Miles in London Part 7 - Riots!

Hey Guys,

Thanks to everyone who checked up on Nancy and I to see if I was OK during the riots.

It was all a bit surreal - I never really got close to any of it - Brixton is the next suburb from us, and was one of the first places post Tottenham to start rioting. It wasn't until Sunday night that Clapham Junction got hit quite bad, with Debenhams, a department store getting badly smashed and two buildings getting burnt (the first was a costume store, which got hit first so people could steal masks.. kinda smart actually).

As you can imagine there is a LOT of debate going on right now over here as to the cause of it and why it got so out of hand. I have watched a few things and read a few articles and for the record, here is my understanding of events:

Mark Duggan - a man from Tottenham was shot by police - and it is now clear that he never fired his gun at all. This was the cause of the initial riots in tottenham, where i'm sure the pictures have been broadcast around the world - I believe this was saturday night.
What is also clear is that the police were very slow to respond on Saturday and as mobs generally do, they started burning cars, buildings and looting. Now Mark Duggan is from a council estate (public housing). One thing to remember here is that there is a massive amount of community housing here in London, and they can be found in almost any suburb of greater london. Of course not everyone in these places are bad people but it seems that the vast majority of rioters were from these places. I guess you can imagine the aboringal boy that was killed running from police in Redfern last year and what happened there - but this was on a much larger scale.

Every other riot after Tottenham was pure copycat. I think that people saw how easy it was for those people in Tottenham to get away with looting and rioting and realised there was some quick money to be made. Also, it also seems that the 'gangs' that work in these various areas all actually called an truce and decided to work together to target certain stores and areas - all done via blackberry messenger - another controversial topic right now. None of the rioters that have been interviewed have even pretended that it was anything to do with Mark Duggan - it appear to be purely opportunistic greed. So basically, it just spread and while it was mostly London on Sat and Sunday night, on Monday night it had spread to Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool etc, all places where people had never heard of Mark Duggan, but had seen on TV groups of people burning and looting, and no one getting arrested.

Btw - its good to point out that originally, the looters were mostly aged 15-17 - 'street gangs', but as the days moved on, it became much more organised with people in their late 20s getting involved and driving up in cars, loading up the boot etc, and it was much more planned.

So that's where it stands at the moment. Everyone here is trying to understand how this got out of hand, and why so many people feel that they needed to riot. All the usual suspects have been thrown out there:
- Social Divide
- 5% of people own 80% of wealth
- Education Cuts
- Police Cuts
- Lack of opportunity for the people in these housing estates

I'm sure you've all read the articles for yourselves.

Personally, I think it was a combination of all of these things but mostly just the nature of society these days. Everyone wants the get rich quick, no one wants to work hard anymore. I look at the generation before us - and I was taught by my parents that working hard will give you success. Nowadays i guess kids believe that there are shortcuts, and they don't care if its legal or not. Its probably a massive oversimplification but I think that a work ethic has really disappeared from our generation.

Feel free to email me back to discuss :)

Anyway - in other news, we went to Krakow a few weekends ago (it seems like AGES! and i've only spent the last 2 weekends in London), Krakow is a nice place,as with most European cities, it has an old town and boasts hundreds of years of history and culture. On the whole, Polish girls are pretty hot - on average, potentially the best looking girls i've seen in any country so far - but I haven't been yet (France, Belgium, Helsinki, Estonia and Portugal for those keeping count). There were no particular jaw dropping moments but just on average, the waitresses, people walking along the street, were well dressed and good looking.

Highlights of Krakow
- Auschwitz/Birkenau - you can't really call this a highlight but its something that I think is worth seeing. 1.1m million people were killed at these death camps - you don't even call then concentration camps because people literally got off trains from all around Europe at Birkenau and were promptly marched into the gas chambers and killed. In almost all cases they never knew what was coming, they all thought they were simply being relocated. Most people had brought luggage and they dearest belongings. The museum is intense, when you see the tens of thousands of shoes, toothbrushes, suit cases and even human hair (yes you read that right, the Nazis harvested hair from dead bodies to be used in factories to make carpet etc) you start to appreciate the scale of this tragedy. When you talk about 1m people - the number is so large that it almost becomes meaningless, but when you see the personal belongings (and these are only the things that were left behind, because when the soviets came, they had already marched all prisoners that could walk out) it really hits home.
The most harrowing experience was actually walking into one of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. God only know how many people died in there. The nature of German efficiency meant that the furnaces to burn the bodies were simply located next door, 5 meters away and they made other Jewish prisoners collect the bodies and put them in the ovens.
Its hard to imagine cruelty and massacre on such a scale.

- The salt mines are a much more light hearted attraction that consist of an old salt mine - 130m deep into the ground. The amazing thing here is that they have been mining for salt for such depths since the 1300s and was one of the most profitable mines in the world for hundreds of years. Nowadays, they have amazing carvings out of salt and one chamber in particular that is now a church, where they have the last supper carved in salt on the walls, a salt pulpit, salt crystal chandeliers, salt crucifixes - simply stunning. The lines for this are pretty horrendous - it took us about an hour to get in - but i made the most of that time,i lined up about 30 mins to get a hot dog, potentially one of the most inefficient processes I have ever seen in my life - how could you back up a hot dog line for 30 mins ? Just put some more damn hot dogs on the barbecue....

- We also got some culture into us, attending a concert at Wawel castle where we both go in as students. I suspect that it was a fairly legit concert as people came in suits and nice dresses, Nancy and I were definitely the most under dressed people there, it was nice, in a small courtyard in the castle and consisted of a pianist, a clarinet player and a violinist.

Food - No Miles email would be complete without some mention of food!
Food in Krakow is great, they are a meat and potatoes kind of people and I'm a meat and potatoes kind of guy.
The most common thing to eat there appears to be Perogi - basically a meat dumpling, either steamed or fried. Over the 3 days I must have eaten about 30 of them. Other highlights included Zurek, a sauerkraut soup, Beetroot soup and Duck with Apple. Servings were generally generous food was CHEAP - luckily the poles havent got the euro yet, and a 3 course meal at a decent restaurant was about 10 pounds for 2 people, or the price of a pizza in London.

We also went to St John on Friday - the master of nose to tail cooking. 1 Michelin star. I had been warned about this actually, with a large number of asian friends who had been before telling me that they were not impressed so my expectations weren't high. Also, service was supposedly dreadful according to several food bloggers so all in all , things weren't looking great. With the help of some friends, I managed to find 15 other people to share this meal with me as we had ordered the SUCKLING PIG FEAST - where you get an entire suckiling pig, and a selection of starters and desserts.

For starters we had snail and oakleaf (great salad!) and bone marrow and parsley (if you love marrow, you'd love this). The main was the pig and presentation wise, it certainly didnt disappoint - see facebook for photos. The main criticism from almost everyone I had spoken to was that the skin was not crackling. I guess due to the way that they cook it, the skin does not crisp up in that fantastic way you get with roast pork. I had been expecting this so my disappointment was tempered. The pig for me was a mixed bag.
I loved the meat - it was amazingly tender, you didn't need a knife at all, everything literally had fallen apart. I didn't like how something in it gave me asthma - I have no idea what it was but it was getting a bit ugly for a while because I didn't have my puffer but luckily logan came to the rescue. I liked the stuffing, it was quite tasty and complemented the texture of the meat. I didn't like the stuffing because there was too much and it was too fatty. Actually that is the main problem with the pig. It was amazingly fatty. I don't actually think I ate that much pig, but in the end, it sat in my stomach like a lead ball for hours. I daresay that I still felt that pig the next day at about 11am.

Desserts were Peach & Raspberry Pie, Vanilla Ice Cream and Eccles Cake and Lancashire cheese. Ice cream was by far the winner - the rest were too heavy. Dud picks on my part. I think with another meal they would have been fine, but after rich, heavy, fatty pig, it was all too much.

Overall, It was worth the experience, Service was actually quite good, and I liked the starkness of the decor all white. I actually enjoyed my first plate of pig a lot - it was the 2nd and 3rd that I really regret. At 50 pounds a head (including service and wine) I dont' feel like I got ripped off, i walked away full and I've paid more for worse. Would I do it again? Probably not for a few months...

Anyway - I think that catches you guys up on life in London. Hope you guys are all having fun.

Next Stop - Scotland and the Fringe festival!

Write back to let me know how you all are!

Miles