“Bad coffee but very good pubs: Living in London” Special to the Toronto Star, June 3, 2003, E1

 

I rolled down the car window and stuck my head out. And I breathed in until my lungs reached full capacity. (And the passengers in the car next to us started pointing).

That's when I knew I was home: When I breathed in, it didn't feel like a nuclear attack.

I recently returned home to Toronto after living in London for over three months. I had been warned that when I arrived in England I would go through culture shock at the sight of crammed neighbourhoods and tidy houses in long rows. I was supposed to feel suffocated. The truth is I didn't fully appreciate the differences until I returned from my semester at City University.

I had set out for London naively armed only with an umbrella, a Time Out guide, and Bridget Jones' Diary memorized word for word.

I figured if my wit didn't repel caddish Hugh-Grant-types, then I could beat them away with my umbrella.

EATING IN LONDON

The first question that anyone asked whenever I said that I was leaving for London was, "What are you going to eat?" And then they snickered.

I had been haughtily replying in my best British accent, "The high culture and the plethora of artistic and historical bastions override the triviality of food."

But it was a lie.

I don't know about you, but my emotions translate themselves into food. Homesickness eventually meant Kraft dinner and peanut butter that I had my mother send me. (Peanut butter in London can cost up to $10).

I snivelled to my neighbours when they walked into our shared kitchen and saw me shovelling spoonfuls of it into my mouth.

"Blully 'ell," I grumbled, with a mouth full of nut fat. "Ith tho exthpenthive in London."

Some stereotypes are borne of truth but most are for the most part wrong. Food in London is actually not all tasteless. You can find some great tandoori chicken. The number of Indian, Pakistani and Bengali restaurants in the UK have increased by about 6,300 since 1970, reports Gourmet magazine.

Another trend that has taken London fast food by storm is the chain Pret a Manger - my favourite place to drop a few quid. There is one at every corner, competing for space and yuppie customers with Starbucks.

The chain - which began in London - has since been expanded to China, Japan and the U.S. McDonalds has even bought a bit of the company.

Pret, as Londoners call it, literally gleams from stainless steel furnishings. The shops sell mainly sandwiches and wraps, like the spicy aubergine and low fat soft cheese sandwich, the tuna nicoise salad wrap and the honey and granola pret pot (layered on top of yogurt).

Still, a survey on www.londoneats.com showed that the favourite British food is a full English breakfast. A Sunday roast dinner, and fish and chips came second and third respectively.

"Whenever I go home to Sweden and find myself wanting to eat English sausages which I can't find there in Sweden," said Lisa, a Swedish-native studying in London, "I feel as though I have lost all my sense of food culture."

So I knew when I went to Paris and found myself wistfully longing for fish and chips that I had become a true Londoner.

COFFEE, TEA OR ME

The first time I drank a cuppa tea in London, I closed my eyes and let the fragrant Earl Grey swim over my tongue and down my throat. One of the employees started strumming Beatles melodies on his acoustic guitar. He sang "Yesterday" off key and I was hooked.

This is London, I thought.

I didn't really have a choice about having tea. I couldn't drink the coffee in London. I'm sorry, but it sucked. Regular coffee - double double as I know it - just didn't exist.

"When I go down to Spain, they say our coffee is just dirty water," explained Dylan, a native Londoner.

Crikey. I adapted to many things in London but I couldn't take on the "mustn't grumble" attitude that Brits take on in the face of adversity - especially in the form of bad coffee.

COFFEE TEA OR ME, PART II

When my phone rang that long distance ring, I knew it would be important news.

It was my friend Martha from Toronto.

"Mary," she said, "It's roll up the rim time at Tim Hortons."

I squealed with excitement.

"Yes," she said, "It doesn't get any better than that, eh?"

Oh. Canada. There is nothing better than a sip of fresh filtered coffee (cream and one sugar please) in a Toronto coffee shop.

London - at the crossroads of a European cafe culture and a Western fast-food philosophy - misses out on donut shops entirely. It's either a cream tea at a fancy hotel, a sit-down cappuccino at an Italian chain cafe or tea in a greasy caff.

All the same, I wish there was more of a cafe culture in Toronto so that I could languish in a wooden chair over one cappuccino for three hours, watch people, read the newspaper and contemplate world affairs - all the while imagining that my compatriots at the next table are Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir arguing about free will or last night's romp.

Waiters in Toronto bring you the bill just when you are settling in with your coffee an hour later. Who can possibly become an existentialist in that kind of time?

LONDON LIVING

"Pint o' beer mate? There's footie on telly."

It sounds a little Seussical, but those two sentences sum up many happy nights in a London pub. Let's not fuel the stereotypes and say that Brits are a bunch of drunken hooligan football fans in white Adidas trainers.

But when every half a block has a pub and it is filled with Carling-guzzlers from noon onwards you know that it is as British as bacon and egg sandwiches.

All guidebooks offer the same advice. If a workmate, classmate, flatmate asks you to join them for a pint at the pub - even if you don't drink, go. It's their way of socializing.

The first time I walked up to the bar, ordered two pints of beer and left the change, one regular stopped me: "You don't do that here."

I could get used to that.

Only two things cost less in London than in Toronto. Books and booze. Which came first - the alcohol-induced haze or the author?

As for the scene, the truth is that my social life was less Sex and the City and more South Park. Sometimes I just sat back and watched Brits dance to S Club 7 and pondered deep philosophical dilemmas. Like why couldn't London bars be open past 11 p.m.?

Apparently, it's some archaic law left over from World War II. To compensate, many start drinking on the subway and while walking up the sidewalk towards the pub. No one even knows if it's illegal.

As my neighbour Anu told me: "There may be a law against walking outside with an open bottle of alcohol, but no one ever says anything."

This is where Toronto comes in. I couldn't wait to order shooters with names like B-52 without having bartenders squint really hard, and instead pour me a pint over my protests.

CULTURE IN LONDON

Samuel Johnson once said that when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life. He was right. When I told Brits that I had been to the Victoria and Albert museum, the Tate Modern and Britain galleries, the Imperial War museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery, the British Museum, to see a ballet, two classical concerts, five musicals, and two plays, they mumbled something about not having had the chance to go.

It's inevitable. When you live somewhere, you see less of the city than the tourists.

And the unbelievable part is that ever since a couple of years ago, entrance became free to all of the above museums and galleries.

When you're walking around a museum that is free, there is a different ambience.

You are not rushing to cram in every bit of information to match the cash you paid. You see what interests you and come out fulfilled - not oversaturated.

In Notes From a Small Island, Bill Bryson wrote that there are more seventeenth-century buildings in Yorkshire than all of North America. So I guess for now Toronto can't compete with London's landscape peppered with those nifty blue plaques that teach us that Charles Dickens lived here, Braveheart was executed over there, and that Lord Byron bedded four women in this house.

Perhaps it is Henry Fielding's assertion that "love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea" that explains the British appetite for sensationalism in their history books.

To compete, maybe someday in Toronto we can have a plaque where Mel Lastman had his affair.

TORONTO CULTURE

Here is my rant: I hate that I can't wander into a museum or gallery in Toronto without paying money. I know the usual arguments. We are a newer country and Britain was an empire. We don't have the money - they do. I annually visit the Royal Ontario Museum and Art Gallery of Ontario and the truth is that galleries and museums in London are always packed. The ones in Toronto are not.

I stood in line three times to get an opera ticket at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. And each time I walked away empty-handed because they were sold out.

Londoners will complain that culture is dying in their city but from my eyes, London is a cultural dynamo. Then again, maybe if we had an opera house in Toronto, we would be selling out of opera tickets too.

GETTING AROUND

I knew the first time I blew my nose and saw a black tarry substance in my crumpled wad of toilet paper that something was in the air. And it wasn't love.

Night after night, I meticulously wiped my face with toner and saw white cotton pads turn black from the London air. Dickens was right: It's a dirty city, today though, because of vehicular pollution.

There is a good subway system in London - The Tube, which has over ten lines, compared to Toronto's three. The intricate map looks like the back of your granny's hands.

But even with the Tube, going out at night was troublesome for my female friends and myself because it shut down at around midnight.

I often took the night bus, which operates about once an hour from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m., or sometimes a black cab that can cost up to $50, even within central London.

One of the biggest differences between the two cities is the grid-like street system in Toronto that makes it impossible to get lost, said my friend Tom, who has lived in both Toronto and London.

You know what I'm talking about.

You're in downtown Toronto and you follow the scent of hot dog vendors. Eventually you see the CN Tower and end up on Yonge St.

Someone once told me that Toronto's streets were based on a British system. Well, I don't think they had ever been to Britain.

I laughed when I read that Toronto may emulate London's traffic congestion charging idea.

I suggest we build at least five more subway lines before we try to cram people on the TTC that has given new meaning to the "how many people can you fit in a subway car" joke. Cattle herding anyone?

What leaps out is that so much of London's identity is rooted in its past. Some buildings facades are still kept pockmarked by wartime attacks to remind Brits of their hardship and victory.

In London it is easy to feel transported to another century by closing your eyes and listening for footsteps on the cobblestone.

In contrast, Toronto seems forward thinking - all concrete, glass and sharp edges - as though the skyscrapers are reaching for something better and new.

But that sense of romance, alas, remains as yet elusive.