Let’s have English tonight

Several days ago I was asked by a friend back home whether English food is as nasty as they say. I scanned my brain for any recent gagging episodes and came up empty. “No, it’s not,” I had to say.

Actually the question surprised me — it seemed a little out of sync. I don’t pretend to know anything about food, but the food scene here is one of the most exciting of all the places I’ve been to. Sure, there’s plenty of cheap, crappy food to be had, and the traditional stuff here still consists of some pie of kidney and liver or a scone that’s as untasty as it is dry and crumbly.

But everywhere in London you can find nourishment that embodies a movement toward healthy, fast, and fresh. Whereas back home organic has become the badge of distinction for conscientious eaters, here organic is old news — standard fare.

Instead the vanguard of food seems to lie in the anti-McDonalds establishments, like Pret a Manger and EAT., where you can pick up freshly made food (healthy too — and they don’t forget to tell you this) on the go for not much more than a Big Mac.

For all the fuss and litigation in the States over unhealthy food, the problem, as I see it, is that it remains more economical (time- and money-wise) than healthy food. So many people make the economically rational decision to eat unhealthily, and long-term health becomes an externality. Eating well is too inconvenient.

They’ve gone a long way toward solving that problem here. Mini-supermarkets everywhere sell ready-to-eat, fresh salads, sandwiches, and other meals, as well as boxes of mixed fruit. Snacks like cereal bars make it a point to say there’s “nothing dodgy” inside. Here, everyone is Whole Foods.

Today, to make up for last night’s dinner of sausage and mash, I ate at Leon, at classy take on fast food that makes the term “fast food” seem grossly inappropriate. I had their Original Superfood Salad, “a family of supers: broccoli, alfalfa, peas, strips of cucumber, avocado, quinoa, toasted seeds, …” — you get the point.

Superfoods are that special band of foods that are said to impart on eaters long, cancer-free, happy lives. The fact that Leon’s menu has a section called “superfood salads” tells you what kind of place it is. Their chicken is local and “free-range” and their mackerel, as well as being “taste-rich,” is “omega-rich.”

It’s probably bizarre to say, but I’m going to miss London’s food when I leave.

Big things in a small place

Oct. 25: Salisbury, Amesbury & Stonehenge

I’m standing in the freezing cold on a path that cuts through a sea of open grassland. It’s a dark 7:30 a.m. and I’m alone with the sound of cars rushing by. In the distance stands Stonehenge, anchoring the sky.

~~~

I’m CouchSurfing with Dave, who lives less than a five-minute drive from the circular monument in Amesbury. He drives by Stonehenge every day to work, and I’ve taken him up on his offer to drop me off there on his way to work this morning. Stonehenge opens at 9:30, but the payoff, I thought, would be watching the sun rise behind the stones — even if it meant standing in the desolate cold for two hours.

But the path I’m standing on is on the wrong side, maybe, to watch the sun rise behind the stones. And anyway, if the sun does rise this morning, it does so imperceptibly, hidden behind the mist and clouds and, well, the English sky.

Day creeps up slowly, and stationed behind barbed wire, I watch the unmoving circle, myself shaking, shivering, and breathing into my scarf. I bought the jacket I’m wearing on a September day in Los Angeles thinking its warm would be proportional to its big price tag. But (maybe as Angelenos are wont to do) I’d forgotten how cold cold can be.

~~~

The problem, Dave says, with Stonehenge is the way a road goes right by the monument. It takes away from the awe it’s supposed to inspire in you, the mystery. And then every once in a while, drivers will be surprised by the site appearing suddenly beside them on the road, and they’ll brake and crane their necks to look, causing near-accidents.

~~~

There’s something sort of allegorical about the way something as big as Stonehenge is nestled in a place as small as Amesbury, a town of about 10,000. Many things here and in the rest of Europe seem to work that way — big things and little things, ancient and new, famous and modest — all sharing the same space.

Copy editors travel too

Oct. 10: UK’s Passport Control, Gare du Nord, Paris

I just survived my first immigration interrogation. It happened like this:

As I approach the passport control window, I notice a Japanese girl sitting off in a corner being scolded by a passport control officer: “… so you better tell the truth.” The officer disappears behind a door, and the girl sighs apprehensively.

“Good thing I’m not her,” I think smugly. A couple moments later, I would eat my words.

I present my landing card to the officer at the window, who begins asking me some routine questions, writing down everything I say. “How long will you be in the U.K.?” Nine weeks, I say. “Doing what?” Backpacking. “For nine weeks?” Yeah. I explain I may be visiting other countries as well. “Who lives at this address?” My friend, I say. “How do you spell your friend’s name? And what’s their number?” I tell her.

I’m getting nervous now. Several people have by now whisked by at the adjacent window. The questions are straying further from normal. But I have nothing to hide, and I have a ticket to prove I’m leaving the U.K., so I try to keep cool.

“And how will you be funding your trip?” With my savings, I say. “How much?” I tell her, rounding up a bit. “And what did you work as?” A copy editor. I wonder now if this is where my story begins to seem fabricated. Copy editors don’t make enough to fund their own backpacking trips in the U.K. for nine weeks …

“Copy editor,” I see the officer writing in her notes on me.

At the end of the world

Oct. 8: Mont Saint Michel

Clock time here doesn’t really agree with the sun’s position in the sky. At noon the sun is still only halfway to the top of the sky.

So when I woke up at 6 a.m. today to catch my bus, it was so dark it could have been midnight. And when, after a five-hour drive, we arrived at Mont St. Michel at noon, the island was still coolly luminescent in the light of a morning sun.

Mont St. Michel is an island off the coast of Normandy with an abbey built on its steep contours. Before I heard of it, I would not have thought such a place on earth existed. But exist it does, rising improbably out of the sea shallows like a mythic city. Maybe that’s why UNESCO designates Mont St. Michel, which is hundreds of years old, a World Heritage Site (Carcassonne, which I visited last, is one too).

Surrounding the abbey is a small village, which, like La Cité de Carcassonne, seems to survive exclusively on tourists’ euros. I’d seen it all before, so I walked briskly by the souvenir shops to take in the steep views from higher up the island, including in the abbey itself.

Outside, low tide afforded visitors the opportunity to trudge through the sand surrounding the island. Maybe they didn’t want to get their shoes dirty or risk falling in the mud — out there, the figures standing out against the dun of the sand and dull blue of the sky were few. It was almost desolate.

I could imagine then that Mont St. Michel was a magical, sacred place at the end of the world, not in Normandy near a village named Avranches. That we, out there on the sand, were pilgrims, not sightseers, come to seek answers to questions and prayers — only to find that the builders of this place had gone long ago.

… And in their place were people selling T-shirts and €20 omelets.

Postcard from a medieval fortress town

I had already bought my ticket to Carcassonne, a medieval walled city seven hours south of Paris by train, but a forecast of thunderstorms was threatening to ruin my trip.

On my train ride down on Thursday, though, the skies showed no signs of trouble. Farther and farther from Paris, the countryside, showing signs of autumn, glowed gently orange and yellow under the midday sun. And even though the sky was swathed in cotton balls, now and then I saw a patch of blue.

I was beginning to think I wasn’t going to get rained out after all. But my day with the walled city was on Friday, and there was still plenty of time for things to go south.

I found a hotel for the night after wandering the neat, perpendicular streets of Bastide St. Louis, Carcassonne’s less interesting half. (The city of Carcassonne is divided in halves by a river; one side is La Cité, the walled city. The other is Bastide St. Louis, a relatively normal town.)

The next day, I woke up to rain.

Wielding my umbrella, I began the 20-minute walk across the river to La Cité de Carcassonne, envisioning a day of soggy jeans and disappointing photos.