First week - made it!

I’ve made it through my first week in London. Work was good, the people in this office seem generally nice. A lot of new people are actually starting this week, so the whole office went out for drinks Wednesday night. It was fun - got to know a lot of people – although after I had had a few the conversation of course veered into politics and I was probably a little too virulent in my rhetoric. But people seemed interested by my take on Europe and the UK, even if they did disagree with it. I think a favorite hobby of mine here is going to be challenging the Brits’ perceptions about the world and their place in it.

Interestingly Tony Blair just gave a big speech on the subject yesterday. Speaking to an audience of defense experts and military personnel in Plymouth, he said Britain faces a choice, continue to participate in international military intervention or cease. He warned of the dangers of the former. But the problem, as many military experts here have pointed out, is that the UK doesn’t have the money to increase its military budget to the degree needed to continue the kind of military intervention its engaged in in the last six years. Britain will shortly be withdrawing 1/3 of its troops from Iraq, and internal government sources are saying by the end of the year they will have withdrawn their entire force there. It is widely understood to be an acknowledgement that the Iraq misadventure has failed.

But in my mind there is an obvious solution here. If Europe were to band together and form a pan-continental army, there would be no need for any country to increase its military budget. In fact, many countries, such as France and the UK, could decrease their military budget. But that’s never even posited here as a legitimate option.

And when I asked my coworkers if they really thought it was a tenable position to be reliant on the US for protection in the 21sy century, they insisted they didn’t need the US’s protection. Oh really? What’s going to protect you? Trident? NATO, they insisted.

I hope that people who don’t know me here don’t think that my harping on the fact that Europe depends on the US for military protection is because of some sort of jingoism. Obviously, readers of my blog will know that it’s not. Still, one of the first things I’ve been struck by here is the naiveté with which many Britons perceive their place in the world, particularly their future place in it. It’s interesting to me. The jist of it is they don’t see military power as being all that important in today’s world. Maybe they’re right, and maybe I'm approaching the issue from an outdated geopolitical perspective. But my gut tells me they’re not. Perhaps I will explore this issue more in the future.

They think about the future in other ways here, certainly. They are, for instance, single-mindedly fascinated by global warming at the moment. Every newspaper on Tuesday morning had an article which started with some variation of “The effects of global warming left New Yorkers sweltering in the heat Monday…” I mean you seriously can’t get away from it. But there’s a lot of frustration too because Britain, and the rest of Europe, is doing so much to reduce its carbon footprint, but in the end it will make no difference if the US, China and India don’t cooperate.

Anyway I’d better head out, I’m hoping to do some proper clubbing tonight, even though it means an agonizingly long trip home on the night bus. I cannot wait to move into my flat on Sunday! Then I can stumble home whenever I want to.

Observing pop culture

I’ve arrived here in the UK just at the start of the fifth season of “Big Brother,” a wildly popular reality series here in the UK which I believe existed in some form at some point in the US but never really caught on.

I’ve written about the show before, me and Pierce were perplexed by it when we visited London two years ago. The premise to the series is similar to many of our reality shows, a group of people is selected to live in a house and have every moment of their lives recorded. Each week the British public decides who they would like to “save” in the house. Whoever gets the least amount of votes has to leave. And the person who’s left wins some sort of cash prize.

Sounds fairly standard right? But here’s where it gets weird. There are not one, but two “live feeds” from the house, two channels that provide two different live broadcasts of whatever is going on in the house at that exact moment, which is usually people sitting around eating or sleeping. And people actually sit around and watch this, riveted!

Flat hunting

Day three here in the UK, things have gone ok so far. I looked at some flats Friday and Saturday, and have settled on one in a pretty cool area right on the cusp of Clerkenwell and Holborn. There are a ton of bars and restaurants around, so it should pretty much be the polar opposite of Roosevelt Island! It’s a good location because it’s a 15 minute walk to work and a 15 minute walk to SoHo, basically right between the two. So no having to take the tube ever!

I looked at an apartment in the Barbican that was truly amazing. The Barbican is sort of like Roosevelt Island, a planned community with its own stores, a movie theater, arts center, etc. It was a gorgeous 4-bedroom apartment with some amazing modern amenities and a huge balcony. The other rooms were three guys. The only downsides were the room faced a fairly busy street, and it was the kind of deal where it was clear it would be heavily dependent on me getting on with my roommates. This other one in Holborn, on the other hand, is a very big bedroom in a 3-bedroom flat with no living room. So it will be kind of like my studio in Chelsea, sort of like having a studio with a shared kitchen and bathroom. The owner is an older Eastern European guy, and the other renter is a girl about my age who is also a finance journalist, and she seems nice and says she hardly ever sees the older guy. This other apartment also requires no long-term commitment, so I’m free to go at any time. The Barbican one required 6 months.

Land ho!

Well I'm officially here! They let me in and everything. I am now officially a UK legal worker, like a green card holder in the US. I wish the UK cards had some kind of cool color. Alas, they don't.

I narrowly missed catastrophe this morning when I was on my way to JFK Airport in a car service, and sudenly got the urge to check my info to make sure I was indeed taking off at JFK. I came to find out I most definitly was not, my plane was actually leaving from Newark. So I had to scream "Newark!! Turn around!!! It's Newark!!!" and we had to race through the tunnels, through Manhattan, over the NJTP, it was a mess. But, thanksfully, I made it. Thank god I checked otherwise I'd still be in New York tonight!

It's 3am here and I can't sleep. I felt bad that all my tossing and turning for the past 2 hours has been keeping Aaron, who I'm staying with, awake, so I just took an ambien and went into the living room to write a blog while I wait for it to kick in. Jet lag is tough.

Tomorrow hopefully SOMEONE will show me their flatshare, noone has been responding to me. I must not be selling myself very well, is it the American thing? Maybe they don't want to take on a foreigner. Maybe my search radius is just too small, but I really want a flat in Clerkenwell, where my office is. Maybe I just need to have a little patience.

Lessons not learned

One of the most commonly heard defenses heard from people who voted for the Iraq war resolution is that they with the “widely-held” belief at the time suggesting that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to Al Qaeda, and with the American media swallowing this excuse unquestioningly, I think it’s time for a reality check.

Despite David Kay's insistence that we were “all wrong” in Iraq, the evidence says otherwise. Many of the assertions that Bush and Blair made in the run-up to the war were highly dubious and viewed with a high degree of skepticism around the world, particularly in Britain. In the UK the media reported on these doubts in the run-up to the war. This is partly why the war was and has remained so unpopular there, prompting the largest public demonstration in London’s history right before the invasion.

Counting down...

I really can't believe there's just a little over two weeks till I move. I'd say at this point I'm experiencing about 50 percent excitement and 50 percent apprehension. It's kind of coming in waves. At times I'll start thinking about all the things I want to do once I'm there, where I'll travel, etc, and I get really excited. But then other times I start thinking about the stability I'm leaving behind, and I start wondering whether I really have the ca-hones to do this.

I mean it is a pretty major move. I'm going to be thousands of miles away from my family and friends, plopping myself into a city where I know just one person. I try to reassure myself by remembering how well my move to Chicago went, another time when I was coming into a city not knowing anyone. But in that case I did have a grad program, so I had kind of a ready-made group of friends and support system immediately at my disposal. Same goes for DC. In London I won't have that.