What’s a girl gotta do to get her print-on in peace? My semi-adventures in London town

The real added bonus of academia is the conferencing one has opportunities to do.

The day of my last Hungarian class I was off to London for a conference on Realist Evaluation and Synthesis at which I was set to present a 30 minute talk. I had submitted a proposal to give a little 15 minute talk back in the early spring and heard nothing and assumed what I had written was incomprehensible gibberish and the abstract selection committee was so embarrassed for me that they couldn’t bring themselves to even email me a rejection notice. One month before the conference, I received an email with the preliminary program for the event. I decided to double check it and lo and behold, there I was, in the program for a 30 minute talk about some methodological thing I was doing that I myself had yet to figure out how to articulate. I had 30 days to figure it out.

After patiently waiting among a mob of Norwegian travelers at the weirdly chaotic Budapest airport with no row line-up things— just a hoard of people encroaching upon the Norwegian airlines service desk:

I boarded my flight to London, my very first time in the UK outside of airport transfers and one overnight in a Holiday Inn Express near Heathrow sick as a dog years ago. I arrived at Gatwick and made my way to the place where I could catch a train to the city. I found the ticket machines complicated to use, with weird inconsistent pricing structures: like a full day unlimited transit pass which would ALSO get me to the city cost 14 pounds, while a one way trip into the city from the airport was 23 pounds—WTF London? My stress level rose as I figured I’d have to ask for help, then abated as I realised I could actually ask for help in English and be understood!

I made it to my airbnb in White Chapel (essentially the Bangladesh of Europe) with just enough time to drop my luggage and walk to a nearby Bangladeshi restaurant to meet my old friend, Nabeela, a friend and fellow PhD student living in Brighton. We met over six years ago when we were both hanging out in Bangladesh and, while we had facebook kept in touch over the years with a skype or two in between, we hadn’t seen each other since  January 2012.

Early the next morning, I realised very quickly that, OF COURSE the UK would have a different electric plug than the rest of Europe, which never crossed my mind. I had at least 8 hours of work to do the that day and had planned to just stay cooped up in my airbnb working on making my presentation coherent, at the very least. Luckily, being the South Asia of Europe, early on a Saturday morning one can hit up one of the local White Chapel street markets that sell EVERYTHING, including electricity converter plug thingies.

That evening, after getting my presentation as good as I decided it was going to get, I went and met up for dinner with another friend I hadn’t seen in a few years, a young man whom I met while doing my permaculture design course in Tamil Nadu, South India. We met up in Camden town for some soul-sharing over fish and chips, pints, kitschy American music in a Dubble-ya Dubble-ya two nautical themed restaurant.

The conference began the following day. This conference, a Realist Evaluation Conference, was one that I was very much looking forward to, which is super rare for conference content. I decided to adopt this particularly interesting and emerging approach for my research just over a year ago. To-date, I have tried to read as much as I can about not only the praxis of doing this kind of evaluation but also around the philosophical underpinnings—scientific realism.

And I digress for a moment…. (WARNING: this portion of the post contains information about my research which may bore some readers)

At this point I might take a moment to mention a bit about my research. In a nutshell, I’m trying to evaluate the implementation of British Columbia’s provincial school food and beverage sales guidelines that aim to eliminate food and beverage items sold to public school students that are high in salt, sugar, and fat. Basically I want to know: what is working (or not working) when it comes to implementing them on the ground, in schools, in what contexts is implementation facilitated or challenged, and why. This research question is basically the key inquiry of realist evaluation.

There aren’t really any resources allotted within either the Ministries of Education or Health to evaluate these nutritional guidelines regardless of so many resources having gone into creating and supporting their implementation over the last decade. I am effectively doing free consulting work for the government, that stakeholders across all levels have supported through conversations and institutional ethical approval etc., with the nice trade off that they let me be academic about it (ie. situate study design and findings in existing theory and literature—which consulting gigs don’t often support) and I am free from government communications departments when it comes to reporting findings.

And now back to funner things…

Anyways, I was presenting on the second day of the conference and had not yet printed out my speaking notes; I tend to prepare detailed scripts and memorise them and then say them like they’re not memorised (I was always a good actress) because I have become aware over the years of doing conferences that if I am not very prepared with things to say, I end up sounding like George W Bush when he used to go off book:

I grabbed an apple from the conference snack table and munched on it as I raced to the tube station, thanking the Street Painters Guild of London for keeping me safe:

I wanted to get back to White Chapel in time to catch this printing place near my airbnb before it closed. I finished my apple as I was waiting for the train and went to find a trash can. I walked up and down that god forsaken platform and was like “what the hell London? What’s with the lack of access to trash cans? No wonder the streets are so filthy”? I eventually sneakily just chucked my apple core onto the track. I found out later that they removed all the trash cans after one of their train bombings because it had been a convenient place for a bomb to be dropped and left.

I arrived back to White Chapel and, surprise surprise, the printing place wasn’t actually there where Google maps said it was. I was standing outside the building where it was supposed to be, just staring at it hard, my eyes scanning up and down the building, as if my gaze would make a printing place appear. A young man was standing outside of the grocery store in the building having a “fag” (their word, not mine) and he asked me in his very thick South Asian accent, “what are you looking for?”.

“The printing place”, I said. He put out his smoke and beckoned me to follow him into the building to ‘his place’ from which I understood, you can come print at my place. And without question I followed him into the building, down the hall to the back of the building to a small office with a large desk, a love seat, and another small desk with a PC from which I could print. I sat down and started printing my document. I noticed a BRAC poster above his desk and asked, “oh are you from Bangladesh?”.

“Yes”, he answered.

“I spent a bit of time in Dhaka a few years ago”, I offer. Nothing too heavy, just a bit of small talk while my thick presentation script was printing on what felt like the SLOWEST printer ever.

Then the questions began…and I’m going to put it out there that I have a bit of bias when it comes to encountering younger South Asian men…there sometimes is a tendency to ask me questions that ultimately end up making me squirm with discomfort; personal questions that seem, to me, socially unacceptable to ask in certain contexts.

Where are you from? Ok fine, this is fine, right? Canada.

What were you doing in Bangladesh?  I was doing research there.

What do you do?  I’m doing a PhD in Canada.

What are you doing here? I’m here for a conference.

Do you have any marketing skills?  Okay this one was weird, I didn’t quite understand why he was asking me this or what he was talking about—but something like “you get help from me, I try to get some help from you”… but I could be way off with this.

Where are you staying here? Okay, nope. Oh I found a nice little place down the street there,  I say as vaguely as possible.

Is it a hotel? A flat? I hesitate (cause I’m a terrible liar) and then lie, Just a hotel down over there, I say.

Where? He persists. I’m not telling you where I’m staying, I say to him in a calm voice tinged with disapproval.

Are you married? Do you have a boyfriend?  This is one I’ve been asked by a number of young South Asian taxi drivers in Canada and by a few men sitting next to me on airplanes traveling in South Asia. And not after long small talk get-to-know-you kind of conversations—like immediately into the conversation.

My tactic was to simply stay silent, pretending I hadn’t heard this incredibly inappropriate question in this particular context. In past situation, sometimes I tell them it is really not any of their business, but I didn’t want to stir any pots cause I really really needed my presentation notes printed. And as my discomfort grew, the printing could not have been done fast enough, two of his buddies walked in and made themselves at home on the love seat. I continued my silence as they proceeded to speak to each other in Bangla, looking at me,  until finally the printing was done.

I stood up quickly and brusquely asked, “how much?”.

I paid him and left as quickly as possible. But then I remembered I needed some groceries to make dinner so I stupidly went into the little grocer nearby, out front of which I first met my curious printer-matchmaker entrepreneur. As I’m checking out the meat selection and asking questions to the meat guy about how to cook this cute little plucked fowl they are selling, dude from the printing walks up to me and says, “Hey you’re staying in a hotel! How’re you going to cook that? If you cook you have to invite me over!”

I chuckled my there-you-go-then bartender chuckle, that I used to use when creeps were trying to talk to me while working in bars, and swiftly left the store. Feeling paranoid, I wandered home in a zig-zag pattern to be sure there was no one following me. I glanced back every 50 feet to be sure he hadn’t sent his buddies to trail me. I went and found another grocery store and then, when I was sure the coast was clear and no one was following, I went back to my airbnb…I mean my hotel…. And settled in for the night to practice my presentation.

Anyways, enough stereotyping. My presentation was a methodological presentation on how I am analysing some of my data. I had been super anxious about sounding smart in front of this international crowd but the very first talk was given by one of the “important” academics in this field right now, and the conference organiser, and he immediately set the tone of “uh this is just the second conference ever on this methodology and so we’re all just figuring it out still”. I Was sooo much less anxious after this. I presented on the first day, VERY grateful for my printed script, received some good feedback, and went home and drank a bottle of wine and watched some Twilight.

Finally able to relax and just drink in the academicky-ness of the conference, which felt like an intensive methods course (but I LOVED IT), I finally noticed London….or rather how London made me feel. I felt as if people were forever encroaching upon me from all directions as I walked through the litter-strewn streets. I caught brief glimpses of why people might think London is this magical mythological city but ultimately it just annoyed me.

And the prices? Don’t even get me started (in the SNL voice)!

However, I did manage an excellent night out at a tiny little blues bar near Oxford Circus tube station called “Ain’t nothing but blues”.

This place was recommended to me by a friend who had frequented here maybe like 16 years ago when he lived here. I arrived for the 7 pm show and found an empty seat at a table with a middle aged couple…. From Prince Rupert BC, naturally. We chatted for hours about life and love, and took in some excellent blues over numerous pints.

All-n-all, I didn’t get a chance to do any of the real touristy things in London, besides a ramble through the FREE museum of London (which one could spend an entire day in–all the national museums in London are free all the time, FYI). But I will  I’ll go back for a couple days in the coming year and see all the things, do a Jack-the-Ripper tour, etc and then leave as quickly as possible.