The London Abroad Experience

Last fall, I studied abroad in London. I stayed at Edgeware Road and studied in Regents Park - near the Lebanese Quarter and Camden Town, and made it a point to spend time in a number of other districts. A student filming project I did with some NYU kids actually took me to a Bollywood-esque Arts neighbourhood near Brick Lane, where we borrowed a studio from an Asian (Indian) talk-show company and I received the Brick Lane Curry Tour after we finished filming. A number of our novels have taken us through the mythic town of London, but I felt a resonance with the feeling of alienation in Londonstani. In a city with such ancient history, it still feels like everyone's a stranger of sorts. The Bangla-town section (where the Bangladeshi Muslim Indians live) became so after having been the emigrant Jewish silver-smithing quarter. T.S. Eliot lived on the same block as I did, along with his American expats. Everyone's from somewhere else except for the English folks - but even there, things get fuzzy. London leaks out from the Loop, from its centre, and where exactly it ends or begins, what's a suburb and what's an unwanted neighbouring burrough can get hazy and extremely subjective. My London relatives actually live in Croydon and commute in to the city... and they've only been English citizenry for a couple of generations (Irish before that). I often felt kind of isolated in London, but other times I felt like we were all alone together... of sorts.