Welcome Back: Pitt student abroad sees parallels between London and The Burgh

Descending the escalators to the tube —  or subway in other words — on my first day in London, minding my own business, staring into the abyss of my own thoughts, a disheveled businessman bulldozed me before he gracelessly hustled down the remaining steps.

In the United States nobody really walks up or down escalators, it’s a time to ponder life’s mysteries while you glide. The general sentiment stateside is that things are moving you for a reason: It’s best not to mess with the machinery, a relatively apt metaphor to describe American life.

Subwayetiquette is just one of many cultural quirks I’ve noticed during my brief stint in the United Kingdom. You’re not really supposed to talk to one another either, I’ve noticed, which is a bummer because there’s nothing like deafening silence to accompany a complete dismantling of your personal boundaries.

You know that scene in the first Matrix, in which Keanu Reeves surfaces from the goo pod, gasping for air with tubes coming out of his nipples? That’s what I feel like when I step off the Northern Line.  

Culture shock, our study abroad office warned us, would be a scary, even briefly crippling transition. I’m only here for seven weeks, so maybe because I knew I had only a precious few days among these people, I became numb to the big picture. But honestly, it’s the little quirks that seem to stick with me. 

My friends have travelled all over the world — from Prague and Athens, Greece, to Beijing and Johannesburg — and it’s taken them weeks, even months to adjust to their new environments.

I know I still manage to stick out, even in places as eclectic as Camden Town, but I like to think the transition so far has been fairly seamless. Maybe it’s because London is an international hub, with its porous borders and access to so many other countries, but there seems to be a culture of “the other” here that doesn’t alienate or marginalize minorities of any genus.

London’s origins date back to the Roman Empire, and physical heirlooms to the city’s history pepper the alleyways. And much of the architecture — even the buildings rebuilt after the Great London Fire in 1666 and those walloped by the Blitz during WWII — resembles some critical time period in the city’s development. 

It’s not the empire that once ruled much of the world, but London still remains an international hub, far-reaching not through a colonial presence, but through diversity — from the people, places, affiliations, and affections to the cityscape itself. 

Pittsburgh, steeped in a history of its own, hasn’t had as much time or the generations of prosperity to forge such a complex, open landscape of institutions. And from the few Londoners who do know where Pittsburgh is, it is still thought to be at “the center of the Rust Belt,” a legacy we’ve tried to eclipse with our recent successes. 

It’s not fair to call Pittsburgh a homogeneous place or a shell of a former steel town. There’s too much going on. And honestly, comparing a city such as Pittsburgh to London is difficult because of the difference in scale. Great Britain’s capital has a population of 8.1 million to Pittsburgh’s 307,000. 

Still, there are some striking similarities between the two cities. Like London, Pittsburgh is rich in culture, and every neighborhood is unique in and of itself as I’m sure many of you have already discovered. But in Pittsburgh, you’d be hard-pressed to find Squirrel Hill teeming with gothic youths or soccer-crazed fans or a Portuguese family having a picnic next to an outdoor business meeting on a random stretch of green space. London is roughly one-third public park by the way. 

There’s something of a socioeconomic wall dividing and splicing Pittsburgh, as is the case in many cities around the world. 

Across the pond, on both sides of the Thames River, however, there’s a sense of extreme, heterogeneity no matter what neighborhood you’re in, from the posh to the dodgy (I saw a man in a full-body latex suit with heels and a whip at a relatively conventional bar). It’d be easier to attribute London’s tourist industry to the flooding diversity, but I think it’s something deeper, more entrenched. 

I’m not sure the best way to put it or the best approach to seeing it better realized than in Pittsburgh. There are pockets of the city I think resemble internationality very well, just not with the same candor and ceremony as is the case in London. 

The middle-aged Kurdish barber clad in a Rolling Stones T-shirt who cut my hair yesterday called it, “hospitality to any and every niche”.