I think it’s important to try and balance things; if you’re stuck in a routine, it’s important to shake things up, do exciting and crazy things. Conversely, if you’ve (for the sake of argument) gotten rid of all your worldly possessions and struck out on an ill-considered journey, you should probably start small.

Accordingly, my first week (indeed, my first month) is supposed to be low-key. I’m visiting countries I’ve been before, mostly staying with friends, mostly sticking close to home-or-hotel. Minimal tourist things. Find the calming reassurance of routine. My success so far at this has been somewhat mixed.

My first stop was Alcester, which is nearly Stratford-upon-Avon, which is nearly Birmingham. I was crashing with a friend, which proved to be both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because the company was lovely and gracious. A curse, because I ended up spending a week with someone as mad about food and drink as I am, so most mornings found me bloated and vaguely hungover. If I want to be bored, I need to find more boring friends.

The week was spent in a variety of pubs and restaurants and cocktail bars. Saturday we caught the train into Birmingham and made a day of it, stopping at a pub for lunch,¹ hitting a couple museums,² wandering around the city center for a few hours (at least 9 km walking), stopping in at some places for cocktails,³ hitting a restaurant for a tasting menu for dinner,⁴ then two final cocktail bars⁵ to round out the evening. It’s something of a miracle we were able to navigate a cab home, and even more of one that I was up and mostly recovered by 10:00 the next day.

That Sunday I headed into London, where I had tickets for Secret Cinema. The show was Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. Secret Cinema’s been doing this for a while now, where they take some cinematic work and create an immersive experience around it. It’s clearly evolved from the shows where a group of performers act out the action on the screen (they did a lot of this in silhouette, and also had actors mirroring key scenes, like Mercutio’s drag performance). I avoided a lot of information about it so I would go in fresh.

The pre-experience was pretty great; there’s costume suggestions, in-character documents (as a gang member, you’ve received a summons for the “Truce of Two Houses”), clever instructions (bring a mask for the ball, bring a sonnet to woo your true love), and regular news bulletins from Verona Beach leading up to the event.

The actual event was … less so. The event was in a broad open field which they had set up as a street fair in Verona Beach. There were quite a lot of food vendors and bars and other sellers (I got my beard trimmed by the barber they had on site), the lights and sound were rigged from three towers they had set up to look like blighted buildings, there were posters everywhere advertising tango lessons and gun manufacturers and gas stations (all drawn from the film). One section had a number of carnival rides like a ferris wheel and a carousel. Another had a building set up as the Capulet mansion where a disco was going on, and another part was set up as an auto repair shop that had been turned into a makeshift dancehall.

But there were a lot of small problems. The secrecy around the location meant that when I booked my hotel I ended picking one clear on the other side of the city, resulting in an hour on the Underground to get there. There was also a 15-minute-walk between the place they told you to gather and the actual site. And there are no seats, so you’ve got to be comfortable sitting on the ground for two hours. And, of course, it wasn’t exactly obvious from the invites you’d be wandering around a street fair for a couple hours, so if that wasn’t your kind of thing you’d be stuck.

The interactivity, as might be expected for an event with 1,000 people, is super-thin. There’s a couple of the actors who address you in character as you walk in, in a group. There’s some people wandering around who’ll do a small bit of character business if you want. And that’s about it. The crowd costuming is a mixed bag. The food stalls are decorated, but the food is the same thing they’d be serving elsewhere.

The bigger problem I had was more fundamental; previous events have used The Empire Strikes Back, or The Grand Budapest Hotel, or Alien, or even Moulin Rouge. All of those are experiences I’d like to have — gathering in a Rebel base to fight the Empire; sipping champagne in a twee, fussy, past-its-prime hotel while an army of busboys directs luggage around you; hiding from some thing stalking you from below decks on the Nostromo; or watching absinthe drip into your glass while aerialists perform above your head. I don’t get that for Verona Beach. Sure, it’s stylish, with the flamenco gunslingers and the Hawaiian shirts, but it’s not especially fun. It’s not enough to be transported. You have to have some interest in the destination.

The remaining time in London I spent more-or-less holed up in my hotel. I found a relatively cheap place on the outskirts⁶ and just kind of recovered from the past week. I ventured out to the food court at the nearby glitzy shopping mall for dinner, considered and rejected seeing a movie, and mostly just sat in the hotel and worked. Which is fine — I’ve been to London before, I’ll be back again, and relatively soon.

I’d like to talk about that glitzy shopping mall, though. It’s an odd experience, walking through and seeing all the stores without recognizing the brands, like playing Grand Theft Auto where everything’s been replaced with a parody of itself. You can instantly tell what each one is retailing and what market segment they’re targeting, even if you don’t know the names.⁷ The experience here is fundamentally the same as walking through the Mailbox in Birmingham, or Crocker Park in Cleveland, or NEWCITY in Chicago⁸ with the primary difference being whether you’re indoors or out.

I’m far from the first to point out the sameness and shallowness of global consumerist culture, and expect it’ll be a common theme. There’s a way to travel where you manage to entirely skate over the surface of the local culture: see their art museum, climb to the top of their biggest building, book dinner in some “contemporary fusion” restaurant, then fly off to the next place.

My concern for Birmingham (which I’m sure worries Brummies far more than me) is that all those new buildings and cocktail bars and restaurants have less to do with Birmingham and more to do with this kind of deracinated global culture. Don’t get me wrong; change is inevitable and essential. I just wonder what happens if and when every place ends up the same. You can’t live in a mall, no matter how much the owners might like to see you try.

Next: Stockholm (ARN) to Berlin (TXL)
Prev: Chicago (ORD) to London (LGW)

Footnotes

¹ Purecraft Bar & Kitchen

² The Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, and the Newman Brothers Coffin Works

³ Marco Pierre White Steakhouse, Bar & Grill and Saint Pauls House

⁴ The Wilderness, which was simply astounding. I don’t want to go into it too much, because I’ll quickly fall into the worst excesses of food-reviewer porn (“The carrots were lovingly braised in a unctuous glaze which had been teased over the ripe taproot then artfully arranged into a reproduction of Nude Descending a Staircase ”). It’s really hard to write about food, which is why reviewers like Pete Wells have largely stopped.

Just trust me when I say the food was clever, inventive, surprising, unpretentious, and very, very good.

⁵ 40 St. Paul’s and The Botanist

⁶ Stratford. Not the one near Birmingham.

⁷ Although, let’s be fair, there’s a lot of Starbucks and Disney and The Body Shop here as well.

⁸ “Chicago’s vibrant lifestyle, shopping, dining, and entertainment district located at the intersection of Halsted & Clybourn” and if that bit of advertising glurge doesn’t make you ill you’re better suited to this cultural moment than I am.