My first time in the UK, and I have to say- London certainly left its impression. It’s not the first time I’ve seen anachronistic architecture like this- old buildings made with long dead architectural practices sharing streets and skylines with contemporary glass structures- but it is the most drastic example of this kind of juxtaposition I’ve ever come across, and for lack of a better word, it’s really freaking cool. I didn’t think my first time viewing a castle would involve skyscrapers in the background?

It also makes the connection to our reading stronger, as the tight streets and oppressive castles and courthouses of Dickens’ day not only still exist, but thrive under the transformation of the modern day. It’s not a one to one translation, and how could it be (thank god, we don’t need people emptying their chamber pots at night), but there’s enough of the old world left that if you squint just right and catch the old buildings at the right light, you can imagine the London fog roll in over people in hats and coats amid carriages. Just gotta try to not think about what the smell would’ve been like.

This makes simply wandering around London special, something I became somewhat of an expert on after breaking my glasses (did I sit on them? yes). Leaving the group early, I began my odyssey to an optician (there are a LOT of them here). The journey there was nothing special, about twenty or so minutes of walking with obfuscated vision that rendered even the grandest sights into a blurry mess in front of me, but after a couple journeys back and forth I was equipped with the ability to once again take in the sights. This, of course, wasted the day, but my journey back to join the class allowed me to soak in the same sights I was supposed to see earlier. It also gave me a clearer understanding of where things were located. I found a rather large brick castle like structure that boldly stated “Dickens lived here for a time,” stumbled across the same Cheshire Cheese the class had visited, and found a courthouse with rather intimidating lion statues and a guard that looked annoyed at my presence. I took in Fleet Street as a lost pup, and I cannot say that that experience was entirely unwelcome.

When I later read Dickens’ and saw mention of that very same street, I felt almost as though I had become privy to some insider knowledge, or some kind of inside joke I could share with Dickens. Of course, it’s just a street, but since so very little fiction occurs in Long Beach, California, it was nice to get a reference. Bookpacking, in essence, is getting those little references. These small pieces of context that may seem insignificant when you’re an ocean and the width of a country away, but feel far more impactful when you actually have the opportunity to enjoy them. Tellsons’, the hanging sign inside Dickens’ house are just little things, but they’re also giving you insight into Dickens’ as a real person. The museum in Dickens’ house does an exemplary job of this, not just showing you his stuff, as one might expect, but explaining how he lived, and how the house functioned. I think it’s easy to forget that the people of the past were, well, real people, not too unlike ourselves, that lived regular lives. As an aspiring writer, it is rather grounding to step through the same areas that Dickens’ did, and take in the fact that at some point he was just some hopeful would-be fiction writer like me. Only I can’t look out the window and see a castle when I’m writing. Furthermore, visiting places like that Victorian house, make it far easier to visualize how the people in fiction such as Dickens’ or Hugo’s lived. I hadn’t quite internalized how dark life purely by candlelight was– there was a sense of eeriness in that house so intense I thought the experience would turn out to be partly haunted. But of course, the people living at the time wouldn’t know any different, so these novels don’t go in too depth about how dark everything is. It’s just a piece of context that enhances the experience of reading, alienating you slightly from this world, and yet making your connection to it stronger as you get a fuller sense of how these characters lived as people.

A little more firmly modern is the culinary scene, something I took immediate advantage of. It’s impossible to relate it to the literature, other than to underscore just how much it has changed. But it’s too damn good not to talk about. Firstly, I was surprised by how many coffee shops there were, I had expected them to drink less coffee and more tea, but as a typical college level caffeine addict, I found it rather welcoming. But more than that, no longer is London home to merely boiled cabbage and indiscriminate meats, instead you have a global culinary experience. The global sense of London cannot be understated. America, for all its flaws, is classically known as the melting pot of cultures, an iconic immigrant nation. But cultural identities in America tend to melt away and assimilate into the greater culture. That’s not to say there aren’t cultural identities in the US, only that London, in comparison, feels truly global. This creates this global food identity, that provides an excellent replacement to beans on toast (sorry Britain). The Borough Market, where we visited, was one of my favorite places, because of the sheer amount of food you could consume, from quite a few different cultural backgrounds. Funnily enough, though, my favorite food in London was thoroughly American. A cheeseburger. My god, I wish we had a Bleecker’s back home.