sup london

Hello America,

Rolled into London about 8 am local time on Friday. Took me a couple of cab rides plus tube rides to get to my place, which is on the opposite side of town from the airport. I'm super thankful that my employer is helping myself and the other dude from NYC with accommodations until August. The area is called Canary Wharf, and it's one of London's main Financial Districts, hence work is less than five minutes walk from our flat!

Canary Wharf sits on an island created by a bow in the Thames, and almost every building on the island is a huge financial headquarters. Part of me is impressed, part is appalled by this. An interesting side effect of the location, as opposed to NYC's financial centers, is that Canary Wharf goes absolutely dead after 6 pm. Compared to Times Square, where I worked at Lehman Brothers HQ last summer, this place is Green Acres haha. There are many bars and even a shopping mall on the Wharf, but these places get most of their business during the day. At nighttime, everything save a couple of pubs close by 8 pm. It's bizarre!

On Friday night I walked all over the island and probably saw 50 total people. Wearing only my street clothes in a district that is usually replete with Suits, I was an imposter sneaking in the shadows with the sleeping financial gods looming overhead. There is this one square with a water fountain and this nice foliage, and as I walk up to it at night I think "Oh nice, what a pleasant park!" I get to the fountain in the middle, hop up the step and start pacing around its circular perimeter. After a lap or two, I slow down and lift my head to look at the sky, only it's not the sky that catches my attention. The park has been surrounded, besieged by giant concrete and steel bodies. Like symmetric sentinels with oversized neon nametags on top, HSBC and Citi and Bank of America and Barclays glare down at the park, reminding the perfectly manicured lawns and trees that they are the outsiders in this stolid London district.

I suspect that the real imposter is the one who puts on the suit and tie and walks around the corner to work every morning. The proximity of my workplace to my home, coupled with my solo nighttime escapades that I expect to ensue, might help me to come to terms with working here. It's like the banks lose their power over me when I'm just kickin it in shorts and a white Tee. In those unfettered afterwork hours I can safely shake my fist at the buildings, make jokes behind their backs or maybe even join forces with the trees and fight to take back the land. I already made friends with one - a tree that is. I climbed it.

So much more to say. Think I'll throw stuff into another post so it's easier to split the labels and titles up.

- Josh