Multicultural London

Friday the students went for a neighborhood ramble in the East End, finishing up with a really great meal at one of the many Bangladeshi eateries in the district, and I was happy to join them. The idea was for them to see an area of London that they might not ordinarily get to, and to try and appreciate the way this area has changed and adapted over the past couple of hundred years as it has welcomed different waves of immigrants.

Now it's home to this mosque, one of the largest in the city, we were told, and a thriving and energetic Pakistani/Bangla ethnic enclave. The street signs tell the story, as they're bilingual. I'd noticed the street signs in Chinatown, earlier, were in Chinese as well as English, too. I wonder how many different alphabets London street-sign-makers have to know? (Note the English language school sign, too; I must have seen 4 or 5 in the short time we were in the neighborhood.)

The neighborhood stroll was fun and interesting, thanks to the expert commentary of the students' British Culture prof, who was our guide. And the food was really good, very different from anything I'd had before—also incredibly spicy! Plus I was able to do some needed shopping, both for groceries and souvenirs. An altogether rewarding few hours, on a beautiful day, something that's sort of becoming a rarity around here.

The next night the rain held off for a while and my guests and I made our way downtown for the Lord Mayor's fireworks show, going by this gathering in Trafalgar Square. We're pretty sure the flags were Polish, and the speaker under the shell sounded somewhat Slavic, but we knew she wasn't speaking Russian, so we think it was some sort of Polish celebration. The subject of the event eluded us, but it was just another example of multicultural London, where the cultures are many and ever-present—what a show!