October is drawing to a close, which means one thing: Halloween!
Unfortunately, a downside to being abroad is that the wonderful American culture of over-commercialization is subdued or, even worse, non-existent.
Thankfully, if you look hard enough in London, you can find tacky jack-o-lanterns, campy witches and "This is Halloween" from "The Nightmare Before Christmas" (1993) on endless loop.
One such example is the London Dungeon, a terror-themed park with exhibits offering the chance to sit in Sweeny Todd's barber chair or get hanged in Newgate Prison. It's the perfect cure to the "missing Halloween" blues.
So a bunch of us Tufts-in-Londoners got ourselves on the Underground and before we knew it, we were waiting in line (or queue as they say over here) for two hours for a good ol' cheesy tourist trap.
That last sentence is what led my mind, as I stood in the queue alongside families vacationing on their fall breaks from every place from the United States to Germany to Japan, to wonder: what am I? Not in the metaphysical, philosophical sense though. In the simple way of, "Am I a tourist or not a tourist?"
On one hand, I am naturally beginning to feel a little like a Londoner, and this place is becoming home for me. I have a pretty general idea of the Underground system and don't need to look at a map most of the time. I know where to buy groceries (though I heard everyone rave about Tescos before coming here, any Londoner will tell you that Sainsburys, with its 20 pence cans of veggies and soup, reigns supreme) and have regular haunts. I've gone to places a tourist wouldn't think to go and can nonchalantly walk by Trafalgar Square without giving it a second look.
But does all of that really make me not a tourist? Because, despite the last paragraph, I still do maintain a lot of tourist tendencies.
Aside from London Dungeon, this weekend saw me going to the top of St. Paul's Cathedral, taking a picture with a royal guard, and being pretty blown away by the Houses of Parliament, among other things. Any Saturday that I am in London, I feel the need to go out and explore the city, to see something new, to find another landmark and prove to myself that it actually exists and isn't just the product of a vast conspiracy by history and travel books.
Perhaps I'm in a state of limbo between being a tourist and a resident. Sometimes I have traits of both, even when the two should, in theory, conflict. There are days when I look the wrong direction before crossing the street and have to jump back before a Smart car turns me into the inside of a mincemeat pie.
However, when I was in Munich recently, I found myself thinking, "Huh, the cars are driving on the wrong side of the street," before shortly realizing that they were driving the way cars do back in the States. When an American lecturer came in to speak to my Chaucer class, I found her accent both wonderfully familiar and strangely disorienting.
Right now, I don't know if I'll ever feel completely at home, yet at the same time, I find myself identifying with this city more and more every day. I'll laugh at the tourists as they give perplexed stares to the maps in their hands, and then proceed to wander off to the British Museum or London Eye.
But in the end, I guess that's what studying abroad is all about: learning about different cultures as both a spectator and an insider, seeing both the monumental and the everyday.
Devin Toohey is a junior majoring in classics and studying abroad in London. He can be reached at Devin.Toohey@tufts.edu.
