Walking in the sunshine

I took a walk around Brighton today. It was 30 degrees Celcius (74 Farenheit), sunny, and packed with people. Perfect for observing my little nook of England.

The best description of English fashion was one I received before I arrived. A girl who had studied at Sussex last term told me that English people dress as if they had rolled out of bed, thrown on a mish-mash of whatever was lying about, and come out looking fashionable. With a little more color-coordination and some imaginary ironing, this is exactly how they look. Also, they may have even more of an obsession with tanning than Americans do. Already, I have seen several Brits who have darker tans than I acquired during all of last summer.

Over the span of less than four months, I have seen more dreadlocks than I ever did in all four years of high school at Woodland Hills. Yet, England (or at least this area of it) does not have a very large African-American population. All of these dreads are on white people. They remind me of what I imagine hippies looking like, had I lived in that era, particularly because I usually find them cross-legged in parks, riding bicycles in sandals, or swishing patchwork skirts to the beats of basquers on Sussex’s campus.

After my travels to London and various locations in Spain, basquers no longer surprise me. I’ve found duets of fourteen-year-old flautists performing in front of charity shops in Hove just as common as grubby old Hispanic men playing their alto saxophones in Metro stations. The one group who did surprise me, however, was the trio of Native Americans in Churchill Square. I was walking past the neon-colored signs of HSBC bank and H&M when I spotted them, all dressed in what would appear to be traditional Native American garb (leather-like attire with beading, feathered headdresses, painted faces, etc.) playing long wooden tube-like instruments, their sounds magnified with electrical amps. All this on the street corner of the busiest shopping hub in Brighton—right outside the mall. And my initial reaction? What are American Indians doing way over here?

On my walk, I passed two elderly gentleman sitting on a curbside bench. One man was reaching into a cellophane package and withdrawing a small, square-ish, brown bun. The bun was topped with two perpendicular white stripes. Smaller darkish dots speckling its crust suggested that it had been made with raisins. As the man offered it to his partner, I recognized the bun—it is distinctly un-American. These two men were sitting on a bench, sharing hot cross buns.