Socially speaking, I'm pretty sure I've done more in my first two weeks in this city than the last two months prior to my departure from the US. It has been vastly enjoyable, uplifting, and... I feel like I've been run over by a train. Multiple times. I'm not kidding; I barely have the strength to type right now.
That said -- given the chance to replay any of it, I wouldn't change a thing. It's been great catching up with friends, checking out the city, meeting new people. Aside from the daily after-work quick-drink, highlights from this week included my first football match ("soccer" is a blasphemous word around these parts) -- a veritable Arsenal score-fest at the impressive Emirates stadium -- and the wedding of my close friend Gaby to her longtime boyfriend Jon in Cobham, an affluent little country town about an hour and a half south of the city.
It really hit home exactly how strongly people here feel about football, or as people seem to call it, the football, in a surreal moment this week when I posted the following innocent (and clearly naive) status update on Facebook:
"Adam Svoboda is going to the Arsenal game tonight."
Within 10 minutes, I had seven messages and two phone calls from various English folks, both here and abroad, demonstrating their feelings about this in no uncertain terms :
- Clearly you have fallen in with the wrong crowd.- Enjoy the game. Arsenal are a shit team.- What in God's name is wrong with you?
And my favorite:
Arsenal!?! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!
It got even weirder on the night of the game, when we headed up to Emirates and I noticed a small sign in the window of the pub where we had gone for a bit of quick pre-gaming... "Home Supporters Only." I asked my friend Fritha, season ticket-holder and self-described 6-on-a-scale-of-1-to-10-fan, about this, and she regarded me with a look that said-- how do I accurately describe this -- "uh, like, helloooo, y-AAAAhh!" in roughly the same way an in-crowd 15-year old would disdainfully answer a dumb question by one of her parents. Apparently, the segregation is taken very seriously here; beyond the pub policy (which I'm told is ubiquitous), the stadiums have separate entrance for away fans, who are parsed away from the home fans before and after the game by a line of police, arms locked. These are safety measures, I'm told -- and flashing back to the reactions of my friends to my Facebook update earlier, it was not difficult to imagine that they actually made a lot of sense.
Not an Arsenal fan? Fuggedaboudit.
Emirates is supposedly one of the nicer football stadiums, and although it's hard to make out in the crappy picture below, it really is an impressive structure.
View of the pitch.
The game was fantastic. This was an early-season qualifier for the Champions League, against FC Twente -- Arsenal dominated, controlling the ball probably 80% of the time against the Dutch team and putting the ball into the net 4 times before the final whistle. But I have to be honest: as a guy used to seeing American sports in American places, a couple of aspects of the evening jumped out at me as much as the game itself. First, the songs and chants, which were all much more complex than, say, the standard American "sha-na-na-na, hey hey hey, goodbye" -- but which everyone in the crowd seemed to know by heart, from the most grizzled fans down to the youngest kids. Second, the stadium was clean - not a stray piece of litter anywhere as far as I could see. Not sure how they accomplished this, but I would strongly encourage the management companies that look after our stadiums in the US - who I'm sure are all reading this blog right now with rapt attention - to take a page out of the English playbook on this one. Third -- and this really was Twilight Zone weird -- even the men's room was nice. I mean, I wouldn't volunteer to live there for a month or anything, but the space was clean as a whistle, didn't reek of death (or worse things), and wasn't covered with the nasty, biological-warfare grade funk that seems to coat every surface of men's rooms in stadiums and most other high-traffic public venues I've visited in my life (I am thinking specifically here of all of my favorite bars in NYC).
Of course, none of the above-mentioned niceities might have been possible without the fourth and most extreme difference I noticed: no beer, or alcohol of any sort, was on sale inside the stadium.
This difference also accounts for why, after the game, Fritha and I were still sober enough to mug it up a bit.
The game was mid-week; by Friday, I had barely -- and I do mean barely -- recharged the batteries enough for the next big outing, an event which one colleague aptly referred to as "The Social Event of The Year": the Gaby Gully-Nee-Bolton Wedding Extravanganzapalooza. Now, that may sound a little superlative, but it's actually a pretty accurate representation of what went down this past Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in Surrey, beginning with a massive Friday night session at the - um - rustic local Hilton where our group (Chris, my roommate, and friends Claire, Fritha, and Jacqui) set up shop for the weekend.
The wedding was held Saturday, and I'm pleased to note that despite the fact that our previous evening had ended in the not-so-early morning hours, we were all able to pull ourselves together pretty well prior to the ceremony.
Claire and Fritha lookin' all snazzy
Chris, Sharon and Jacqui in the churchyard
The beautiful old church where the ceremony was held. It dates from the 1600s.
The blushing bride and groom, directly after the wedding
Following the marriage, the wedding party headed to Gaby's parents place for the reception. It was fab - flawless service, great music (during the cocktail reception, a fellow played gypsy jazz guitar) and a spectacular meal, featuring some outstanding speeches by the bride, groom, and their respective parties, which broadly ranged in topic from the abnormal size of the groom's head throughout his life to Gaby's well-known and terrifying Category-5 tantrums. Ultimately, though, I think it was Jon that won the Line Of The Night prize:
"When I asked David [Gaby's dad] for Gaby's hand in marriage, his response was, 'Are you mad!?!'... this was not exactly what I had been expecting..."
The party went on into the wee hours, and amazingly, Gaby and Jon kept pace with the guests, dancing, drinking and laughing in a superhuman display of energy after what had undoubtedly been a joyous but exhausting day... Perhaps they got their second wind after chowing down on some roast pork -- or to be more accurate, a full roast pig, which had been cooking over an open fire for hours during the afternoon reception and through the formal sit down meal. It was a great finishing touch, and absolutely delicious besides.
Jazz Hands at the reception.
Claire and yours truly.
Ready to roast. I don't know what your name was, big guy, but you were delicious.
We returned home Sunday fat, happy, and utterly beat. As I sat with Chris drinking a cup of coffee at a little cafe overlooking the river, we talked about what a great time we're having in this country, batted around some ideas for the next big adventure, and even came up with an idea for that very afternoon:
Get back upstairs, dump the bags, and go to sleep. Which is exactly what we did.
