Week 4: The Great Grocery Store

Today marks one month since I left the US. I don't know how this can be possible—I feel both like I just got here and like I've been here for forever somehow. Tomorrow will also be my last day in this flat before I move up to Enfield, and it's kind of bittersweet. While I'm excited for the new place and the good things that will come with it (like a real shower), I've really come to enjoy living with this family and the kindness that they've extended towards me. One of the children didn't realize that I'd be moving, and when she found out on Sunday, her lower lip ballooned out and it made me feel so sad. They're a really excellent family and I feel like I've learned a lot from living with them (including an incredible soup recipe that I will definitely be using in the future). So I'm sad to leave, but I'm glad I've been here and I'm excited for what's to come.


I've obviously been thinking a lot about the culture of London as I've walked its streets and talked to locals and long-term visitors and short-term visitors alike. The thing about London is that its culture is about as easy to pin down as nailing Jello to a tree or herding cats or some other such nonsense, the reason being that London is a massive collection of international people. We think of the US being a great melting pot, where people from all over the world were able to come together and become one thing: Americans.

London, however, is not a melting pot. Not even close.

As I see it, London is like an enormous grocery store. It brings in products from all over and collects them in one place, but in no way are these items melted together. It's divided into sections, each with their own particular focus—just like London's boroughs. It has particular sections that are dedicated to specific regions—like Chinatown, and the Middle Eastern sectors of the city. And then, of course, there are people milling about each of these areas and aisles—these are the tourists.

London is often called the Crossroads of the World, and rightly so. At times, I feel like I'm walking across BYU campus for the number of languages I hear being spoken! Not only does the city become a home for people from all across the world, but it plays host daily to thousands upon thousands of international tourists. In a way, this is has its perks. I love that I can get fantastic, authentic Indian food just a few minutes from Chinatown where there are spits of roast duck and bright orange squid-things, and still be within sight of a regular English pub.

London also has its own history that's remarkably present, which adds a certain sense of anachronism to a walk down almost every street in the city. Standing by the castle built in 1078 (now known as the Tower of London) and your eyes can pass over sections of a Roman wall built in the 2nd century AD and then on to the Tower Hill underground station that opened in 1967 and was refurbished in 2008. That's nearly two thousand years of London construction captured in one glance! Naturally, there are going to be hundreds of residents—homegrown or immigrants—and tourists captured in that glance as well who represent who knows how many nationalities. In fact, the first Sunday I was here, I went to Relief Society and we had small group discussions. My group had an English girl, a couple Scottish girls, a French girl, an Australian girl, and myself, an American. How's that for international?

Having never experienced this city before, I didn't know what to expect. I think I may have thought that somehow I could capture the concept of London culture in three short months and get a pretty solid understanding of it, that I could come out on the other side and be able to describe it in fairly certain terms, that I could catch on to what makes this city tick. It's become overwhelmingly clear to me that this would be like walking into my monstrous metaphorical grocery store, and then exiting with my basket of shopping somehow able to describe what the entire place was like. All the same, I've enjoyed wandering up and down London's metaphorical aisles, and catching glimpses of what each place holds.

So far, the best I can do to give you a full picture is to simply explain what I've just explained: that London is, to some extent, inexplicable. It is defined by its very own indefinability and mutability, by the endless stream of footprints that cross to and fro, over and under each other as people from all walks of life and all nationalities come into this city, to stay or go.