Brian's London Blog: Around London #1

I've been in London for just under a month, yet I am guilty of writing about nearly everything but the city itself so far...not fair, considering the name of this thing is Brian's London Blog. So, here's a little bit about the London I've come to know.

Islington/Finsbury/Angel/Barbican-
The above words have become as familiar in terms of explaining my home surroundings as the phrases "Downtown Milwaukee," "Wisconsin Avenue," and "kind-of-near-the-Milwaukee-Public-Library." I'll explain...

Greater London is divided up in so many different ways that I probably shouldn't even begin to detail them all. But humor me, and let me try to explain a few. At the highest administrative level, the city is split into Inner London and Outer London. I'm in Inner London. Then, like New York City, London is divided up into boroughs. The only difference is that while New York City has five boroughs, London has thirty-two plus "the City," which is the financial center of London. The City actually rests upon the site of Londinium, where the Romans settled 2,000 years ago, and it has been the urban center ever since. It has special status as its own sort of autonomous borough and is ruled by The Corporation of London, a governing body older than Parliament.

From these 32 boroughs and the City, each is broken up into postal districts, but those follow fairly arbitrary borders. Therefore, the best way of describing where I am in London is to tell you my borough, my neighborhood, and the nearest Tube stops.

My borough is Islington. If you're from Milwaukee, the closest comparison to Islington is probably Riverwest or the East Side. If you're a Chicagoan, think the trendy neighborhoods surrounding the Loop. Islington boasts a lot of nice places to live, cool boutique shops, a semi-Bohemian populace and a lot of diversity. I'm actually at the very southern edge of Islington. My neighborhood, also called a "district," is Finsbury. Incidentally, my dorm is "Finsbury Hall." Here's a map from Wikipedia with which I took a few artistic liberties:

Islington borough is in red. I'm on the south side of that, in the Finsbury district.

My nearest Tube stops are Angel and Barbican. In fact, I'm almost equidistant between the two: south of Angel and north of Barbican. Old Street and Farringdon stops are also close. I'll spare you the seizure-inducing yet quite artistic map of the London Underground on this page, but if you absolutely need to see it, here you go.

City University-
As I've mentioned, I'm spending the semester as an international student at City University, London. Roughly 20,000 undergraduate students attend City U, but Marquette, with only about 8,000 undergrads, feels much larger. The campus of City U is much more disjointed than Marquette, too, but universities in London are especially lacking in real estate. That may explain why I haven't seen grass in weeks, excluding my ventures off campus. City U specializes in business, computer science and nursing, but lacks just about every liberal arts course you could imagine. This is because most students know exactly what their majors are when coming to a British university, and they stick to their core curricula. Major-switching, a uniquely American pastime that I myself enjoy, is almost nonexistent here. City U is especially known for their ever-improving graduate programs (which doesn't help me), but administrators like to brag about the school's rising stature and also enjoy flaunting the new university logo:

I must admit that I'm a fan. It beats the Jesuit bossing around a Native American in a canoe going backwards with a stupid motto.

As much as I miss Marquette, I have to hand it to City U for being so diverse. About 170 countries are represented by the student body. That's twice as much as Marquette's figure. In fact, in one of my classes, we were split into groups and mine consists of a Czech, a Pakistani, a Swede, a French-Canadian and me. I'm definitely in the ethnic minority here, and it's wonderful walking down the hallways; I see tons of Africans, Arabs, Asians, Slavs, Israelis and the occasional white kid that looks like me. Hijabs and yarmulkes are more common that baseball caps, and I hardly ever hear English outside of class.

Here are a few photos of day-to-day things...