First impressions and the London orientation

So I arrived at my hostel a little before midnight instead of around 6 PM which meant that I wouldn't really get to see much of London that night. But my orientation was going to start on the following morning so I decided to wander around the streets at least for a little bit to get some feel for the city. In that first night, pretty exhausted from the trip and still confused that people around me weren't speaking Bulgarian anymore, I discovered several things which really surprised me:

1. London has no building with more than 4 or 5 floors and they are mostly identical.
2. All the streets in that city are one-way and mostly single-lane.
3. Despite the streets being one way I still expected the cars to come from the wrong direction.
4. London is a BIG city.
5. Everyone has an accent.

Now you can probably tell that some of these are obvious and others are obviously wrong. After having a couple of days to think over this I think I have explanations for my impressions:

1. Well, London obviously has tall building but the thing is that the vast majority of building seem to only have a couple of floors. In that I guess it's not all that different from most other European cities I've seen but I somehow expected it to look much more like Boston or New York with their towering buildings and skyscrapers.

And, seriously, it is almost impossible to tell apart the buildings on a street most of the time. They are not only built identical but their owners have made no effort to change the front, to make it unique in any way.

2. Obviously false. I just happened to be walking around a neighbourhood with particularly small streets. However, the British seem to love their one-way street and almost all the streets in Oxford are like that (granted that is probably due to the fact that it is difficult enough for one car to fit in there).

3. London crosswalks always have "look left/right" written in huge letters on them but I kept looking in the wrong direction. In fact I still do. It's unsettling but not particularly interesting. Anyway if I do get run over by a bus, you should know it was almost certainly because I looked the wrong way before crossing.

4. Well, it is a big city. It's a huge metropolis in fact. I knew that before I arrived but the thing I did not expect was that the center of town is not concentrated in one place- it is all over. It took me two days of walking- I probably went more than 10 miles, to cover most of the sightseeing spots. Unfortunately other than the rather impressive Westminster abbey I didn't see anything particularly interesting- beautiful parks and buildings either empty or filled with tourists with the intermittent drizzle and gray clouds as background. Overall the London architecture left me unimpressed.

What London does have is a... a feel? Character? I am not sure how to describe it but the city feels different from any other place I've been before. It's like what I had expected from Vienna but where Vienna let me down, London surprised me with it's individuality. Well, maybe before I start talking about individuality, I should go visit more English cities.

I guess this is the natural place to show a few pictures but I wasn't moved to use my camera even once during my visit. Well, I'll go to London again soon and maybe then I'll feel more eager to explore the city and take pictures.

5. This is the best part of this country so far. Everyone has an accent! And I don't mean that they speak differently from Americans. I believe I've heard a dozen or more radically different British accents so far and there doesn't seem to be a prevalent one. It makes it a little hard to understand what people are saying sometimes- not because I have a difficult time understanding any particular accent but because I don't really know which one to expect before the person starts talking. And there is still this fraction of a second when I marvel at what I am hearing and don't pay attention to what they are actually saying.

I am sure this will go away soon enough and if I were to read this in a couple of months or even weeks, I'd wonder what I was talking about but right now it is the most entertaining thing aspect of England for me.

Well, this post got too long without me describing any of the particulars of my orientation so let me describe it in a sentence: "Quite entertaining but rather unnecessary." Still the people at the London office of IFSA-Butler did a great job and they are really nice. Are any of you guys going on programs though Butler?