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| Friday at 10:30am - High Road, Wood Green, London |
High Road in Wood Green is a bustling place throughout each day of the week. On Saturdays it is wall-to-wall people moving up and down past the “high street” shops, popping on and off the buses, elbowing each other at the open-air fruit and "veg" stand. The diversity of the crowd is remarkable and different from the diversity of the San Francisco Peninsula. There are the white Brits – the younger with black tights under their cut off jean shorts, the older wheeling behind them their fabric shopping trolleys; Muslim women in hijab (head scarves) and their male counterparts in white full length kurta (long white woven shirt) worn over their western clothes; Eastern European women with black and bold flower print scarves; Turks and Greeks; Indians, Bengalis and Pakistanis; and West Indian blacks. The number of languages being spoken are numerous and to me, unrecognizable. Furthermore, hearing East London British English being spoken by a West Indies black is pleasantly disorienting. Lily and Abby cringe when they hear me repeat in my annoying, nasal American English the directions just spoken in a wonderful British accent. As you’d expect, they’d rather I kept my mouth shut and kept us “under cover.”
At the north end of High Road, past most of the shops near the Wood Green Tube station is our local Haringey Council (borough) library. I was impressed to find the other day a full shelf unit each for books in twenty non-English languages: Urdu, Greek, German, Albanian, Kurdish, Somali and Vietnamese to name a few. Twenty book shelves!
Peter
Peter
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