[Photo Source: ME! September, 2010]
Each time I make the journey to London, my mom asks me “Why not Paris?” After all, Paris is Paris. I could join the legions of Americans who wax poetic about the cobblestone streets and Haussmannian architecture, the slate gray rooftops that reflect the often similarly colored sky and combine to create a shockingly beautiful and seemingly infinite horizon, the women who ride mopeds whilst decked out in fur coats, and the sidewalk cafes where men drink coffee out of impossibly small cups. Paris is that wonderful, head over heels first love. But I almost never visit. I went in 2006, 2008 and 2010 (I guess every two years?). I am always happy when I go, and I almost never have bad luck there. The trips unfurl flawlessly. I wear my little ballet flats and buy baguettes and order citron presses in my as perfect as an American can get Parisian accent.
I should be visiting there every chance I get—and yet I don’t.
I have, however, been to London at least once a year since 2006. So frequently that the immigrations officer on my visit last spring asked me if I did business there.
Any logical person would avoid a city where they had a painful breakup and experienced homelessness (no exaggeration, I lived in a library. For a month.) and then had to return to their hometown, shamefaced and missing two suitcases because they’d been stolen. No one would go back to that, right?
But, twice a year, as though drawn by some siren call of PG Tips & Banoffee Pie, I load up a carry-on bag and travel 6,000 miles to enjoy weather only vaguely better than Seattle’s, to pay almost twice as much for everything and to nearly get hit by cars for the better part of a week because I almost never remember to look the right way when crossing the street in my jetlagged euphoria.
Recently, I realized that while Paris inspires in me the kind of love that makes me scared I might be a prime candidate for one of those shows about people in love with inanimate objects, London is well…Mr. Darcy (you knew that I’d find an Austen tie-in, right?). It’s not an easy place to love, and it’s full of reasons to really loathe it. It’s dirty, congested, and crowded, and the tube is an odd mixture of passive aggressive people and very, very crazy people. The weather is…well, it’s Seattle-y.
London is also an amazing mixture of history and the future, it’s vibrant, but there are also these very small patches of urban quiet that seem to exist in a sort of soundproof bubble. There are Starbucks in hundred year old buildings. People can pronounce my name correctly. Boys there don’t take my shyness as a sign of bitchiness, and pubs are a living, breathing sociological experiment.
I guess that some subconscious part of me has come to grips with the idea that you can have really painful memories somewhere, but still look upon it fondly. And even if I still get pee shivers when I see coffee machines that dispense watery brown liquid in tiny plastic cups (because that’s what I lived on for a month), I am comfortable in London. I know it well, I have friends there, and life may have been hard there, but I lived a real life there, outside of the storybook quality that almost all study abroads lend themselves to.
As much as I love Paris, I would never live there full-time. The time I spent in Paris was pain-free and aside from my bout with sickness early on, I can’t think of anything bad that happened to me there—and it’s not that I didn’t have an address there or technically live there, but there was always an expiration date that kept me half in the States because I knew I’d eventually go home and any bad experiences were just a fun little footnote to the semester abroad stories I’d tell later. London was different. I’d planned to stay in London for a long time. Maybe not my whole life, but a few years. I was heartbroken about leaving because it felt premature and it was somewhere that, despite my literal lack of a permanent address at times, felt a little bit like home. I had a part-time job, a general physician, my first relationship where I was forced to act like an adult, and I was surrounded by friends who shared my goals.
So now, if I was given the opportunity to move to London, to pick up where I left off almost four years ago, I would do so in a heartbeat.
Because every girl needs to find her own Pemberley.
