dekstop: weblog

(Just found this in my notes, written a couple of weeks ago, just days after coming to London.)

london is quite interesting. in a way it's similarly divided as berlin is, with the west of the city as the "establishment", clean, rather wealthy, predominantly white (at least the places I've been to), and the east more interesting, racially mixed, culturally diverse, council houses and poverty everywhere, but also more "creative", shoreditch as hipsterpartytown central, the rest of southern hackney mostly lower middle class/upper lower class (which is it? dunno).

interesting to move around in this city. the local dialects alone are plenty, but if you add all the foreign languages spoken everywhere it's amazingly diverse. once listened to a black girl talking on the bus, cockney with a distinct slant towards jamaican. really interesting.

however I'm told that the real divide is between north and south, with the river thames as a border -- dunno if I'll make it to the south yet, might take a while to find the time, and I'm not that curious yet.

most people, london-bred or new londoners, seem to constrain their movements within the city to a rather small area. I guess that makes sense because you mostly have everything everywhere, every couple of kilometers there's another self-sufficient area with complete infrastructure, or even a new cultural climate.

but I think I'd like to move around more, to explore. let's see if I can make the time to do that.

Jef told me that buses are the under-appreciated medium of transport in this city, and it's true -- the tube is mostly awful, packed and hot, and not that fast in the first place. buses can get just as packed, and they're not as easy to navigate if you're moving around a lot, the system of buses is quite complex, and they don't announce stops. but you get to see more of the city, and it's a little more relaxed, and you're usually more flexible once you get over the initial threshold of understanding the system.

and: the oyster card rules! it's basically a top-up system for public transport (or "prepaid", as Germans like to call it), with the added guarantee that you'll never pay more than a day ticket for the areas you traveled. once you topped-up your card it's the most convenient way to travel besides having an actual travel pass.

---