Love from London: It’s a great city, if you can afford it

by Iva Skoch on

I just made it to London and will be spending a week here. Lucky me! London is one of my favorite cities in the world. To use an overused cliche, London combines the best of Europe with the best of the US. Some people, I am sure, would argue against this statement, but I think it sums up London pretty well.

The biggest problem I have with London is how crazy expensive it is. Just to illustrate my point, one single fare tube ticket is 4GBP. That is about 850 dollars. Just kidding. It is about $8, but still. It is not cheap. The public transportation trick is to purchase an Oyster card, which allows you to add rides for only 1.50GBP.

London is also a very walkable city, which is what I plan on doing. How else am I going to report back on all the great pubs I frequented?

Earthquake shakes parts of England

by Aaron Hotfelder on

A mild earthquake struck parts of England early Wednesday morning, rattling homes and business but apparently not causing any serious injuries. The quake, centered about 125 miles north of London, measured a 5.3 on the Richter scale, and it was the UK’s second largest since 1984.

Though it only lasted about ten seconds and little damage was done, it seems to have frightened quite a few people who don’t have much experience with earthquakes:

“‘It felt pretty scary,’ Haydn Jones of Nottingham, who lives in a third-floor apartment, told CNN. He said he has lived abroad in Japan and knew immediately what it was, but felt that a lot of those in England ‘didn’t really know what was going on.'”

Others weren’t so much frightened by the early morning quake as they were annoyed: “I was woken up. It was hell,” said one man.

More here.

Climate activists arrested at Heathrow

by Anna Brones on

With all the talk of biofuels and climate change in the airline industry, environmental activists have taken to airports as their protesting grounds. Last week in Sweden activists dressed up as polar bears at a Stockholm airport. This week the site of protesting is Heathrow Airport, where today four Greenpeace activists, who climbed on top of an airplane, were arrested.

Part of a larger group that was gathering in Westminster to oppose plans to expand Heathrow, the Greenpeace protesters hung a banner that said “Climate Emergency – No Third Runway” on a British Airways Airbus A320.

Although the environmental group saw their actions as necessary, the BAA, the British airport company, called the act “unlawful and irresponsible.” I wonder if they’ll ever be allowed to fly British Airways again.

The English Project 2012

by Abha Malpani on

As part of the London Olympics cultural program, the plan is to build a museum tracing the roots of the English language.

In conjunction with BBC and the British Library, the museum will allow visitors to experience physically and virtually (holograms!) the global evolution of the language from when it was a mixed tongue of the Jute, Angle and Saxon tribes, to how it stands today as spoken by 2 billion people around the world.

Although being organized by and in the UK, I’m assuming that it will take into context English spoken as a first language in the US, South Africa and Australia.

I’d be particularly interested to see how the future of English is predicted. Language experts say that because of its global reach, new varieties are emerging and there is a possibility that English will evolve into a family of new languages — like what happened to Latin a thousand years ago.

The idea is not unique and just when I was wondering how is it that this hasn’t been thought of before, I find that it has — but for other languages, not purely for English, and on a much smaller scale.

There’s the Museum of the Portuguese Language in Brazil, the Afrikaans Language Museum in South Africa, and the National Museum of Language in the US that talks generally about world languages.

The English Project sounds like a monster project; one that would involve an extensive amount of research and careful articulation to represent a language that is so boundless today.

Apparently, writers are homebodies

by Iva Skoch on

This could be a big problem for me: “Many authors are homebodies deeply connected to where they live. After all, it’s where they work,” after seeing this line, I just had to open the full article in NY Times. If, in fact, most good writers are homebodies, I better start looking for a new job.

As it turns out, they are not really homebodies. (Thank you, Mark Twain! Thanks Hemingway!) Most of them are just really connected to their homes. I can live with that. I am also connected to my home(s), although I couldn’t tell you right now where my real home actually is. I can see this could potentically be a whole set of problems.

Anyway, read this article by Pamela Redmond Satran if you want to check out how a few of the world’s greatest writers lived. For me, I love getting a little inspiration from seeing where and how great authors worked. I wrote about the Mark Twain house in Hartford, CT on gadling before. Satran also recommends checking out the Dickens house in London, Edith Wharton’s house in Lenox, Mass., Eugene O’Neill’s house in San Francisco, Kipling’s in Brattleboro, VT and, of course, Hemingway’s in Key West.