— tapioca world tour

i will miss chorlton. not the theives who smash my windows and steal stuff, but the big brick houses…the swaying green trees…the organic supermarkets…and, especially, Barbakan Bakery. they have the best bagels, loaves of bread, imported cheese and chicken coronation sandwiches on the island. and quiche, apparently.

i moved into 8 Ruskin Ave, Rusholme, Manchester, M14 4DQ yesterday. just, you know, kind of packed and left. it was a warmer day for this freezing city — probably lower 60s — and after calling 20 cab places, someone finally agreed to move my stuff.

the driver, though perfectly harmless, immediately started hitting on me:

“so, you have boyfriend?”

i should have quickly switched my grandmother’s wedding ring from my right hand to my left and held up my finger, but i thought just telling him i had a boyfriend would be enough. it wasn’t.

“but why not have another boyfriend here?”
oh god. i don’t do that, i said.
“why not?” he persisted. “i bet your boyfriend already has another girlfriend.”
he can see whoever he wants, i said. as long as i don’t know about it. if i knew about it, i’d have to kill her.
“oh, i’m sure he has many girlfriends. that’s the way of guys. you know, they go to club, they drink, they meet women…”
stop! stop it! can we please stop talking about this?

we drove on for a little while, silent except for his stiffled chuckling. soon we hit rusholme, on the border of moss side, my new neighborhood.

“oh my god,” he said. “you’re moving HERE? are you crazy? this is the worst area of manchester.”
thanks, i said. i was already robbed in the posh part of town. i think i’ll be fine here.
“no,” he continued. “this is where all the drug dealers live!”
whatever.
[i did come to find out, however, that our neighbors directly across the narrow street are in fact some big players in the drug underworld, as evidenced by the yelling and screaming mob of questionable persons who form a queue outside the house every morning.]
“my friend got robbed here the other night!” he said. ” i got robbed here a month ago! you’re crazy. don’t ever walk alone.”

you know what? if i can survive manchester, i can survive anything. despite the misery my congenial taxi driver tried to inspire in me, i kept my chin up and moved right in. peter from germany, who’s in his mid-thirties and has spent the past 3 years integrating technology in tiny villages in peru, let me in, helped carry my stuff, and set up my bed with me. he and i share the third floor, which i think was an attic at one point. i just wanted to be high up. he’s going to be a great neighbor, since he’s quiet but not shy, owns the entire Macromedia MX Suite for PCs and is not afraid to share all his applications. he’s unfortunately a chain-smoker, and the smoke seeps through my walls all day, but c’est la vie. a little tobacco never killed anyone, right?

so that’s my move-in story and i’m sticking to it. my 12×10 room is just lovely. i went to the pub last night with peter and ben and michel’s girlfriend, who’s visiting from canada, and a friend of hers from liverpool. do you know, the pubs here all shut down at 11p? if you want to drink or hang out after that, you have to go to a CLUB! a club, where you pay to get in, and where skanky girls/guys come up to you, smashed, and try to dance with you. um…no thank you. and all the pool tables here are tiny, i mean tiny, and the balls are also tiny and they’re only red and yellow.

peter and i have bonded over lack: the lack of decent bread and pastries from good bakeries (the new ghetto neighborhood hasn’t a bakery in miles), the lack of late-night pubs, curry with vegetables, affordable sports facilities, and sun.

i miss you all, but please don’t come to visit me because it would never be worth the investment, and i couldn’t bare to see any of you subjected to the horrors, anticlimactic though they may be, of this sad wet city.

happy sunday!

…it just drizzles. consistently. like that in-between stage where it’s not actually a hard rain but it’s a little bit more than drizzle, so half the people have their umbrellas up (the wimpy ones), and half haven’t put their umbrellas up (the rugged and/or stupid ones).

except today. today it’s weirdly sunny. we still have to wear jackets and scarves because it’s cold, but it’s sunny. it’s sunny! my italian pals, the two valentinas who miss the sun more than the rest of us, they want to be outside all day. i hope it lasts more than 6 hours…

i have nothing interesting to write about, so i’ll wait until after i’ve moved in the new place and i have more to talk about. meanwhile, i feel so disconnected to the world, not reading much news or hearing anything about the US. what’s going on at home? kidnappings and executions in iraq? that much i’ve heard about. what else? should i be grateful i’m far away right now? i hope everyone votes. please, everyone, oh please vote!!

despite what you might think, it’s not too late to reroute all those packages of extra peppermint stick gum you’ve sent me! here’s my new and hopefully year-long address:

8 Ruskin Ave.
Rusholme
Manchester, M14 4DQ
United Kingdom

[phone number forthcoming as of next week]

and, just like tooth whitening solution, you see results within 24 hours!

that’s how long i gave myself yesterday to decide whether or not to stay in england. (no, to answer questions, my stolen camcorder/cables weren’t insured, but it’s better than having a laptop stolen.) anyway. everything was riding on sam, right? well here’s what happened:

sam doesn’t speak english so well. every payphone call i make costs $4. i called sam about 9 times yesterday, negotiating where he was to pick me up. skip ahead a few hours of me in the rain in downtown manchester. i finally find sam. he’s 28, a bouncer and a data entry person and a student. his voice sounds small, but he’s a big guy. we drive an hour away to oldham, and we pull up to some housing projects, more or less. gradually i begin to see that sam is running a big scam: he’s nice, but he’s lied — he doesn’t own his place, he rents; he doesn’t have a two-bedroom apt, he has a one bedroom; and he secretly rents out his own bedroom and sleeps in his living room. i was very cordial, smiled, then got a ride back to rusholme (near campus) and slumped in a phone booth, nearly in tears. this was my last chance to stay in england, but now i had to turn around and cash in my chips and quit school and go back to boston with nothing but a laptop and A LOT of debt.

and then i thought of michel.

pronounced “michelle”, though the beatles weren’t singing about a french-canadian guy, this dude had posted an ad about a 7-bedroom flat with 4 available rooms that afternoon. i had called earlier, and he told me to call back the next day and maybe i could see it. it was 8pm the night before, but i was desperate. he was in a bar, but picked up anyway.

“michel,” i said. “i’m really sorry to bother you about this, but is there any possible way in hell you can show me your place tonight? i just got robbed, i’m supposed to sign a housing contract, and i can’t go home until i’ve found a new place.” he was super nice, left the bar, jumped on his bike, and met me in rusholme, which is the indian section of town (curry mile) about a 15 minute walk from campus. in rusholme, almost all the houses are brick rowhouses, quite nasty inside. but michel’s landlord, steve, is 26 and is completely redoing the whole place — including new floors, windows, kitchen appliances, washer, dryer, and new double beds, desks, lamps, closet things and dressers in every room. AND broadband in every room. it was almost too funny. the place is still torn up but will be all done construction by next week, and people can move in whenever. michel and his roommate, a nice guy named ben from france, live there currently with peter, a german guy who’s in lima, peru visiting his girlfriend right now, or something.

anyway.

long story short: this place was so perfect it was a little too ironic. at the eleventh hour, when you’ve lost all hope in a decent human solution, BOOM! something tends to work out. there was a knock at the door. a young french couple came in, neighbors with a broken stove. they cooked spaghetti and left some for all of us to eat. then another knock on the door. steve, the landlord who’s my age, came in, and agreed i could move in on saturday. i just have to sign a year’s contract with the 3 other new people who i’ll meet tonight, and i’m allowed to leave in june so long as i find someone to sublet my room. voila!

everyone in the house will be mid-to-late-20s and is from a different country. apparently, we’ll be representing canada, the US, france, germany, finland, ireland, and britain, respectively. and we’ll each have our own internet connection. woohooo! rent for this place is equivalent to $400/mo, and since it’s close to campus, i don’t even need to buy a bus pass.

for those of you who tease me about my great karma, i guess you know me better than i know myself. except, friends, i don’t believe in karma. good and bad outcomes aren’t handed out at random. life is not a casino. if it is, well maybe i’ve still lost because i haven’t received my loan money yet, hence i cannot yet pay for this new flat, but dude, that stuff works out. i’ve got another week for that to work out. at school they’re letting me have a temporary registration until my bank problems sort out. and, as my literary mentor sarah dewey reith says,

You can’t go all the way across the water for a program, and not even see if it’s any good! Rally, Bon, rally! You’d feel like an ass forever if you didn’t even go to the first few weeks of class. You’ve been depressed in Boston, too, remember? Being a student over here is like living on another planet; why not in England?

she’s a brilliant friend, but to this i say, because manchester, england is poopoo. you don’t get your hand held at uni here. it’s like going into a supermarket with your mom and getting lost in aisle 8. you’re lost for hours in the international food section, and you try to remember what you’re told: if you don’t know where you are, just stand still. someone will find you and help you.

nope, that wisdom does not apply in the UK. you have to go around to the produce section, walk to the deli, bang on the fake glass that separates customers from the guys who chop up meat, and you have to yell, “help me! help me, i’m lost!” but they can’t hear you, and, even though you’re only four years old, you have to leave the supermarket altogether, dance on the sidewalk until you’ve made $10, then catch a taxi home and jimmy your bedroom window open with a stick because all this time your mom’s been in the pharmacy by the customer service area, waiting for a particular kind of imported ointment to be cleared for coverage by her insurance company.

that’s exactly what england’s like.

cheerio.

seriously. who’s playing all these tricks on me? mortal existence never ceases to amaze me with its limitless badness. just when i think a situation can’t get worse, it graduates to a new, ridiculous level of awfulness — which just proves to me that this can’t be all there is to life.

i got burglarized last night. just before coming home. some dude smashed my window and made off with my camcorder, firewire cord and some other cables. fortunately he couldn’t take my laptop since, being the little genius i am, i’d locked it to the table. he tried to bust the lock but couldn’t. woohoo! and fortunately i’d also packed up my external hard drive and had it hidden in a bag he couldn’t get to. but, still, i didn’t like what had happened.

here’s the irony: first, chorlton, the area where i live, is posh and professional and supposedly the safest area of manchester. there’s even a neighborhood watch on my street. but the cops said that, even with our alarm system, my window had been broken into before in the past few years. great, that’s just great. so, my landlord came to board up the window and i ran and hid upstairs. i didn’t want him to meet me, since i’m intending on moving out asap. needless to say, he badgered the housemate about my housing contract, wanting to know when i’ll sign it, and wanting her to sign some other census-type form about the house, putting my name down that i’m the new resident there. she told him she’d do it tomorrow (which is today), and suggested to me that i just sign the 9-month housing contract now, then break it in december and find someone to sublet my room.

call me crazy, but why would i want to sign a legally/financially-binding contract to a place i know i want to leave, where i don’t even get a bed, that someone’s already broken into and made off with my stuff? and then find someone to secretly sublet from me without the landlord knowing? no way, man. how is it i lived in the crossfire section of roxbury for nearly three years, where several people were shot up and one man actually died on my street, and yet i never had any safety or security problems at all?

the down-side is, without signing this contract, i think i’ll need to jump ship asap. but where? i’m praying the sam situation works out. i’m praying in general.

i called george last night for probably a million dollars. i thought burglary was a pretty good excuse to finally call. i hadn’t spoken to anyone i know, and he’s always a good voice of reason. he can’t quite possibly get any cooler than he already is.

honestly, if my masters program weren’t incredibly perfect, which, all administrative red tape aside, it is, i would be on literally the next flight back to boston. if the red tape doesn’t sort out, if i do have to go back to boston, back to my job, defeated, would you all bow your heads and please pretend this experience never happened? if that’s what goes down, i’ll apply for a fullbright to do my own documentary project next year. i might even apply for the fullbright regardless.

anyway, i am trying to keep my chin up, despite the robbery and the intense, consistent cold and rain, and the financial bla bla bla, and the fact that us americans are on a hunger strike because the food is too pricey, and i think we’ve all lost at least 5 pounds since arriving. “bon,” rosie wrote from san fran, “my coworker from london says manchester is the armpit of england.” yeah, i’ve heard that before. it would actually be an ok city if it weren’t for the weather and the general fact that it’s in britain. as it stands, though, it seems like a godless, grey, sad place. but i’ll have to work on reversing that.

more later. enjoy your sunny days, despite those awful floods…

(nick, your place in brooklyn is fabu compared to 90% of the poo-poo places i’ve seen in manchester, and in all of them, you pee on your feet and shower and shave at the same time. i really didn’t think places could be so nasty until i’ve seen places around here; i’d trade it all for 57 herbert street any day.)

so while we’re on the subject, allow me to describe the jail cell i visited today. it was supposed to be privately rented student accomodation by salford university, which is about 20 minutes from my school. however, after a 20 minute bus ride and a 25 minute walk over the rainiest, windiest highway overpass you’ve ever seen, i get to a petrol station. next to that, wedged between a home for the mentally disabled and a halfway house “where the naughty big boys go”, there’s salford hall, which you have to get beeped through several gates before entering. if you can imagine the sketchiest-looking motel in the heart of texas, then multiply it by 10 and add a few hardened english accents, that would be salford hall. the “warden”, keith, liked me cause i was white. he didn’t want to put me in “chinatown”, the end of the hall where the chinese kids live. instead he recommended, if i wanted to move in, that i wait for a few more weeks, when a room opens in “the more…european section, shall we say…”

needless to say, i started choking on my own spit and am continuing to fight the good fight to find a new room asap. i told the roommies last night that, simply stated, my funds won’t cover their place and i cannot open a bank account and pay for school until new housing gets settled. i blamed that all on the uni, and frankly, it kind of is their fault. everything is very disorganized this year, since my uni has merged with another.

anyway. a pal from my program, also from massachusetts, needs a room and she might be able to take my current one. i’m bringing her home tonight to see the room. and tomorrow i’m driving an hour away with sam, the possibly-sketchy possibly-indian guy who owns one or two rooms in oldham, a few light years away from my campus, but at a whopping $280/mo, quite possibly the cheapest room i’ve ever heard of.

thanks for tuning in, guys, and i hope my drab complaining isn’t too tedious or self-absorbed. i recognize you can find better reading material at the back of a Ragu jar, so i do appreciate your visit to my little blog and your support in general. yes, especially your support.

i’ll tell you all about how and why the british are insane tomorrow, when i select the lesser of the four evil living situations i have seen this week.

i love you all, i really do. i really really do, i really love you all! bahhhhhhhh!

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