United Kingdom

October 1–20, 2000

For the first time in my life I went through 16 rolls of film on one trip. And began to give the idea of switching to a digital camera some serious thought.

The red brick houses, moss, and rainy weather in England are lovely.

London

I didn’t like London one bit.

I had expected it to be more like Paris. Turns out it’s hard to say what it resembles. It also has a dreary embankment.

Plus it’s flecked with awful 1970s buildings.

Neon advertising.

In the evenings chewing gum is cleaned up off the streets.

Truly beautiful postbox.

Barrier fences guarding a knocked over traffic light.

Pedestrian crossings are marked with yellow orbs atop posts. This tradition has also been kept alive in many British colonies (for instance, Malta and New Zealand).

Red telephone boxes and double-decker buses are the urban design gold standard for all other cities around the world.

London has got to be two-storeyed. If it weren’t people simply wouldn’t be able to get around. London is hands down the best city in terms of how all of the different modes of transport are organised.

It’s no coincidence that there’s a monument to the inventor of the tunnelling shield in the centre of the city. Such a shield was used to help dig the London underground in 1861, which is the same year serfdom was abolished in Russia.

The new underground stations are splendid (although there’s no comparison with the ones in Moscow and Stockholm).

There are always at least five airplanes in London’s sky. If there aren’t, it means that it’s either the middle of the night or the weather precludes flying.

This sign points out how watchful Londoners are (they’ll dob you in without a second thought, just as they would in the US and Australia).

Leicester

A small and pleasant city.

Pictogram tiles.

This museum looks like the one you see in school textbook illustrations — a classical building that says “museum” on it.

Conga line.

York

The city New York was named after.

People taking photographs of each other.

Edinburgh

In my opinion, Edinburgh is the best city in the world.

It’s got mountains, the sea, old buildings; it’s soulful, and replete with local history.

In 1826 construction got underway in the city centre on a monument commemorating those who died in the war against Napoleon. The monument was supposed to be an exact replica of the Parthenon in Athens. They erected 12 columns, after which the money ran out. They didn’t even manage to make what’s there look like ancient Greece ruins. It is now a historic monument in its own right. The whole of Edinburgh is made up of such stories.

The atmosphere here is like something out of a fairy tale.

Even the bagpipe player, who really got on my nerves, couldn’t make me love the place any less.

Glasgow

A truly awful city. Grey, dreary, proletarian, grim, and uninteresting. The only glimmer of life was symbolised by the traffic cones squeezed onto this monument.

The hotels in the UK are awful. All of them are small, cramped, with low ceilings, bad lighting, and unbelievably impractical bathrooms, where hot and cold water comes out of different taps in the hope that hotel guests will mix the two in the sink first, then wash as if there’s no running water and they’re using a plastic basin.