TimWoolery.net Documenting the Journey and the Learning Curve

17 – Somewhere on the Circle or the Bakerloo

DS17 - Somewhere on the Circle or the Bakerloo

Bad news, San Francisco.  I used to think you were cool.

I used to think your Painted Ladies and your museums and your sweeping hills and your panoramas were all I needed to be happy in a city.  But guess what?  I was wrong.  I used to think that San Francisco was what they meant when they said "cosmopolitan".  Again, I was wrong.  I used to think California's history was rich and fulfilling - that all you needed to know was what had happened in the last 150 years or so.  Dates starting with "18" used to impress me - if you said it happened in the 1700s, I might swoon.  But now I've got a different perspective and all it took was 4 days in London.

London was a city in my imagination for many years - books, movies and TV shows were as close as I got.  My mom brought home the board game "Scotland Yard" and we had a ball going around imagining how to get from here to there in the streets of London by cab, bus or the Tube.  Still - it was as close as I got.  Never went overseas, never ventured farther from home than one trip to New York when I was 19 and two trips to Florida after my brother got married.  I considered myself well-traveled; I can navigate a US airport like nobody's business.  I can rent a car with a smile.

The concept of traveling to Europe was something that both fascinated and daunted me.  I heard horror stories - passport troubles, exchange-rate nightmares.  I heard the stories about people who refused to eat anything but McDonald's whilst in Europe and other stories that suggested that US tourists put a major dent in the country's foreign policy.  All of that stuff conspired to keep me in limbo about going away.  But I still couldn't get it out of my mind.  I wanted to travel to distant places - see landmarks and historical places that I'd absorbed both in school and personal interest.  When I'd listen to the Rolling Stones and they'd mention places like St. John's Wood or Knightsbridge - I'd think of those places and with a little dig of shame realize that I knew nothing about them.

I'd watch movies about England, read stories and know that Harrod's was a big department store or that Bond Street had clothing stores.  I knew that they had ring roads, roundabouts and identified all highways with letters like M or A.  But how much can you know about a place from movies?  Do they laugh there?  Do they shop for food the same way?  Do they get frustrated about politics or road construction?  Do they care about Britney Spears' divorce and child-custody fight?

Traveling to Europe was also daunting because, until now, Woolery's didn't go that far from home.  The last Woolery to go to Europe was riding a tank.  That time we all went to British Columbia, I felt so mature having ordered a coffee in broad daylight at 10PM in Gaslight Square.  Wow, I've been places - I've been to Vancouver!  That's not to knock Vancouver - lovely town, and all that.  Point was, I've never been that far from home...period.  As I got older, the lack of travel started to affect me more as I began working with people who clearly had traveled.  The guys who bummed around Europe after college or took cross-country bicycle rides.  The kid who spent 3 months in Tokyo and he was 5 years younger than me.  The sum total of this was to make me realize that it was a big, beautiful world out there and I really was missing something for not having gone out and seen it.

After we got married and started taking vacations of our own, me and The Lady got our feet wet by making all of our vacations traveling ones.  First to Phoenix in 2002, then the Highway 1 road-trip in 2004, then to Alaska in 2005.  Along with Alaska, I took a 5-day roadtrip to Montana and back and it made me realize that I am a traveling man.  Sure, a week in a hotel somewhere with room service is nice but actually getting out and smelling the air in a new place is something I really enjoy.

Of course, anyone will tell you that having a kid will put a serious cramp in that kind of lifestyle. When Little Man joined us in 2006, I really wasn't sure how that'd change my ability to drag us from place to place.  I was afraid our traveling days were over.  I'm happy to report that the opposite is true and that the answer to the question (how do you travel with a kid?) is simple: you just make it work.  It flies in the face of the Uber-Mommy logic that permeates the parenting scene in the US.  Oh! (shocked gasp) - how can you take a kid to those dirty old cities!  How can you take him to those old museums!  What if he knocks a statue over?!  I guess it's worth mentioning that Little Man came within a foot of a pressed-metal wall piece from the palace of Ashur-Banapal at the Louvre.  I'm sure it made perfect sense to him and, compared to most 1-year-olds, he's behaved like a prince.  I stopped him in time; no harm, no foul.

Yes - we got tired.  Yes, we got cranky.  Yes, we had to buy power converters and yes, one of them burned out my battery charger from the states.  Yes - when you travel, things go wrong.  You should expect that.  Outside the Xanax-and-Valium processed reality of a theme park - all trips have an inherent amount of risk.  You'll see dirt, you'll see homeless people - you'll have random street folk in Paris come up to you and go "Do you speak English?" and then hand you a note that tells of their cancer and coming from Bosnia and if you're dumb enough to stand there and read it, one of them might sidle up and lift your bag or wallet.  You'll have drunken chavs start shouting on the tube about Americans and you'll keep your mouth shut and stare at the wall.

The risk simply doesn't in any way overbalance the reward, you see.  Since I've come here, I've seen things I've only heard about in history books.  The Rosetta Stone, the Hammurabi code, the Tower Bridge, the Globe, Harrod's, Lord Nelson on his pillar in Trafalgar Square.  The emotional impact of seeing these things, not just on a computer or the television - reaching through the membrane and smelling the sticky heat of Paris in October.  Pure, visceral experience is something that no book or movie can give you.

In Europe, it’s completely possible and also perfectly acceptable to stand in quiet awe as you contemplate a singularly masterful piece of art or antiquity.  They have stone columns from Egypt, those half-lion-half-man statues from Assyria and those beautiful carved marble statues from Greece.  It’s one thing to see them in photographs but it’s something else entirely to look at a piece of stone that is carved so carefully that it looks like real cloth.  The Mona Lisa looks smaller than you would expect it to – as does the Venus de Milo.

When contemplating the mass of history that has occurred in that area – from the Romans to the Battle of Britain, you start feeling very humble about the area in which you live in. We used Marble Arch tube stop several times - 20 people using it as an air-raid shelter died when a bomb struck it during the Blitz.  There's no memorial to those 20 dead - and yet when the recent shooting at Virginia Tech killed a similar number (32) the news is non-stop, we're hostage to endless digestion and regurgitation courtesy the cable news networks.  The US hasn't endured a Blitz, hasn't endured anything like the IRA.  The fact that it’s not obvious says a lot more than having a brass plaque and Battle of Britain day.  As we looked at various landmarks (the British Museum of Science had an interesting exhibit on the Spitfire) you got a sense that, these folks were looking down the barrel at the destruction of their society – Winston Churchill’s “Finest Hour” speech makes that obvious.  It’s refreshing not to be reminded of it constantly.  That’s not to say that Americans have the market cornered on silly, gossipy news.  One thing that was driving absolutely berserk about English papers was the infinite mastication of details about Princess Diana who, in case you've forgotten, has been dead for over 10 years.  It's unlikely they'll ever pull up a 'Watergate' tape on Diana, but never let it be said that they'll stop talking about it.  Nor about the drug-addled Ms. Spears.

London is a true cosmopolitan city.  London is The City - regardless of what we think in California.  You know how SF has that grand, trippy vibe that is the sum total of all the corporate money and buildings and power funneled into such a small area?  Take that,  multiply it by 10 and then expand the area of that vibe by another hundred square miles or so.  What makes SF interesting would just be one section of London and there are dozens of really cool places like that in London.  When you look at real castles, you just don’t want to go back to the fake Disney castle in Anaheim.  In California (and in my town in particular) you have those subdivisions that emulate the architecture of other cities or places in the world.  Well, London is different – they have their own architecture and they don’t feel the need to name their streets after other locations.  No faux-Mediterranean tile roofs, no pressed-concrete driveways.  People park Bentleys and Aston-Martins on the street there – try getting away with that in the Bay Area (outside of Portola Valley).

Everything about London is cool - even down to the language of the street signs.  Every single one of them seemed to be filled with helpful information - from avoiding pickpockets to avoiding being killed while on the Tube.  Terse, friendly language designed with the maximum efficiency of thought - here is what you need to know, please do it to avoid unpleasantness to yourself.  It's like the city was designed entirely by UI Architects.  I was never completely without a Tube stop - a walk of more than 10 blocks in any direction seemed to be unusual - the city is carpeted with red two-decker buses and cabs.  Met cops were friendly and human - something different from the just-back-from-Iraq feel of Fremont cops.

And let's say you get tired of London - stuffy Englishmen and all that - 3 hours away by rail - there's Paris. City of Light, the most romantic location in the world.  Just standing under La Tour Eiffel prompted The Lady to give me a completely spontaneous kiss; Paris just does that to people.  You can see the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triumphe, Notre Dame, have two sidewalk cafe meals, buy souvenirs and get back on the train in 10 hours - I did it.  I could go on and on about figuring out their public transportation in such a short time but I think it's more of a testament the design of the thing.  DO YOU HEAR ME, BART!!!???

Seriously, I think that did it to me on the first day, not only in London but also in Paris. Other than the ride from the airport - we haven't been in a car all week.  We've been taking the Tube everywhere.  When we were in Paris - we got a day pass on all their buses, Metro and RER lines - guess what, they're all linked into a single ticket system and they're all matched up.  You can go anywhere on public transportation and if you miss a train, another one is coming in 5 minutes.

The night before we left London to return to the Bay Area - I was left with an overwhelming sense of sadness for several different reasons.  One of them is the superstitious feeling I get when something really awesome happens to me - in this case, this trip.  It illustrates how twisted I can get.  I'm so used to having not-so-good things happen to me that when things that are really great happen, some part of me can't deal with that.  I'm waiting for the punchline - waiting for the other shoe to drop.  I know I shouldn't be superstitious - I have no reasonable explanation for why I get so cynical.  This, again, is part of my not-letting-go-and-just-be-present-in-the-moment streak that I'm still working to rid myself of.

The other thing I'm sad about is - the trip is ending.  I've been mentally composing a love-letter to London almost from when I arrived.  Thing is, I know I've seen very little and also that I haven't seen everything about England.  I was standing outside a Tesco Express at Charing Cross (right underneath Nelson's pillar) and talking with a girl from Uzbekistan who worked at the McDonald's two stores down.  I said, "That's a miserable job!" and she responded "No...inside is miserable!"  I thought she was Chinese by her eyes, but turns out she was an Uzbek - in the country for 9 months.  She talked about how expensive everything was in the UK and asked if it was better in the States.  Between her and the three old birds we shared seats with on the Eurostar - the way they talked so happily of Northern California made me realize that I see London the way they see California.  Neither of us have been in each other's homes long enough to see it the way that they do.

As I was riding home from SFO, the sun was shining and we were into that wonderful, warm/hot fall weather of October.  I realized that I was glad to be home, but also glad of the experience.  I have finally been someplace else. I have finally gone somewhere where I was the one with the accent.  I’ve been able to see how the other half lives and it’s given me a greater perspective about life as I know it.  That’s what traveling does for you – that’s why you visit other places.

It sure beats camping in Carlsbad.

- Tim Woolery, 10/10/2007