Stranger and Stranger

LONDON
All these strangers feels strange! 

My life in suburban California is filled almost exclusively with people I know.  I travel from home in "my" car (listening to “my” book-on-tape or “my” radio station) to “my” office with “my” employees.  In the evening, when I pick the girls up from swimming I chat with the other parents I know.  On Sunday I go to “my” church and am surrounded by “my” friends.  Over email I correspond with people I know.  The few newcomers to my world are screened through friends or work.  Shopping at Trader Joe’s and the Burger King drive-thru window may be my only encounters with strangers all week.

Piccadilly Line Eye Candy

My life in London ads a new dimension to this “friends, family and colleague” world: strangers.  My fellow 7 million Londoners.  On the Tube I sit hip-to-hip with my neighbors, look eye-to-eye four feet across the train at my fellow passenger. During rush hour I’m pressed up against people, some forcefully wedging themselves into the car as the doors close.  Walking to the Tube, from the Tube, to the train in the Tube station, onto, off of buses, down Wood Green High Road…there are strangers everywhere! What a range of sizes, shapes, voices, clothes, overheard conversations, choices of reading materials.  Eye contact?  Fleeting.  She’s taking in my baseball cap; I’m checking out her attention-catching Adidas-logo'ed ballet flats.  Whoops, our eyes dart away.  Just occasionally a commiserating exchange of exasperated eye-rolls in exasperation regarding the inebriated fellow Tube rider who is making a scene. 

The eye candy of wild, weird and totally normal strangers, this is a great bonus earned by the carless urbanite. 


Peter