A Journey Through Time and Space
October 12-15, 2018
In the classic time paradox film Dazed and Confused, Matthew McConaughey quips that "Time is a flat circle" after realizing that he is aging normally but those around him are not aging at all. As he spends his life trapped outside a metaphorical billiards hall, he is doomed to see the same scene play out in front of him again and again, each time with new participants who remain the same age while he withers into a husk of a man and eventually succumbs to the pull of the universe.
Time is indeed a flat circle. If you go straight long enough, you'll end up where you were. In this way, it is not unsurprising that Kirb and Mazz have reached a part of their world traveling adventures when they are back to doing the same things they've already done, albeit with slightly different results. The first time in Old London Town we came to see our favorite bad sports team, the Jacksonville Jaguars. This time around it was to see a team we actually care about, our hometown Seattle Seahawks (even though Mazz is from Portland, and she grew up rooting for the Broncos). On the flight from Berlin to London nearly half of the plane was dressed in Seahawks gear.
It's tempting to say that the early autumn day was unseasonably warm, but climate change is real and it's getting hot earlier and staying hot later so really who's to say what's normal or not normal anymore. In addition to helping come to grips with the impending weather apocalypse, this nonjudgmental state of mind is also key to enjoying yourself in Camden Town, a refuge of 90's goth, grunge, and raver culture. Our lovely British friend Iain was once again our guide as we made our way through vintage stores, shops called “Dark Angel” and “Tainted Prince,” and a multi-story rave emporium called “Cyberdog,” complete with live dancers, DJs, and several hundred blacklights.
Time repeated itself in multiple ways that evening. Even though we knew it was going to be a busy weekend in London because of the football game, we didn't bother to make reservations, or even decisions about what we wanted to do until it was far too late to actually do them. We made the exact same mistake in Paris earlier in the year, and once again, didn't bother to learn anything from our lack of foresight. Still, it wasn't a terrible consolation that we ended back up at Tayyabs, which had fed us easily the best Indian meal we'd ever had our first time in town. We ordered a pared-down version of just the hits from the first trip: heavily seasoned and grilled lamb chops, the exceptionally flavorful but unfortunately named lamb dish "dry meat," karahi chicken tikka masala, and seasoned okra. This place is amazing, and we'll gladly take it as a backup plan any time.
The next morning, we showed up at the Hayward Gallery for the exhibit we wanted to see right as it opened, but Kirb was hungry and wanted to eat something from the stalls set up outside first. In the time it took us to wolf down a hot dog, all of the spaces for the day were booked out. Frustrated, we bought a spot when the exhibit opened again the next day, and did the same thing we did the last time we were in London – go to Tate Modern. Again, this was not a bad consolation, as it's an exceptional museum and something we just don't have in Berlin. We barely scratched the surface the first time we were there, and it was easy to spend our afternoon wandering through the free exhibits. Kirb generally doesn't care about museums, but even he finds this place a real joy. We particularly enjoyed the photography of Martin Parr and the paintings of Sandra Gamarra.
Luckily for us, Iain and his girlfriend Leila understood the importance of making reservations ahead of time, so they locked down a spot at a popular restaurant for the four of us to have a classic English Sunday roast. We'd never specifically had an English roast before, though we'd had variations of it many times: roast beef or chicken served with roasted potatoes and vegetables and sautéed greens, all covered in a slathering of gravy. The only part we'd never had is a Yorkshire pudding, which isn't really pudding at all, but rather a fluffy puffed pastry. The Sunday roast is some straight up comfort food, and we were instantly sold on it. Since returning to Berlin we have been making some version of it for ourselves just about every week.
When we went to the Jags game two years before, it was remarkably easy to get tickets from scalpers. We had managed to get three seats together in the nosebleed section for well under face value, so we figured it wouldn't be hard to get two tickets the same way this time around. Once again, we quickly found scalpers, and talked one down to £50 a ticket. But instead of real tickets with holograms, this scalper handed us computer printouts, which we knew ran a much higher risk of being a scam. Dealing with scalpers sucks though and we didn't want to have to barter with someone again, so we took the guy's word for it and gave him our money.
When we tried to enter the stadium, the gate flashed red as we put our printouts into the machine reader. We started to get real tense and feel like idiots. Then, in the gate next to us, the lights flashed red for two other guys with printed tickets, and then again for a guy with a proper hologram ticket. The five of us complained to an attendant, and he brought us over to a side gate where there was a guy with a handheld scanner. We quietly asked the other guys with printouts if they bought theirs from a scalper as well, and they had. When the attendant opened the side gate, Kirb tried to just run through without getting his ticket scanned and was promptly called back. We held our breath as the man with the handheld reader scanned our papers, and miraculously the light turned green. We quickly scurried through the doors and up the escalator, sure we were still breaking some sort of rule by being inside. When we got to our seats, there were already two people sitting in them. We checked our tickets to theirs, and they were indeed the same printout, also bought from scalpers. We all had a good laugh, but getting grifted the way we did would have been much less laughable if we hadn't still somehow made our way inside. We made our way down to the bottom of the section where there were still several free seats and hoped that someone else wouldn't come in later and displace us.
The seats we ended up in had a fantastic view of the game, and we quickly made friends with the Hawks fans sitting around us. We sat next to two ladies named Susan and Laura from South Carolina who had adopted the Seahawks as their favorite team. Hawks fans outnumbered Raiders fans at the game 10 to 1, making it a vastly different experience than the polite clapping and general quietness of the Jags game we'd previously attended. The crowd yelled every time the opponents had the ball just like it was a home game for the Hawks. Kirb jeered at the nearby Raiders fans as their terrible football team made mistake after mistake, though we all rooted together for our favorite former Seahwawk and current Raider Marshawn Lynch. We drank merrily and laughed and took selfies with our new friends. The Seahawks won handily 27-3.
The Space Shifters exhibit at the Hayward Gallery was exactly the sort of art that gets us most excited. Each piece, gathered from 20 artists over a period of 50 years, explored perception and space in different ways. Knowing that the centerpiece, 20-50 by Richard Wilson, had queues that could last for up to an hour, we made our way there as soon as the doors opened. For the piece, the artist filled an entire room with engine oil and constructed a metal walkway that takes you out to the center. Once you get out to the middle, the reflection on the oil in the otherwise empty room tricks you into thinking that you're walking above an empty space, and the dissonance of what you see and what you know to be true makes you feel like you're turned inside out.
Though the exhibition was fantastic, it didn't take particularly long to take in. After an hour at Hayward Gallery we were ready to move on, and we still had plenty of time on our hands. So, we did what we knew and went back to Tate Modern. It's massive, so there's always something great to see there, and once again it proved to be an exceptionally enjoyable way to spend our afternoon. If there's a better museum, we haven't found it.
At the end of Dazed and Confused, when McConaughey finally realizes that his downfall was his inability to move with time instead of fighting against its currents, he unleashes another epic and wholly original quote: "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Unlike McConaughey, we realized our folly before it was too late, and after failing to get into the restaurant we wanted on Saturday, made reservations to have lunch there instead on Monday. Fergus Henderson's St. John restaurant is a London institution, and has turned him into something of a celebrity chef. Somehow fittingly, when we arrived for our lunch reservation the place was almost empty.
Not knowing exactly what we were in for, we accidentally ordered way too much food and stuffed ourselves to the point of discomfort. There was a leafy vinaigrette salad with roasted Jerusalem artichokes and olives, a rich stew with snails, chorizo, and fresh watercress, and a braised lamb served in broth with roasted carrots and aioli. By the time the final dish came around, a "lasagna" made of fennel and berkswell cheese, we could barely eat it. As it was the only dish we ordered that wasn't exceptionally good, we didn't feel too bad leaving most of it on the plate, except for the part that it was a total waste of £16.
By this point we'd learned that no matter where you're going in London, by bus or by train, it takes an hour to get anywhere. So, we set off from lunch early to gather our bags and start making our way to the airport. We had to get from the restaurant in Shoreditch to Iain's house in West Norwood, then to Gatwick Airport. Doing this took well over 4 hours, and we showed up at our gate as the plane was boarding. On the flight from London to Berlin nearly half of the plane was dressed in Seahawks gear. We were moving forward, but right back where we began. The pilot stood in the doorway to the cockpit as we entered the plane. He looked exactly like Matthew McConaughey.