be wondering- yes, English people do indeed play softball, though, I would not say that it is exactly “their sport”. Part of what keeps me coming back from week to week is the pure joy of observing their strange version of laid-back gym class softball tied in with distinctly English interpretations of the rules. When I first started playing, I tried my best to impart my knowledge of the game and its many rules in as non-condescending a manner as possible, but I soon realized that such a task would involve me shouting the entire game and happily gave up the chore to follow whatever the players deemed as being “fair.” After all, who was I to speak anyway, given the fact that my hitting skills still tend to remain latent only until my father pitches? I had always thought my trouble when playing softball for school was that they pitched too fast and I wasn’t used to it, but at the patent agency softball games they lob the ball over the plate, and still I consistently hit out, despite my intimidating proper stance, making me realize the truth in the joke I’ve always made but hadn’t prior believed- I really can only hit if my dad is pitching the ball! Unfortunately, because the commute is rather long for him, this means that I probably will never slug a ball at softball here, though I do manage to slightly make up for it in the field as one of the few people who doesn’t feel that using a glove makes one a “sissy.”
Throughout my time at softball both this and last year I have run into a number of such new verdicts and rule interpretations, all of which it is hilarious to watch as an American. Some of these differences arise from confusion with cricket, and others derive from, well, a lack of understanding, but together they make for a fantastic show. For instance, when the ball is hit foul, nearly every person on both team shouts, “BEHIND!” rather than “foul”, which for many times caused me to look behind myself in anticipation of perhaps a semi-truck about to run me over from behind, rather than a ball that’s gone FOUL. In addition, there is also the gym class mentality of fairness, given the fact that many people playing have never done so before. This results in many incidents of someone hitting out only for one captain or another to say, “Oh no, that’s not, fair no no let her go back,” even though the rules clearly state she is out out OUT. The best mix-up, however, that I ever saw, came from this week with a wiry young agent from another team who had never played before. After several pitches, he connected with the ball and hit into the infield. He watched the ball roll onwards as everyone screamed, “RUN! RUN!” and the ball was lobbed to first for an easy out. In a state of confusion he turned to his team and asked, “Can one not choose when to run?” Indeed, one cannot.
That said, despite my “taking the piss” (aka teasing), I do have quite a fun time playing softball, especially because it generally takes about two innings before a mass of people say, “Right. Can we go to the pub now?” and wander off before the game can be completed. Thus, in its own way, softball in England = going to the pub, which is very English indeed.
On top of that, I’ve found that playing sports here is a great way to meet new people, something I’ve actually spent the entire week doing. Part of the thrill of meeting new people is, well, meeting new people, but another part of the fun is fielding the inevitable questions you get when people hear your accent. One of the very first questions is the very obvious, “So where abouts in the world do you come from?” I used to always answer, “New York,” figuring that no one would know where Ithaca was, but this always resulted in the problem of people thinking I came from the city which I feel guilty about taking “street cred” for. As a result, I figured I’d clarify things by instead saying, “Upstate New York, near Canada” to get across the idea that I lived far away from New York City, but this instead lead to the follow-up questions, “Is that in Manhattan?” Finally, I decided what the hell, I’ll just start saying, “I come from the states- Ithaca, New York” so that people would know I’m not from Canada but I’m not from New York City. To my surprise, when I talked to English people, the moment I said Ithaca, suddenly their faces lit up with amusement and recognition and immediately I had to begin dealing with yet another type of inquiry altogether. “Ithaca?” they would respond. “Is that like Ithaca from Road Trip? Ithaca University?”
Indeed, it seems as if Ithaca is a famous and well-known city all across Europe thanks to that dumb (but amusing) Tom Green movie, “Road Trip” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0215129/ ), where a bunch of college idiots travel across the country to visit a college boy’s girlfriend at “Ithaca University” (which, I always tell people here, does not actually exist!). Now when people ask me where I’m from, I tell them Ithaca and wait for that look of instant recognition, that squinted eye movement that says, “Wait a second, isn’t that from…” and I immediately respond with an eye roll and, “Yes, the same Ithaca from Road Trip, but there is no Ithaca University!”
Along the Ithaca front of things, I hear that we have finally gotten a new Starbucks, a fact that would excite me if it weren’t the fact that I am now boycotting Starbucks for life (how’s that for a nice transition? Ah, what can I say, I’m just Pullitzer Prize worthy author in the waiting). Now, why exactly am I protesting Starbucks? Have I gone back to my roots as a ten year old moral vegetarian, as a thirteen year old activist for recycling within our home, as a sixteen year old leader of Key Club, picking up trash on the side of the highway to improve its look? Am I protesting Starbucks’ likely use of nearly slave labor, of their raping of natural resources in poor countries, of their exploitative employment policies, of their ridiculously high prices?
Nope, I am protesting Starbucks because they wouldn’t give me the drink I wanted. Imagine that! Me! Princess Leah! The girl who lives amongst the fountains! Denied of the drink she desires! Indeed, I went to a Starbucks the other week and asked for a New York Princess drink, a blended iced skim latte, which sounds fancy and ridiculous, but which is, in all reality, simply iced coffee with skim milk put into the blender. I was informed by the manager that it is against company policy to make this drink and that I could instead have a frapuccinno, and when I told them I had consumed this drink at this very establishment before, they told me that was against their rules and they would look into who made that drink! Well, I (Princess that I am!) was not about to have this, so I complained to the corporate offices that I should be able to have the drink I want rather than being forced to buy their unhealthy and more expensive frapuccinnos which are loaded with sugar. In addition, in a fit of entitlement and dramatics, I may have in fact also argued (eloquently!), “If I were a diabetic, should I not be able to buy myself a cold blended drink without going into diabetic shock from the sugar of the only blended drink you have available?” The corporate office took a week to respond with a typical corporate doublespeak line, “We feel that the blending of our coffee drinks leads to a degradation in their quality” (which makes ABSOLUTELY no sense because a frapuccinno has coffee in it as well, and they’ll blend that and then charge you £3 for it!). So I promptly wrote back and informed them that fine, if that was there policy then I would go visit any number of their competitors that WOULD make me the drink I wanted and would never return to a Starbucks until they made the drink that I, as a customer, desired, rather than being forced to pay a ridiculous price for something unhealthy that I didn’t want. And I would tell all my friends to do the same! HRMPH! FEEL THE SNOBBY BURSTS OF ENTITLEMENT WAFTING FORTH FROM A PRINCESS’ BLOG!
Yes, I know I’m being petty, and yes, I know I should probably be spending my time protesting things that are actually a problem (e.g. world hunger, poverty, the degradation of women in third world countries, yada yada whatever blah blah blah) but all I want is my goddamn iced blended skim latte and if that means protesting Starbucks, then that means I won’t go back there ever again in my life! Unless of course they woo me back with free products (are you reading this, Starbucks execs? Yes a lifetime of free coffee would be nice, thank you very much). In making this decision, I was reminded of a story related to me only a few days before I left for London about my grandmother’s protest of a local shoe shop. Apparently she had bought shoes for my Aunt Laura when she was in elementary school, only for the small heal to break off the very first day. My poor Grammy received a call from a hysterical eight year old Laura at school that her shoes were broken, forcing my Grammy to come to the rescue with a new pair. Enraged, Grammy returned to the store with the damaged pair of shoes, only to be refused a refund and to be treated rudely, as if the poor quality of the shoe was her fault. From that moment on, she vowed to never return to that store and now, about forty years later, she will never set foot in that store (even if they’re having a monstrous sale! Now that’s commitment). Drawing on the experiences of my Grammy, I have vowed to never consume one more thing from a Starbucks, even if I am, for some reason, climbing Mount Everest and in the midst of a particularly bad bout of hypothermia to find at the summit a lone Starbucks, offering lone mountaineers a warm blanket and a large mug of coffee (priced $20.99 by then, just because they COULD in that location), you can be sure I will be refuse their “generosity”!
As a result of my protest, I have been frequenting the many Caffe Neros which compete with Starbucks RIGHT NEXT DOOR to them, something I don’t mind doing because I prefer Caffe Nero anyway. However, this week such preferences were tempered by a weird experience I had on the Caffe Nero mid way down King’s Road. This Caffe Nero has always struck me as being particularly odd because it is filled both with super-posh clientele, businessmen and women meeting at nearby tables, rich mum’s rolling their prams back and forth to soothe their babies to sleep while prattling on about their most recent holiday to some far off posh location, and with very, very, very, extremely strange people. One such person is a lady I like to call Feathered Cruella Devil as she looks like, well, a feathered version of Cruella Devil. This woman appears to be about 90 years old and is swathed in black clothing, a dramatic black hair wrap, and a shock of windswept grey hair. However, what is stranger even than her funeral dress is the fact that on her face are feathers. That’s right, feathers. When I say this, I don’t mean to imply that she is wearing a hat with feathers that dip down elegantly over her face, nor do I mean to say that she is hairy like a man. When I say that there are feathers sticking out from her face, I mean to say that there are feathers sticking out from her face. What’s more, it’s not even as if she was born The Feather Lady and has a face entirely covered with feather’s like a bird’s wing. Rather, there are just a few random feathers sticking out from various places around her face. I don’t know why, there just are, and I know it’s not a fluke because I go back there every week and there she is, sitting in the back, smoking dramatically and staring ambiguously from behind dark thick Gucci glasses as if there weren’t feathers sticking out from her face. The glasses themselves are a strange completion to the ensemble as they, along with her stooped body posture complete with her legs facing one direction and her torso facing another, make it entirely impossible to tell just where it is she’s looking from behind those monstrous things. All in all, it is entirely discerning.
Earlier this week, I was sitting in this very Caffe Nero, trying to avoid Feather Lady’s glare, when someone approached me who was even stranger than the feather lady (yes, such a thing can be achieved). I was typing away on my computer, doing my own thing, and feeling quite cool as I was wearing a black and grey striped tank top, straight from the Indie scene up in Camden. All of a sudden, an older man who looked proper enough in his suit and tie came raging up to me from the back of the store shouting, “YOU LOOK LIKE AUDREY HEPBURN IN THAT SHIRT THAT SHIRT MAKES YOU LOOK LIKE AUDREY HEPBURN! HOW DARE YOU LOOK LIKE AUDREY HEPBURN!” He continued like this for nearly a minute as the rest of the store turned to stare at us, curious as to what all the fuss was about. As has become my way, I sat there calmly, not all that perturbed, watching the man’s spit fly in every which direction out from his slobbering mouth, wondering to myself, “Wait, is he saying I look like Audrey Hepburn? Is that… an insult?” When he grew tired of shouting at a person that wasn’t perturbed by him or even in the least bit responsive, he turned to the woman at the table next to me and shouted, “SHE LOOKS LIKE AUDREY HEPBURN AND IT’S INSULTING!” and then pushed through a crowd of people to sprint onto the street and tell the news to random passerby.
As the crazy man ran out of view, the woman and I made eye contact and shrugged, not entirely sure if I should be insulted or not. I mean, part of me feels like I should take my compliments where I get them. Hey, the man says I look like Audrey Hepburn, and even if that’s apparently insulting, at least at the end of the day I get to look like Audrey Hepburn! Pretty cool for me, no? I smiled confidently to myself as this realization dawned upon me (Audrey Hepburn! Not bad, Leah, not bad at all!) and was beginning to feel pretty good about myself when I accidentally looked too far to the back and noted the feather lady’s Gucci sunglasses, fixed with disdain directly upon me. “Oh God,” I thought to myself, looking very quickly away. “I bet she thinks I look like Audrey Hepburn and is insulted too.”
Ah, this is where my protest of Starbucks has lead me! But one must stick to their principles, Crazed Ranting Suit Man and Feather Lady Cruella Devil alike! Thankfully, that night I received a nice break from the crazy people, hitting the town with another one of the Headband Harriers, Nick, his girlfriend Laura and a bunch of their friends. To do so, I had to break the ban Becca and I placed on clubs with names involving the elements last year (the “yuppie” club we went to last year that I wrote about in last week’s entry, where we were shouldered out of the way by even the waistaff, was called Fire or Water or some element like that) to go to a sushi place/techno bar/a kind of place I had never been to before called Fluid up in North London near Farringdon. I had a blast out (which made up for the Audrey Hepburn incident) and met a whole slew of new people whom I’d love to hang out with again. Perhaps the most fun was spent making an ass of myself on the dance floor (as per usual), where I quickly proved that I was out of my league. One of the French guys in the group (whose name I don’t think I ever learned) took me out for a spin on the dance floor, where I quickly lived up as my reputation of being completely rhythm-less (ahem a Levine/Kaminsky) and smacked several people in the head while doing spins, most notably the pseudo-suave guy I was dancing with. Whatever. I have a reputation as a poor dancer to live up to, so why not stick to my guns?
Indeed, it was a weekend spent proving my reputation as a terrible dancer time and time again as the very next day my new buddies Laura and Savi (whom I had met that night in Fluid) invited me to take part in their morning kickboxing class at their local LA fitness. Because I got lost on the way to the club, we had to very quickly fill out a guest form (Does the guest have: Heart Problems? N Diabetes? N Dizziness? N FOR THE LOVE OF GOD JUST LET ME IN THE CLUB) and sprint into the class without a chance to get oriented or nervous about doing something I was entirely too uncoordinated for. Within seconds of sprinting into the class I realized that my gym shorts and oversized Ithaca Baseball t-shirt were entirely out of place as most of the women were wearing cute little sports bras and clingy pants. However, I decided long ago when I lived in NYC for a summer that I absolutely would never wear such outfits to the gym because I will be damned if I have to look cute while I’m sweating out of pores I didn’t even know existed and bouncing/jiggling, once again, in places I never knew existed. So I gritted my teeth and determined to blend in despite my clothing, a feat that proved to be impossible to master, given that nearly everyone already knew the steps (even the flabby old people!).
In completing this kickboxing class, I was reminded of watching the ROTC crew doing step aerobics one morning at the gym while I was a sophomore at college. I remember getting into the gym at some ungodly hour for a student (I think around 7AM) to find the gym staff crowded around the door to the basketball court nearly collapsed in hysterics. Intrigued both by this sight and by the loud, energetic aerobics music blaring throughout the building, I joined the gym staff to peer around the door. What I saw was perhaps the funniest sight I have ever seen in my entire life (funnier, even, than the Feather Lady). There, in the middle of the gym, were the ROTC boys doing step aerobics. For those of you who don’t know what ROTC is, it is the training course for undergraduates who will become officers in the armed forces after graduation. Yes, that’s right, there before me were the bulky, awkward, uncoordinated, manly men future officers of the armed forces attempting to do step aerobics to the fast beats of aerobic music and the energetic shouts of a cute, cheerleader-esque fitness instructor. I, too, collapsed in a fit of hysterics as they shuffled their feet awkwardly, flailed their limbs into one another’s faces, tripped on their own (or other’s) feet, and generally became entangled in their own bodies.
Yes, I did laugh very hard and have continued to laugh very hard at just the memory of this incident, until I attempted to do kickboxing and managed to look exactly like the ROTC boys. I maintained a good attitude and even managed to enjoy myself as I mirrored the instructor and hopped around the floor, but I came very close to kicking several people and tripped over myself multiple times, nearly landing on the floor. Furthermore, I was the only person in the class to attempt doing BACK kicks with my FRONT foot, a point the instructor was kind enough to point out in front of the entire class (“Oooooh,” I thought, as I changed feet. “That makes it MUCH easier.”). However, I found the most amusement not to be my own embarrassing performance but rather the moment when the instructor put on the song, “The Final Countdown” by Europe. For those of you who don’t know Arrested Development, this is the song that the ridiculous, “joke of the family”, Gob, plays during his awful magic shows, leaping around like a monkey and flailing his limbs to the beat of the music. It took every ounce of discipline I had not to transition into my Gob dance and sashay around the floor like a cocky, brash magician that doesn’t know he’s an idiot. For a glimpse of the dance I was holding back, check out Gob dancing here:

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-7829620529078237458&q=gob+final+countdown

Ah, with my ROTC- and Gob-like moves, I was much better suited to the following picnic we had in Green Park (near Buckingham Palace) and the many hours spent chatting while consuming croissants, Spanish omelettes and fresh fruit. Altogether, it was a fun week, and through such activities out at the club, running, and making an ass of myself at kickboxing, I have managed to establish a much stronger social network here with people from all around the world. That, in itself, is yet another thing I love about London- the number of people from foreign places. At this point I have friends from England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Brazil, Spain, South/North Korea, China, Malaysia, France, Canada, Australia, Germany and New Zealand, which not only makes it easier to travel the world (cheaply!) but which gives me exposure to a large variety of cultures that I would never otherwise come into contact with. Growing up in Ithaca, I have always considered myself to be an open-minded person who warms to people from all different cultures, but I think over the years since 9/11 I have let some racism slip in under the radar. This, I feel, is unavoidable, especially for Americans who do not travel and are only exposed to the media within the states. With all the messages about fear and danger constantly in the news, it’s hard not to start feeling some suspicion of certain people with strange customs and different skin. For liberal, open-minded people like myself who pride themselves at being accepting of all sorts of people, such racism is almost more dangerous than the more overt racism that classic racists display. With such people, their hatred is right at the surface, unabashedly on display for every person to see, but for people like me, it becomes a sort of quiet racial profiling. While we would never commit an overt act of hate against people who fit certain profiles, we still tense up when people who look a certain way sit next to us on the tube or on a bus, or walk too close to us on a busy street, because how do we know they’re not the next terrorist, how do we know they’re not someone to fear?
Such fears are created and stirred by the government, the media, and to be fair, the actions of terrorists themselves. Hey, if Muslims are blowing themselves up on the tube, it’s only natural that there’s going to be some suspicion of people who look just like them. In most places in the states, it is easy to let such thoughts slip into your psyche because you never have to confront such people or see them on a daily basis. There aren’t legions of women in burkas pushing strollers through your parks, or one Muslim for every two white people on your daily tube route. These people are truly “Those People”, an alien, an “other” that you never are forced to confront.
In contrast, living in London you must see and interact with these people every day. A foreigner is far more likely to meet another foreigner in London because it’s only the new people who are looking to meet friends, so as a result, someone like me ends up meeting people from all around the world. For me, this has forced me realize I had stereotypes ingrained in me that I never even knew were there. Even for non-Muslims, I had pictures of what people from all different parts of the world were like- what they talked like, what they acted like. Yet now I have friends from all these places and have come to see- wait a second, hey, everyone is basically the same. Everyone wants the same things in life. The conflict between people comes not from major differences in their nature, but from a mutual desire for happiness that is achieved in radically different ways. This struck me perhaps the most a couple of weeks ago when I was watching the World Cup and began a conversation with several Saudi Arabian girls. Together, these two girls were friendly, giggly, funny and kind, offering me some of their candy and conversing with me about our various lives. These weren’t the Saudis you see on TV as the providers of funds for all sorts of terrorist activities, these were two students just out for a good time. Of all the gifts that London has given me, this is probably the most valuable- this acceptance of all things foreign on the realization that all things foreign are really quite the same.
In this way, these new experiences in London are truly part of what I call my Third London chapter. The first chapter was when I studied abroad with a bunch of great American kids in the spring of my junior year. In this chapter, I learned how to be young and fun, how to go out to clubs and dance around like an idiot and wander around the city at all hours of the night like a rock star. I learned how to let go of my inhibitions and truly have fun like real kids do, rather than just studying and getting good grades and spending my life in the library. The second London chapter was spent working at Ben & Jerry’s and living with Becca in a flat in Wandsworth. In this chapter, I continued my quest for fun while also struggling to adjust to a life without a safety network of many friends. This chapter was very much based around independence. I found two jobs that I loved, I paid my own rent (for the most part ahem thanks mom and dad), I paid for my activities, and I made my life work on my own terms. Going back home, I applied these many lessons to a much more boring area of the world (Rochester) and battled to continue having fun, making new friends, establishing myself in new groups, and strengthening the friendships I had. Together with my time in London, I learned how to love life no matter where I was, to make my life happy on my own terms despite the circumstances.
Coming back this time around for this third chapter, I have had to re-teach myself these lessons time and time again, while learning new lessons at the same time. This time around, I no longer have the young American peers to rely on as a safety net. There is no one to go home to when I need to complain about my day or to identify with me over the struggles of being a foreigner in a place where many people make fun of you non-stop for having an accent or, you know, a horrific foreign policy. There is no one person I constantly have as a guarantee for fun on a Saturday, as a guaranteed companion for the clubs or other festivities. While at first this was very hard for me to adjust to, it has, in the end, forced me to adapt to a new sort of life, and to complete yet another step in my growth toward adulthood. I take “social risks” now that I probably wouldn’t have taken before simply because if I don’t take these risks, I’d never leave my apartment. I am no longer scared to approach people and make friends, to text and email people who I’m not sure actually like me/would want to hang out, and I suggest doing new things I would formerly have been scared to do. In other words, I am open to so many things I would never have done before, if only because I have no other choice. I have to have fun, I have to make friends, I have to take risks or else I’ll have wasted thousands upon thousands of dollars to come to a place I love and spend my life locked up in an (admittedly incredibly nice) apartment by myself.
These are lessons I feel are crucial for most people to learn, but especially for young people on the brink of adulthood. So, I thank you, London (and my parents ahem) and travel in general for providing me with the lessons that are essential to the development of a young girl into a woman. Travel is certainly addictive, but in the end, it gives back to you in ways you would never guess.
That’s all for this week. I’m off to plan more travel for the months to come!