06 June 2009, Saturday

In London, during my stay there from 2008-09, I lived in the completely opposite side of town from where I lived in the three months I spent in the city in 2006. If a person wants to know where in London is the complete opposite of Regents Park, where I lived in 2006, they would say Waterloo.

In '06 I lived inside Regents Park. Yes, quite literally inside a park. My school building and residence were next to Queen Mary's Garden, a famous rose garden, and the very large lake and park mentioned often in Virginia Woolf's novels. Transportation into the park was forbidden at sun-down by very large gates that blocked the entrance, closed by park officers. All I heard at night were sounds from the water birds of the park and occasionally, if the wind were right and it was just quiet enough, the bell from the St. Marylebone Church tolling the hour a block or so away, the same church in which Elizabeth and Robert Browning were married.

In Waterloo, the church 10 feet away from my apartment tolled its bells on Sunday every 10 minutes -- from 9:00 - 12:00. My surroundings here were not black swans, but The National Theatre, an embankment to the river Thames filled with restaurants and shoppes, Big Ben and Parliament, and The Eye. In other words, a tourist trap. Here I was stopped at least once a day by some person with a map of London in their hand, asking directions. Here at 6:00 a.m. I woke to Londoners driving to work, and the many people who walked the sidewalk under my second story flat.

Each place offered a different perspective of the same city, and similarly I experienced a different side to human life. In Regents Park, among the ideality of a park in the fall, the leaves of the trees outside my window changing into beautiful golden browns, living with a young woman whom I spent most days with, and travelled to Vienna and Paris with. We had an unseasonably warm fall in '06; even in December I wasn't wearing a heavy coat. In Waterloo, during the unseasonably cold fall and winter, I was stuck by myself in a one room flat, surrounded by flat-mates who I only saw when they were in the kitchen or either one of us were returning or leaving our rooms. At Regents College I woke at 8:00, walked to the refectory in the same building, and walked to class just the same, Williams poised at his desk, relieving the nighttime residence guard, his jubilance making anyone sour instantly glad. Waterloo Bridge -- famous for its view of the City on one side and Parliament on the other -- had to be traversed every day in order to reach Kings College for class and Tesco's for food. Once in a while I passed someone I knew from a class and said "hi." About as much as I would ever say to them. Even the picturesqueness of the river Thames below and the buildings on either side was not quite enough of an "upper" with the bitter winter wind hitting one the ten minutes it takes to walk the bridge.

In short, it was not so great in Waterloo as it was in Regents Park. But I think I gained from both an equal -- how ever opposite -- view of life. My experience at Regents Park was imbued with warmth (even literally) that Waterloo (again, literally) was not. The ideality of the one, and the -- what one may deem -- normal reality of the other, were both true. I like to think of my time in London in '06 as an experience that taught me the potentials life have to offer -- in short, a life that one is proud to live, with people you get along with (and, even, love) and one that, when you look around, is beautiful and perfect like well tended roses. My time in Waterloo was scattered with only handfuls of moments where I was happy, usually in a theatre seeing a well-known and acclaimed actor, and productions that have never been produced so well and never will quite reach that potential again. This was what my experience in London this last time was about. Seeing, for the first time, the dark side of a life that is not beautiful or well-loved, and learning -- whether when in a theatre or walking the streets of London, or visiting Cambridge University -- that although life cannot always provide the ideal, it is important to grab the moments when it does.