Shakespeare tours London with a boy from Wales

An old friend (and ex-coworker) of mine--Robby, an Atlanta native now earning an IB in Wales--came to spend the weekend with me. We spent his first day here doing a walking tour of London.

Shakespeare at platform 9 3/4 in King's Cross train station.

Shakespeare at the British Library. It used to be part of the collection of the British Museum: to use the books, you would get to sit in the beautiful Reading Room in the middle of the museum. While the reading rooms in the new location (which opened in 1997) are still very comfortable and impressive, I don't think the Chinese feel of the exterior matches what the library stands for.

Shakespeare with Jeremy Bentham, the eighteenth century political philosopher who left his body to University College London to be displayed inside the university.

Robby outside the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand, looking worried.

Shakespeare outside the Royal Courts of Justice, looking considerably more poised than Robby. (The hand is Robby's: don't worry, I didn't break any of my fingers.)

Catch-22s for Immigrants

I am frustrated this morning. It's easy not to think about this in today's world of the online global community, but effectively, when you move to a new country, you become almost a non-person. No contacts, no renting history, no credit history. You don't exist until you start paying utility or credit card bills.

One would think that it ought to be easy for someone with a legitimate reason (say, a student) to move to another country. But if often seems that things have been designed to throw obstacles in an immigrant's way.

Your experience as an immigrant to the UK might be something like this: you cannot get a visa without first having a job. But you are unlikely to get hired without a visa. Even if (like me) you have been accepted to a UK university, your visa application might still be rejected. The universities don't seem to have any power to tell the immigration office who to admit to the country.

Once you make it here, of course, you will need somewhere to live. But you may find this hard as well: most likely, without a renting history, you will be required to provide a guarantor who must be a land-owning UK citizen. Arrived in the country with no contacts? You might be out of luck. If you have a guarantor, or if you don't need one, you will still need a UK bank account. Problem there? You're often required to have lived in the UK for 12 months before you can open a bank account, and you will need first to have a permanent address (which you don't have yet, remember, because you're looking...)

And then, perhaps, after you're settled, and you wait until you have a bank statement or utility bill and a debit card so that you can finally get yourself a mobile phone with a monthly plan (by far the most cost-effective option). So you take your documents and go to the phone store, only to be denied on a credit check (yes, they check your credit to sell you a phone).

Such was my luck today. I wasn't trying to buy a house or a car, just a phone, but because I've only been in the country for a little over a month, I have no credit history. Now, worst of all, since I've been denied a mobile phone, I'm starting out with bad credit history.

I'm trying not to sound bitter. I understand, of course, why it is that I am almost a non-person in the UK at this moment, and why in many cases it must be that way, although I have to wonder if there's a reason why a credit check company can't exist across national borders. But really--should my lack of credit history prevent me from buying such a small item as a mobile phone? And should the fact that I tried to get a phone soon after I moved here because I need phone hurt my credit score?

I was a bit bewildered while applying for my Visa when I had to travel into downtown Houston to have my fingerprints taken. My father thinks this is because George W. started a policy that all immigrants to the U.S. must have their fingerprints taken, and so other countries created that policy for Americans as retribution. That was bizarre, but I think this beats it. In the United States, someone who walked into a phone store with a bank statement to prove their ability to pay--who would even be willing to pay a few months worth of statements ahead of time--would have no problem getting a phone. They might beg her to do so.

I'm hoping this will be the end of the seeming catch-22s I encounter, but I fear that's wishful thinking. I've never had to worry about my credit history before, but apparently now I will need to consciously build it up.

More Adventures of Lego Shakespeare

My church met in a different location a couple weeks ago and I had the misfortune of encountering a bus fare machine that didn't work, so I ended up walking all the way from Bloomsbury to Victoria. On the way there, I found myself passing Buckingham Palace through the middle of a bicycle race, but it seemed like a good opportunity to get a picture of Shakespeare at the Palace.

One day I walked from Victoria over to the South Bank Centre to meet someone. As Shakespeare and I were going over the bridge, we decided to stop and admire the view of the houses of Parliament and the London Eye.

I went to see Timon of Athens at the Globe last week with my flatmate and her boyfriend. Unfortunately, it was too dark to get a good picture, and Shakespeare's head also had come off in my purse. I bought some super glue, so in future pictures, Shakespeare won't be headless.

Puppets and libraries

If life can settle down in London, it appears finally to be doing so: I have moved into my flat, purchased necessary furniture, set up an internet connection, started school. Now a routine can start to form, which doesn't mean that days can't exist (like today) that seem so out of the ordinary to be a little surreal.

My daily schedule has generally been starting rather early, with toast and jam for breakfast with a cup of tea. I discovered a wonderful magazine called the London Review of Books which makes great reading over breakfast or on the tube, so I generally carry that around with me. I have class two days a week, though I am generally in the area of London where UCL is more days than not: the course convenor for my MA told us that the British Library should become "like a second home," and I have a feeling those words were more prophetic than advisory; so most mornings I think I'll be leaving pretty early if not to go to class than to set up in one library or another for a day of reading and writing.

This morning, that was my plan. I woke up early and was making my second cup of tea when my flatmate Becky's boyfriend, Ollie, popped in and announced that he had free tickets to a show at the Little Angel Puppet Theatre to see Sleeping Beauty. Of course I can't turn down a chance to see a puppet show, so at 10am I found myself in Angel, which turned out to be a charming area with lots of antique shops and patisseries, in a tiny theatre behind a garden with a tiny stage for tiny puppets. Most of the audience were under five years old except for a sprinkling of mothers and the little group of postgraduates sitting in the back that Ollie convinced to come. But all of us really enjoyed it: there's something really charming about puppets.

After lunch I said goodbye to Becky and Ollie and headed over to the British Library. I had reserved a copy of a play published in 1728 to read in the Rare Books Room. The BL is a copyright library, so they have--literally--everything. But you cannot check anything out: if you have a Reader's Pass, you can order books to read inside the library. There is a somewhat elaborate process to be allowed to read a book. You must leave all of your belongings except what is allowed in the reading rooms (pencils, paper, laptops on silent, etc.) in the cloakroom. Everything that you take with you must be placed in a clear plastic bag. At the entrance to the reading room you must flash your Reader's Pass and then proceed to an empty seat. Noting your seat number, you may either proceed to a computer to order reading material (which may take 70 minutes to arrive) or, if you were smart enough to order it online ahead of time, to an issue desk to retrieve your book. You then sit with it at your desk until you are done, at which point you may return it to the issue desk and request that they keep it for you for three days. On exiting, your clear plastic bag is inspected for stowaways.

Despite all this, it's an amazing experience to visit the BL. Once you make it through their security measures, they are remarkably lenient about what you can be allowed to read. I almost couldn't believe that they would just hand me a copy of a rare play from 1728 this afternoon, but they did. I sat in the middle of the reading room in a comfortable leather chair and alternated between taking notes on the text I was reading and enjoying watching the people around me. People watching is rapidly becoming one of my favorite activities to do in London, and the British Library seems to be a great place to do it if you're interested in older scholarly (and sometimes slightly eccentric-looking) types.

The play I was looking at is called The Double Falshood, or Lovers Distressed by Lewis Theobald, though Theobald claims that he only edited it and that the text is actually the lost play Cardenio by Shakespeare. Reading it, I find it hard to believe that it could actually have a Shakespeare manuscript behind it. It was entertaining, and certainly accomplished and polished poetry, but there wasn't anything special about the language itself.

I ended the day with more puppets: Ollie shares my love of the Muppets and so we all watched some episodes of The Muppet Show together. A good end to a satisfying day, really.