Foreign Bodies
July 28, 2008
It struck me today, while typing “happy birthday” on my Ukranian friends Facebook wall, I’ve interacted with more non-British people than British people in England. And I’m not talking about fellow American students on campus. I mean in Brighton and London.
Along with the proliferation of Rhianna music videos and Chuck Norris t-shirts, England has also adopted the tired-and-true American pasttime of welcoming in lots of outsiders, who end up working at the jobs nobody from the host country wants to work at, and then the natives go ahead and hate on them for it. It seem strangely appropriate I see this happen the most at McDonalds.
I haven’t really gone out of my way to make British friends, mostly because I don’t know what in the world we would talk about. All conversations I’ve had with British people thus far seem to focus on the fact I’m an American and they are English, and once that well of talk goes dry, there isn’t much for us to talk about.
Thus, the majority of my daily interactions come at stores or eateries. The university employs mostly English people, but going into Brighton changes everything. A lot of employees I end up interacting with are most definitely not English. They are German. They are Eastern European. They are Chinese. They are Brazilian. They are a few nonsensical words away from being The Swedish Chef.
But the diversity doesn’t end at the Border’s front desk. Thanks in large part to England’s complete lack of a culinary scene (simply putting a lot of butter on bread does not equal unique cuisine, England), foreign food shops dot every street in Brighton. Kebab stores are the dominant fixture around town, with glass windows usually featuring Arabic writing. Everyone raves about how good the Indian food in England is, and there seems to be more than enough places in Brighton to sample it. Chinese food places, along with the Chinese language itslef, are slowly-but-surely enveloping the city. Even all the Italian places here seem to have honest-to-God Italians working in them.
Brighton’s tourist appeal leads to a lot of nationalities flooding the streets at all hours of the day. The day seems dominated by French and Eastern Asian visitors snapping photos of just about everything, like they are in Disneyland, but all the attractions have been replacesd with crisp stores and Vodafone shopes. Italian and Spanish tourists take over the nightshift, and replace picture-taking with loud talking and standing still in an intersection for upwards of five minutes.
This mass diversity isn’t all that eye-opening to me – I am from the United States, where Los Angeles, Chicago and New York top anywhere I’ve seen in Europe so far in the “melting pot” game (not to mention in the welcoming department – there seems to be an occassional tension between the English and those not from the island). If anything, it’s just weird having a sampling of most of Europe (and beyond) all around me. I expected to only deal with English people, but my experience has morphed into a very global experience. Which turned out to be a very welcome surprise.
No Australians yet, though. Give it time.
