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Photos are mine unless otherwise noted (edits, camera adjustments, explaining the ISO for the umpteenth time, and encouragement all courtesy of Mehdi, who has a sweet shot from our lunch here).
On Saturday we rented a car and drove out to Cambridge where we met a wonderful family (whose photos I’ve witheld since I didn’t ask for permission to post them) and dined with a wonderful friend who schlepped Mehdi’s first and most-cherished Nikon back from Australia for him. Cambridge itself had quaint old streets with throngs of tourists and academics in tweed jackets–some with matching tweed hats–and a cohort of classic bicycles around every corner.
There was also a big indoor mall with the big name stores London has, albeit better stocked and a little cleaner, from Starbucks to John Lewis. It’s hard to escape a Westfield these days, be it Skokie, Illinois, Auckland, New Zealand or Cambridge.
There’s an article on the ever-widening gap between rich and poor (read it here) that says today’s super rich are a plutonomy, and “In a plutonomy there is no such animal as ‘the US consumer’ or ‘the UK consumer’, or indeed the ‘Russian consumer’. … There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take.”
But isn’t this also true for other classes given the proliferation of Westfield malls, Ikeas, KFCs et al? Mehdi noticed our rest stop en route to New Forest the next day could have been Anywhere, USA or Australia for that matter.
That being said, London and New York City offer much of the same thing, but I still faced culture shock. Things are different between the two metropolises, and a few hours away the air was better and the pace of life happily slower out in Cambridge.
But after traveling the world it is hard to accept that London, of all places, takes some getting used to, and it’s been a slow but steady process of falling in love with the place. The day trips help. More photos to come.
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