If there is one thing that continues to amaze me about London, it’s how incredible the evening sky can be. The colors are amazing, and it’s a regular occurence! Brilliant golds and yellows like this, or different shades of pink and purple and blue and red, the light bouncing off the clouds…
London’s sky is excellent for photography. That is ALMOST enough to make me forget how many chemicals are in the sky to make the sunsets look like that.
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One of the exciting things about this bus project I’m volunteering on is that I’m getting to know some of the neighbor girls who live on our estate. Two of them are quite chatty, but one is more shy, so I was excited when she came on to the bus a few weeks ago and sat down by me in the little alcove we use for painting nails.
“Hey! How was your day at school? Did ya learn anything?” I asked.
“Not really,” she replied, grinning. She looked over at the big sheet of butcher paper we had taped to the wall.
“We’re talking about clothes and fashion and choice today,” I explained. The paper was starting to get covered in questions like “Who buys your clothes?” and “Who decides what’s ‘hot’ or ‘trendy’ or ‘normal’?” and “Fashion: how much choice do we really have?”
“Like your uniforms, for instance,” I went on. “Where do you guys get those?”
“At a school supply shop,” she said. She was still wearing hers, having come straight from school (practically all students wear school uniforms in Britain.)
“What’s the worst thing about the uniform?” I asked.
“I can’t wear Converse hi-tops!” another girl yelled out.
“Yeah, and we’re not allowed to wear heels,” my neighbor replied.
“Not even little ones?”
“No! And then your feet get wet in flats when the bus splashes by in winter!”
“What do you like to wear at home, when you don’t have to wear the uniform?”
“Jeans and tops, mostly.”
I was glad she was willing to sit and chat, and didn’t seem to want to run off to check her Facebook on the laptops upstairs. We started to discuss why we wear certain clothes to special occasions, like weddings.
“We wear salwar kameez [a loose tunic and trousers],” she told me, and clarified the spelling for me as I made a note on the butcher paper.
“Yeah? Do you have just one special set you wear for weddings, or lots of options?”
“Oh, I have loads. But I get at least two new ones every year.”
“For Eid, right?” I said, remembering that part of the fun of that holiday is dressing up in your shiny new clothes and going to visit friends and family.
“Right,” she said.
“Where do you get them?”
“Everybody goes to Green Street to get their wedding clothes,”she replied.
“Hrm. I haven’t been to Green Street yet. Certain places you buy things have a reputation, don’t they,” I said. “Like the new mall by the Olympic Stadium—what do you buy there?’
“Jeans and tops,” was her reply. “But the mall is so overwhelming sometimes!”
“Yeah? I feel that way at the mall all the time. What do you mean by overwhelming?” I asked.
“Well, the mall is so persuasive!” she exclaimed. “It’s like they drag you into buying things—if you buy the jeans, then you need the top to go with it, and then you need the jewelry….if you see it, you want it!”
I paused for a moment, a bit taken aback at how perceptive this eleven-year-old was on the power of marketing on her consumption habits. That was exactly the sort of thing we were looking for when we started this conversation, but more than that, it was the best conversation with I’d had with my neighbor yet.
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Hey friends, miss us? Sorry for the absence. It’s a been a busy month. We’ll get to more of that later on, I’m sure.
For now—London got it’s first snowfall last weekend! And again a couple days ago, but the second go around isn’t quite such a big deal.
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