Love Letter to London (Alternative Title: I don't want to leave and you can't make me)

My time in London is, very sadly, nearing its end. I would love to stay but I currently don't have any job prospects here and as my lease is ending, staying doesn't make much sense. Sure, I could find a random job, but if I can get a position in my field back in the U.S. more easily, that is the grown-up decision I must make. And, on the positive side, it will be really nice to see my family and friends (I can't believe that I haven't been back to the States for almost nine months).

I will, however, desperately miss London. I find it difficult to explain when people ask me why I like this city so much. And I certainly don't disagree when people point out the negative things about London. But there is just something about it. Just the atmosphere, the feel of London. It's not for everyone, and that's cool. But for me, it has been pretty fantastic. I love the rain, and how September actually feels like fall, not the weird bipolar situation we have back in Rhode Island. I love walking the streets at Christmastime, with lights everywhere (and yes, picturing scenes from Love Actually). Sitting in the grass in the parks on those rare, wonderful summer days. I love the buskers playing music everywhere, sometimes brilliantly and sometimes not so good. I love the graffiti. I love the views in any weather while crossing Waterloo Bridge--Parliament, Big Ben, and the London Eye on one side, the Gherkin, St. Paul's, and the City on the other. I love the pubs and the old cobbled alleys hidden among the busy, modern streets. I love riding on the top level of double-decker buses. I love the bizarre people you see on the tube. I love the grand architecture of the buildings. I love the feeling that the Thames gives--like it's the city's pulse and the source of it all. And I love that I can feel thousands of years of history flowing by me just by taking a walk.

As much as I enjoy waxing poetic and probably sounding pretty pretentious, one of my favourite quotes about London comes from the brilliant Neil Gaiman. Fittingly, I first discovered him while here in London. As he writes in his book Neverwhere:

Three years in London had not changed Richard, although it had changed the way he perceived the city. Richard had originally imagined London as a gray city, even a black city, from pictures he had seen, and he was surprised to find it filled with color. It was a city of red brick and white stone, red buses and large black taxis, bright red mailboxes and green grassy parks and cemeteries.

It was a city in which the very old and the awkwardly new jostled each other, not uncomfortably, but without respect; a city of shops and offices and restaurants and homes, of parks and churches, of ignored monuments and remarkably unpalatial palaces; a city of hundreds of districts with strange names - Crouch End, Chalk Farm, Earl's Court, Marble Arch - and oddly distinct identities; a noisy, dirty, cheerful, troubled city, which fed on tourists, needed them as it despised them, in which the average speed of transportation through the city had not increased in three hundred years, following five hundred years of fitful road-widening and unskillful compromises between the needs of traffic, whether horse-drawn, or, more recently, motorized, and the need of pedestrians; a city inhabited by and teeming with people of every color and manner and kind.

This, in my humble opinion, describes London perfectly. It isn't sugarcoated. He doesn't gloss over the curious, confusing, and sometimes irritating aspects of the city, but it perfectly encapsulates the feeling of it. At the end of a year in this amazing, frustrating, ridiculous place, I would like to thank London for one of the craziest, best years of my life.


Ok, overly-sentimental post done.