I spent September 2023 between the UK and Europe. The primary reason was to attend the 2023 Milford SF Conference in Wales, for which I was awarded a bursary. The cheapest flights I could find were a month apart, and so I tried to make the most of some time away from my stressors back in Accra. The Jetsetter September series is a record of my adventures abroad. Enjoy!
Allow me to be a bush girl for like ten minutes, and talk about London like it isn’t one of the commonest and most frequently visited cities in the world. Innit-innit-foɔ, I see you! And believe me, I now understand first-hand how living in the center of colonizer country can make a person even more easily frustrated than a native resident, with the daily failings of Accra. How Europe underdeveloped Africa, indeed.
Based on the tickets I had booked, I had one full week in London before I would have to make my way to Wales for the week-long Milford SF Conference. Up until maybe 3 days before my flight was due to land in Heathrow, I still wasn’t sure where I’d be spending the week (hectic!), but a friend in East London saved my life by offering to host me in his apartment last-minute. Hallelujah!
I didn’t go to London to do touristy things, and, in any case, I didn’t have the funds for that. But even if I did, I still have a feeling that it would always have been the most basic things about the city that blew me away—not Big Ben, not Buckingham Palace, nor the London Eye, but the number of places where I could sit for free, the number of books I could access for free! Accra, have you seen your mates?!
Here’s an overview of some things that made the biggest impression on me, in no particular order:
The Weather
The weather drama began before I ever stepped foot in London. I was tracking temperatures on the Weather app, and they seemed mild enough that I wouldn’t have to pack winter-heavy. But then a couple of well-traveled acquaintances warned me to be prepared for the cold. They reacted in that very Ghanaian, “Hmm, ɛsɛ woara” way when I explained that the Weather app was promising warmth. That was how I came to load my suitcase with jean trousers and thick, heavy jackets leftover in my wardrobe from my college days abroad.
At Heathrow, after baggage claim, my first point of call was the in-airport sim card vendor. She told me to be prepared for the weather. When I asked for clarification, she told me about the average temperatures in London over the previous days, and the way I wanted to scream—it was so much hotter than the Accra that I’d just come from!
The next week saw me looking a fool in my warm clothes in the sweltering heat, while my London acquaintances took me out dressed in their own tank tops and tight-fitting shorts. The heatwave London experienced during that week was, I was told, sudden, although not entirely unpredictable. All I know is, my little handheld Chinese fan which I’d had for more than a year and which was quickly falling apart, was my most prized possession that week, especially on the sweltering buses. I witnessed a Hispanic adolescent collapse on the street, presumably from the heat. I sweated in my sleep.
Two weeks later, when I returned from my out-of-London travels, the weather was consistently chilly, with frequent drizzles. I made the mistake of leaving my umbrella at home one day when it seemed to be hot and dry. By the time I was able to complete an emergency detour via about 40 minutes of mixed-method public transport to shelter in my friend’s central London office before our dinner date, I was soaked down to the socks.
Here’s my unsolicited advice for surviving London weather in September, based on my one-time experience: Expect nothing; be prepared for anything.
Public Transportation
My first real adventure in London was finding my way to my host’s apartment on my own, using London public transport. He had instructed me to look for the trains and take the Elizabeth Line, but here’s the funny part: I followed the sign in the airport that said “Trains,” which turned out to denote specifically underground trains. I was met with a huge sign on an otherwise blank wall, stating boldly, “This is not the Elizabeth Line.” I nearly screamed of laughter. Thank you to the relevant London officials, for saving probably countless tourists from an easy trap, including myself.
I could probably count on my hands the number of times I sat in a saloon car, the entire month I was abroad. There are so many overground and underground trains and buses, most of which run the same route at a frequency that’s astonishing to me as an outsider, and it’s not like they’re sparsely populated, either. You could have convinced me that no-one in London ever drove their own car, and I’d believe you—and yet, there is supposedly deadly traffic on the city streets. Honestly, how many people does London even have?
Lizzy Line
I love that the Elizabeth Line was my first public transportation experience, because it would remain my favorite. Not only did these trains have the best air conditioning, but they were also the most convenient way to get to and from the airport, and, best of all, the seats were purple!
The Outernet
London natives may be unsurprised to find out that my most remarkable train station experiences occurred at Tottenham Court Road. Nobody told me beforehand about the Outernet, where you can just walk into a space and be engulfed in dizzying, gorgeous, immersive artwork. I was mesmerized by the work of Agustin Vidal Saavedra, which was on display the first time I was taken there.
The Thames
For me, the most surprising method of public transportation was boat. The day after I arrived, my host took me on a brief sightseeing trip. We went down from Woolwich Arsenal to Central London via the Thames, and I just couldn’t believe that this was a regular transportation option. The boat was neither rudimentary nor particularly necessary, not like the Volta Region or Staten Island ferries, where moving over water is one’s most affordable or most effective option. In London, one could just as easily get to the boat’s destination via train or bus. The boat wasn’t even special or rare. One could simply choose to go to work by boat and back, every day. (I told you I’d be a bush girl.)
The seats were numerous and spacious. The layout of the aisles reminded me of an airplane. At the back of the boat was a bar and a small gift shop for designer watches and the like.
Other notes about the boat:
- Uber’s advertising was going so hard. The words “Uber Boat” would be visible from the top of a skyscraper, whereas you probably had to squint to see the words “Thames Clipper.” I thought that was funny.
Some notes about the Thames:
- When Londoners pronounce the name of this river, what I hear is the name of a popular Nigerian musician. It never failed to catch me off guard.
- Some Ghanaian Londoners expressed some concerns about the state of the Thames, environmentally speaking. My knee-jerk reaction, as someone who had now travelled upon said Thames, was that there seemed to me nothing to complain about; I had traveled frequently on the roads along the Korle Lagoon.
The World, My Oyster
From my experience, because of how many options London has, a failure on one channel of transportation can set you back barely twenty minutes, because it’s so easy to get where you’re going on a different system. There was a day when I had to make my way from Woolwich to Limehouse, and the DLR failed. I got off the train, and about five minutes later, I was at a different station across the street, on the Elizabeth Line, on my way to Canary Wharf instead. I was alone, but the process was stressless. I just had to send a few texts to my Londoner friends and follow the throng of grumbling Londoners power-walking to the next most efficient route. I had an Oyster Card, baby (thank you, NK!). The world was mine!
My Oyster card remained my best friend throughout my stay. Paying for a week’s pass gave me such a sense of freedom. I didn’t have to calculate how much I was spending every day for each trip, no matter how many, whether train or bus, nor did I have to worry too much about whether I’d remembered to tap out after I’d tapped in somewhere. I thoroughly enjoyed being in a city where, if I had a charged phone with internet connection and an Oyster card (or any contactless bank card, really), I could figure out on my own how to get anywhere and back. (The #AccraWhen? is silent—except, not really, because I just said it.)
London Legs
During my stay, I discovered the time-defying magic of London legs. People in London don’t often seem as though they are power walking, but they have the art down to a science. My host once was getting late for a meeting. His destination was a 7-minute walk away, according to the Google Maps estimate. He had 3 minutes until the start of his meeting. Reader, he walked through those building’s doors in exactly 3 minutes.
Given how many options there are for transportation methods, it’s shocking how much walking one does in this city—walking from home to station, station to station, bus stop to destination, destination to destination, one end of a shopping mall to another. I didn’t notice how much walking I was doing until my Health app notified me that my step count had skyrocketed, had multiplied by about twenty times what I was used to in Accra. Granted, I had just come out of an extremely sedentary period during the virtual Clarion West workshop, but bro. (Speaking of Clarion West, I was able to meet up briefly with one London-based member of my cohort, a brilliant writer! When you attend a virtual workshop with people from all over the globe, you treasure these opportunities and coincidences highly.)
As for the health benefits of London walking? Forget weight loss, let’s talk relief from nerve damage. Since 2019, I’ve been dealing on and off with a degenerative spine condition that often manifests in involuntary spasms in my fingers and along the length of my limbs, as well as sharp lower back pain. I see a neurologist, and have a few medications prescribed. But once I arrived in London, I became so busy that after the first couple of days, I often just forgot to take my meds regularly. And yet, after one week, even with the meds abandoned, my spasms and back pains had simply vanished.
I was abroad for a month. A week or two after I returned to my sedentary life in Accra, the spasms started back up again. I told my neurologist all about it at my next appointment, and he said, “So now you see what the solution is?” I’m sure he meant “walk a lot more” but I have decided to believe he meant “move out of Ghana.” So, please, if you want to fund my relocation—for health purposes—my PayPal is open. 😉
Parks and Libraries
How do I explain to you how much the availability of places where I could exist for free filled my heart with joy and wonder?
One of my main stressors in Accra is the feeling of confinement. After a short while, the four walls of any room can start to feel like a box that I’ve been trapped in, especially the four walls of my bedroom. It’s one of the most effective weapons against my creativity. But leaving my house often involves spending money, or opening myself up to unreasonable noise, inconvenience, and discomfort. The bind of it all has often moved me to tears of frustration, and less frequently, into the outskirts of Accra, just so I could exist among some wide expanses of green grass.
Now, imagine finding decent-to-wide expanses of green grass right in the middle of your city. And you can just get up, walk over to the closest one, and sit down, and nobody is going to ask you questions. Nobody is going to ask you for money! You might even find yourself greeted by an adorable dog or two! You can enjoy the proximity of several other people without the burden of having to interact with a single one of them! And Londoners just seem to take all of this for granted. Nearly every single day I spent in London, the accessibility of parks blew my mind anew. More often, it restored my soul. In the moments I could spare, I took walks in them, I sat in them, I wrote some words in them. It was not enough, and one of the biggest reasons why I was so sad to leave.
It does not make a lot of sense how a city with so many people can also have so many trees and so much grass. But I was overjoyed to be shown that it was possible. Accra is a baby of a city and has no excuse. If I could shoot the influences of neo-colonialism and politicians’ greed with two very well-aimed bullets, I would be training as a sniper right now.
Here’s a list of parks I visited, whose names I remembered to write down:
- Gallion’s Park
- Whitehall Gardens
- St. James’s Park
- Wellington Park
- Greenwich Park – my favorite!
- Walpole Park – second favorite, and the one I spent the longest time in.
Here’s a list of libraries I visited, whose names I can remember:
- Woolwich Public Library
- Greenwich Public Library
- Paddington Library
- Ealing Public Library
- Greenford Library
My most memorable experience was at the Greenwich Public Library, and here’s why. First of all, I went to Greenwich specifically because two London-based friends had recommended the library there to me. It had to be serendipity, because I walked in through the main entrance and right in my eyeline (fantastic marketing strategy, by the way) was a shelf of ostensibly staff-recommended books. Near the center was a cover I recognized: an illustration of a black girl on a green background. I nearly gasped.
Readers, I do not have the words to explain how exhilarating it is to walk into one of your favorite types of establishments in the world, in a foreign country (even if that country is the one that colonized yours and is the most likely place for something like this to happen), and immediately see a book that includes words that you wrote! Of course Africa Risen and I had to take a selfie. What a moment for me as a writer!
It is nice to entertain the idea that, as time goes on, moments like this will be less and less remarkable because they are more and more ubiquitous. I will walk into libraries and bookstores in foreign countries (because I can afford it—let the church say amen!) and see not only anthologies which include my work, but books that I authored (let the church say amen!). But, even if this never happens again, it has happened once, and because it was the first time, it will forever be memorable.
Bookstores deserve an honorary mention, even though I tried to physically restrain myself from entering too many; I did not have the funds to feed my temptations. But I was in love with the abundance of chains like WH Smith and Waterstones, and enamored with the independent ones, like Greenwich Book Time, where I acquired a decently priced copy of Frankenstein, a book I have wanted to own for years.
Food
I really enjoyed most of the food I ate in London, no doubt due in large part to the incredible immigrant population. I spent very little time eating from mega fast food chains or unseasoned cuisine.
I love hash browns. I experienced a hash browns highlight with one of my oldest friends in the world, Fynnba, who treated me to breakfast at The Breakfast Club in Canary Wharf.
Every sushi experience I had in London was fire. The most memorable was dinner with Fynnba. First, Fynn—my sponsor for the day—gave me dinner options out of three Asian places right next to one another in Canary Wharf: Ipudo, Chai Ki, and Sticks ’n’ Sushi. My jaw threatened to drop open when we got there and saw the lines of people queued up to eat at these restaurants. I had never seen such a phenomenon before—and it was a weekday! The fact that most of the queueing people were ethnically Asian erased my doubts about authenticity. Eventually, we chose Sticks ’n’ Sushi, which looked fancy enough to make me feel underdressed. But the food was so good, and even better accompanied by Prosecco.
My most astonishing meal was an extremely loaded, surprisingly salad-like flatbread pizza from story deli, on a night out with my friends NK and Megan. My London-based aunt also couldn’t let me leave without trying classic fish and chips, complete with mashed peas and other condiments I would never have dreamed of eating fish and chips with.
Hands down, though, my best food experience was a solo date in Greenwich at Honest Burgers. I walked in on a whim, hungry and in need of rest near the tail end of a blissful day of solitary exploration. Help me God, that fritter burger was the best burger I’ve ever had in my life. I’m pescatarian; definitely not the target market for most burgers, so I make special efforts to review the ones that I can eat. And those signature rosemary salted Honest Burgers fries—pardon me, chips—were incredible. I genuinely wish I had eaten from Honest Burgers more than once during my time there.
Miscellaneous Notes
- In public spaces, especially on public transport, I probably heard English about 20% of the time I spent in the city. The rest of the time, it was every other language known to humankind: Twi, Ga, Igbo, Yoruba, Haitian Creole, Jamaican Patois, Urdu, Hindi, Mandarin, Arabic—baby, it was Babel (which also is the name of a fantastic novel, please read it).
- A person walking around London dragging suitcases behind them doesn’t stand out at all. I learned that it’s not simply because of the large numbers of tourists. Apparently, resident Londoners take carry-ons along to the store so that they can comfortably walk or use public transport to carry large numbers of groceries back home.
- I fear that middle-aged Ghanaians in London may either be the most vicious hoarders I’ve ever encountered, or that living spaces in London are simply far too small to store everything that needs storage within a home.
- I’m not a fan of the indirect British communication style. I simply don’t speak British. It nearly got me into trouble a couple of times. If someone says, on the topic of hosting me in their home, “The only challenge is X,” what I hear is, “Note that X might be an inconvenience to you while you’re staying with us.” Meanwhile, what they really meant was, “Don’t come to my house.” At first, I thought it might be a racial thing, this communication style. And then I realized it was cultural. You can get it from a Londoner of any ethnicity, if they’ve been born and/or raised in London long enough, no matter what degree of separation they are from you by blood. Knocked me sideways a couple of times, but they won’t ever catch me slipping again.
- I believe a person might be able to live their entire life in London shopping exclusively from the Tesco chain and nowhere else, if they really wanted to.
- Bookstores and libraries seem to really dislike religion. Those shelves are either absent, or the sections are the size of my wardrobe door, or all sorts of creative marketing strategies are being employed to use any word but the word “religion,” or the sections are tucked somewhere in a dark corner, far out of sight. I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate on the incredible irony, UK history considered.
- I encountered quite a few street preachers, since I spent so much time walking, and discovered that although there was a decent mix in the racial demographics between Black (often Nigerian) and white (non-UK Europeans, from what I could tell), they all seemed to be first generation immigrants.
My experiences abroad continued with visits to Wales and Switzerland. I’ll tell you all about them soon.
Love,
The Spider Kid.
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