Ever since I can remember, I have had a thing for British stuff. I can only attribute this tomy early appreciation of British literature which commenced with my reading "Jane Eyre" at the age of eight. The story is fairly bleak, so I don't understand where exactly the novelty set in nor why I wasn't reading Nancy Drew mysteries like other normal girls. The popularity of films such as "Notting Hill," "Bridget Jones's Diary," Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen's "Winning London" (you know you've seen it), "Love Actually" and "Pride and Prejudice" have also fueled my penchant for England and contributed to my dream of living in the picturesque neighborhood of Notting Hill in London, owning a brightly colored flat, married to a bumbling Hugh Grant-esque or Colin Firth-like young chap who plays football with the dedication and skill of David Beckham.
Having been to England twice in the past two years, and having returned from studying abroad in Oxford a week ago, I still can't put my finger on what it is exactly my fellow anglophiles and I are so taken with in terms of the English culture. It must be more than all the tea drinking, cricket playing and running around the Moors lamenting tragic romance (Wuthering Heights, anyone?) My guess is that it's a fascination with how our common language can be spoken so differently and how our traditions vary so widely despite our presence in the world as two highly developed and powerful nations. Or we just find the accents inexplicably sexy.
In any case, it's a novel experience to hear someone say "Cheers" instead of "Thank you," or "lovely" instead of "beautiful," or "brilliant" instead of "awesome," or "dodgy" instead of "sketchy" -- incidentally, a lot of British people I met think "sketchy" is the funniest expression ever. And, in fact, my most enjoyable experiences abroad were talking to the locals about their lives and their views of Americans and life in the United States. One Scottish guy I sat with on a train to Edinburgh said he could only imagine what growing up in America was like as he observed my peers laughing and talking amongst themselves. As the train sped by the North Sea coast and castle ruins came into view, we all stopped and gasped at the natural, antiquated beauty of the scene. "What?" he said, laughing. "You don't have castles in America?"
In fact, the very oldness of the country and its history struck me in comparison to our University, which was founded about 600 years later than the college at Oxford, where I studied. Instead of the stately columns and red brick to which we are so accustomed here, I lived in an environment of gothic stone, stained glass and gargoyles, which gave the place an air of reverence somehow. Even my classroom was different: Imagine if all the classrooms in Cabell had fire places and wooden carvings decorating the walls! Although, after I hauled my over-packed luggage up at least five flights of stairs on the day I arrived, the Will Smith poster I found tacked to the bulletin board in my dorm room almost made me feel at home. There is also an ornate memorial to the British Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in the building in which I lived, and I smiled thinking of the similarity between the sentiment of that and the Edgar Allen Poe room on the Lawn. It seems as if both universities changed their minds about the poets they expelled.
Another fun difference between America and England (besides the drinking age, of course) is the UK's close proximity to the European continent, which I have also dreamed of visiting -- namely to see the motherland, Italy, and to practice my Italian after studying it for two years at the University. My weekend trip to Milan was a whirlwind of shopping, mass pizza, gelato and calzone consumption, and unfortunately the self-realization that my Italian skills weren't up to par, as a hidden sensor in my clothes set off the shoplifting alarm in almost every store we left, forcing me to repeatedly profess my innocence in broken Italian to scary-looking security guards.
In short, studying abroad this summer made me adore England even more than I thought I could after watching Hugh Grant dance in "Love Actually" or Mr. Darcy profess his love to Elizabeth in the rain in "Pride and Prejudice." Even though there's no air-conditioning or edible food, you can always save your appetite and fly over to Italy to eat delicious calzones the size of your head.
Mary can be reached at mbaroch@cavalierdaily.com.
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