To MC (revisiting 2000)

After much London driving (diving across lanes of traffic, sharp turns into tight little roads), we arrived in a neighborhood full of big warehouses and stopped in front of one.  We could tell the river was right there.  He led us into the building, telling us these buildings had been refurbished and reconfigured from their warehouse days, and walked us into a flat that wasn't grand, but it was two bedrooms, a largeliving room, an eat-in kitchen.  And the price was right.

June 3:

I spent the afternoon returning to 2000.  And the haunts of "the other M" and I in the early days of the  program.

So, this famed background story:  2000 was our first trip, pulling in 11 students (we thought we needed 10 to make LHU's requisite summer numbers and added the 11th after arrangements had been started to be made).   Following the model of others, we put the students in a b & b, near the British Museum (in London talk, near Tottenham Court or Goodge St tube stations -- this will come in handy later).  I found a realtor online who was willing to provide M and I a 2-bedroom "faculty flat" for a price we could afford.  We dropped the students off & our landlord-to-be picked up us, and our luggage, in his "auto."  Remember, we had been on a plane all night and my 11-year-old daughter was with us (she slept through the car ride).  He took us, with a series of cuts, somewhere north and I vaguely remember east of Kings Cross Station (I vaguely remember we thinking we were in Hackney, but memory seems to be wrong). Anyway, he showed us this flat and the stairwell outside smelled of urine and I wasn't sure my daughter would survive in the neighborhood.  The flat was large enough, but with someone's exotic taste in decor, and dark and musty.  We asked, rather quickly, if he didn't have another.   He said "yes" and got back into the car.

On the way, he made phone call after phone call on his "mobile."  At the time these were relatively new in the States and neither M nor I had seen anyone conduct business -- one call after another after another -- while driving on one.  He told us about a wonderful flat that was coming open in the Docklands (well east of the city) -- in fact, we might have had a view of Greenwich!  Yikes.

But on the way he got another call (have I mentioned that both he and most of his callers had a heavy accent -- West Indian? that made half of what they said unintelligible to us Yanks?) that said the young man whose father was kicking him out of the Docklands flat had reconciled and was staying; another call.  "I have this place coming open in Wapping.  But we haven't yet cleaned up after the last renter."  Okay, we said, not knowing where Wapping was, but it was after noon on a day with with no sleep, a grumpy 11-year-old, no place to stay, etc.

The deal was half in cash, which I gave him.  He gave us the keys and we left our luggage and were told to come back in a couple hours and it'd be clean.  We did and it was.

But here's the kicker: M is fixing dinner in the kitchen, the flat was set up so the front door entered into a hallway with the kitchen door the first door you came to, and a key rustled in the front door, and this guy walks in!  F***!  M asks "can I help you?" as cool as can be and the guy says it's HIS flat!  M and I worried about it all being something shady, so this didn't look good.  M said we were told the old tenant had just moved out; the guy pulls out his mobile and there's a message from the landlord on it!  Yes, he was evicted!  His stuff was in two garbage bags at the door, which we had thought was garbage left by the cleaners.  M was all apologetic; the guy was an itinerant construction worker from the Czech Republic, here he hoped short term.  He had a bag of groceries to fix his dinner.  M even offered for him to stay and eat with us.  He nicely said no, he needed to figure things out.

And that was the most excitement we had in that flat.  But both our pulses were up for some time after that.

Oh, yes, the other excitement: the place had a small balcony (it was on what the British call the first floor).  We invited the students out for burgers and dogs for Memorial Day and bought a small charcoal grill to cook on.  We put it on the balcony and were in the middle of cooking when M left it too long and the balcony was on fire!  We got it out fairly quickly, and it turned out it was just the rubber mat covering the balcony floor was burned, but it made that horrid burning rubber smell and there were briquettes everywhere...it was one of those things all the students thought was hilarious and teased about constantly.

Back to today.  Here's the flat and it's balcony.

And, indeed, here's the shot to the river, which we could see a bit of from that balcony.

And the pub, directly across the street, where we sat for some hours watching "futbol," as we were there in during the group round of the European Cup and everyone in England thought they were favorites, until they either lost or tied their first two games and it was clear they weren't going through.  M became a big fan of the Portuguese, who played "the beautiful game," with speed and attack that made the English, led by a doughy lout at striker (Rooney's predecessor), look like elephants chasing greyhounds

And, finally, Wapping tube station is on the East London line.  Or was.  It is now the London Overground line (I'm not sure why).  From Wapping Station to where the kids stayed took almost an hour on public transport.  There was a bus stop right outside our building that would take you to Liverpool Street (whence you could take the Central Line to Tottenham Ct) or...I won't bother you with the permutations.  But a conversation every day when M and I got together after our two classes had met was "how did you go and how long did it take?"  The best we ever did was 45 minutes.

BTW, our provost, due to some supposed disaster with a group at another school, mandated that we stay "close" to the students.  Since the second year we contracted with a firm for flats, it was not a problem after that.  But the first year was...well, part of the adventure was the commute to "work" each day and wondering where the students might be.

Today, I took the train there and the bus out, as the bus stop was right in front of the flat.  I also took a Tube route we almost never took, the Jubilee to the East London via Canada Water, which is much on  south side of the river.  It was much quicker than ways we used (the Jubilee goes nowhere near Goodge St or Tottenham, which is currently much under construction).  The bus goes around Tower Hill, to Aldgate, then to Liverpool Street, where it terminated then.  I got off at Aldgate, and started exploring the east end (as in the blog).

Funny, the neighborhood hadn't changed much in 15 years, though our flat building looked a bit more clean and upbeat (there wasn't the gaudy blue paint on the balconies in '00), and the bus was different, peeling south from Aldgate towards Elephant & Castle -- a piece of prime London I didn't want to sit through today (if any other).

The journey through the Wren churches reminded me how much I've grown out of shape in the intervening years.  In '00 I did the entire circuit (here's the link, if you care) from St. Magnus at the Monument to St. Paul's and I'm not sure I was even tired.  15 years and X pounds, and, doubtless the heart attack, meant I wasn't willing to even try to cover most of them.  And it was a very busy day in that part of the city.

And that's my recreation of 2000.