St. Leonard’s is the “when I grow rich” church at the top of Shoreditch High Street, nestled among the strip clubs, council houses and bars, and watching over the gradual accretion of art galleries (including the one I live above) and design stores.  The churchyard is always full of men in long coats sharing bottles, but this looks more and more like a station in their retreat.  As the galleries spread and new businesses like the Days Hotel spring up (bringing understandably bewildered Japanese tourists on package holidays to Hackney Road), the streets are getting busier and less dangerous, and you stand a decent chance now of flagging down a taxi when you need one.

There is a lot to like about this area, not least the awareness of how quickly it is changing from dangerous to merely “edgy”:  ”Live East, Die Young” is a common slogan on hoodies and art student leather jackets; that’s not the sort of thing you would wear if “Murder Mile” were really still a good description of your neighborhood.

On Saturday, Manny came by with a van to help me take my things to charity.  On Sunday, I finished my inventory of possessions, and on Monday the movers came and hauled everything away.  It’s funny how quickly you can go from being constrained (with furniture, property, and obligations) to being free.  Three days, really.  It’s even funnier how much respect you get from other drivers when you’re behind the wheel of a big white van — it looked to Manny and myself like regard for the working man, but maybe it was fear for their paint jobs.

When I was saying my goodbyes, my landlord (an artist and entrepreneur who turned this old handbag factory into a beautiful apartment block) told me, “The business culture here is aggressive, it goes back to the Angles and the Saxons — everyone is out for what they can get.  If I were a man your age, I would get out of London and settle somewhere else.”  I’m not sure if China is going to be any kind of respite from aggressiveness and selfishness, but it will have the advantage of seeming more like a game, since the experience will be filtered through a language and culture that are more foreign to me than the near relation of English.  (What is the American relationship with the British, exactly?  You sometimes hear Brits talk of “our American cousins” (when they are being friendly), but I always imagine Britain to be like an uncle — sometimes literally avuncular, sometimes like the old men in the Monty Python skit who say, “Back in MY day, our dad used to wake us up four hours before we went to bed, feed us a lump of cold poison, then we had to walk to school barefoot in the snow UPHILL in both directions…kids these days!”)

This is some of what I will miss:

• Victoria Park, which on Bonfire Night last year hosted one of the best fireworks display I’ve ever seen (including Edokawa’s hanabi)
• Broadway Market and the cupcakes (made by a fellow Californian transplant)
• Hoxton Square and Curtain Road
• The host of strip clubs within five minutes’ walk of my flat (I did intentionally visit every one of them at least once, but I did not spend nearly as much time there as I would have before I lived in Tokyo)
• Columbia Road’s flower market, and the two restaurants on the east side:  The Sting Ray Globe Cafe and Laxeiro
• Brick Lane and the 24-hour Beigel [sic] Bake
• The outdoor picnic benches at The Vibe Bar
• The vandals/”street artists” who make living in Hackney a kind of treasure hunt:
  • Banksy
  • Eine
  • Invader
  • The local “ad-jammer” whose name I couldn’t discover on the web
• New Tayyab’s (I guess this is technically in Whitechapel, but it beats all the Bangladeshi places on the more famous Brick Lane by a mile)
• Regent’s Canal
• All the art galleries
• The accent!  And someone once really did ask me to pass him his ‘titfer’ (= hat)
• Sausage and Mash Cafe at Spitalfields

Oranges and lemons,
Say the bells of St. Clement’s.
You owe me five farthings,
Say the bells of St. Martin’s.
When will you pay me?
Say the bells of Old Bailey.
When I grow rich,
Say the bells of Shoreditch.
When will that be?
Say the bells of Stepney.
I’m sure I don’t know,
Says the great bell at Bow.

Both these photos have a blurry blob at the bottom — that’s a little drop of rain (I’ll miss the lovely English summers) that got on the lens. The same rain kept people away from Columbia Road today, though, and it was easier to see what was on offer.

I’m saying goodbye to various parts of London, including these cupcakes from Broadway Market that I buy most Saturdays.  Four cost £7.70, or around $15.00.  I never thought about it until I had to write it down in my notebook, but these are expensive little cakes.  They are made by a fellow California transplant to the UK.

When I was trying to set my last day at work, I angled for July 4th as an auspicious day — America’s Independence Day seemed like a good day to be free of a job.  A month’s notice was too little for the team, it transpired, so we set August 1 as the day, a Friday.  The following Friday might have been an even better date:  08/08/08 would be hard to forget.

At least a year ago, I predicted a spike in weddings and Caesarian sections on today’s date as people try to arrange a favorable beginning for these events.  I read recently that entrepreneurs in Beijing were capitalizing on the first circumstance by booking wedding halls for August 8, then hiring them out at higher rates to less foresightful couples.  For the second part, I don’t know for sure that the number of births will increase, or that anyone has figured out a way to make money from it, but I think it’s likely that anyone who was already planning a C-section around this time will go for the 8th, and that some people who weren’t planning one for medical reasons will do so anyway.  I base this on the decision of a university friend to arrange 03/03/03 as his daughter’s birthday via C-section, motivated only by the desire for symmetry. [Update: I was right!]

Of course the other big event starting out today is the Beijing Olympics.  Put births and the games together and you get this recent headline:  ”Over 3500 children named ‘Olympics’ in China”.  If “Porsche” and “Mercedes” are legitimate aspirational names, maybe “Gold Medal” should be too.

Endless lectures! I mentioned before that I had talked to several long-term travelers to learn what their trips cost, what they learned while traveling, what advice they had to offer, etc.  In addition to those mentioned earlier, I got histories from the following people:

• Someone who left the company with a big enough package not to have to work again.
• Someone who took four months off while transitioning from his job in Japan to a new company in the US.
• An IT contractor in the UK who regularly takes a month or more off between assignments.

In the last few days I have spent tedious hours on hold with British Telecom trying to cancel my service, and more hours wrapping various possessions first in tissue paper, subsequently in t-shirts, and finally in rubber bands with index card labels (very eco-friendly, I thought — I haven’t used any bubble wrap at all, and I have to ship the t-shirts anyway).

Of course one benefit of all this tedium is heightened anticipation of my coming freedom, but there was practical and artistic benefit as well:  Practically, I learned that you can dial 170 70 in the UK and an automated service will tell you what number you are calling from.  This is useful if you only got a phone line because British Telecom requires one to get broadband service (and so can’t remember your own phone number); according to the BT operator, it’s also useful if you are over at someone’s house and want to know your host’s phone number (I thought this was shady advice from BT).  On the artistic side, while improvising a carrier for my formal cufflinks, I unintentionally created a Domo-kun-like monster.

When I was in San Francisco on short notice, I had to buy some new cufflinks, so I went to the Pink store and bought three versions of the same cufflinks in red, yellow, and blue.  When I was back home in Tokyo, a friend of mine saw them sitting together on their little tray and said, Oh, it looks like a stoplight.  I didn’t think it was funny at the time, because I know that Japanese people call the bottom light of a stoplight “blue” (and the stoplight itself will tell you in its mechanical voice when it’s safe to walk:  ”Ao ni narimashita,” which means, “It turned blue.”)

But when I was packing them today, I realized that what is strange is not that the Japanese word “ao” refers to stoplights — in fact, it’s easy to imagine an English color word like “sea-colored” that could refer to a range of things that are blue or green.  It is strange, however, that someone looking at bright blue cufflinks would think that they looked like the green light of a stoplight.  Does using the color-word blue for green things influence perception, or is Japanese perception different from mine?  (They call the sun “red”, too, and little kids in Japan drawing a sun will choose the red crayon.)

I have friends who have taken the following long trips:

1. Three years in Thailand
2. One year traveling in South America
3. One year surfing in Costa Rica
4. Seven months in Africa

People have very vague memories of what their trips cost, even though that’s the subject that other people planning such a trip are most keenly interested in.  When I move to a new country, I try to write down every expense for the first six months I am there to teach my subconscious how to estimate cash flow in the new location.  I’ve decided to do the same thing for this trip, and my spreadsheet tells me that I’ve managed to break the minimum budget before even leaving my apartment, as follows:

It to me a while to calculate this, but I figured out that this is my ninth international move and my 42nd move overall.  I’m sure that’s higher than average, even in this footloose age.  Luckily, I didn’t have to start the reckoning from scratch.  I calculated several years ago that my family had moved 21 times before I turned 17, so I just added the moves from when I left for college (exactly double).

When you move internationally, you fill out reams of forms:  volume estimates, insurance forms, customs forms, powers-of-attorney, and shipping inventories.  All of these forms ask for basically the same information (what you are shipping, what it’s worth, where it’s going), and each time you move, you start from scratch, even if you are moving basically the same stuff (i.e., you haven’t acquired or discarded much).  This sounds like an opportunity for automation!

When I was in Tokyo (two moves before the current one), I bought 28 clear plastic boxes with locking lids and printed out 28 A4 pages with the following information:

Property of Shanghai Bob (bobby.dazzler@shanghaibob.com)
Full contents online at http://shanghaibob.com/contents/

1

Box 1 of 28

Then I put the pages into plastic slip-covers (more plastic!) underneath the box lids.  The main numbers are one-third the height of the page, easy to see without opening the box.

I use the numbers as IDs (primary keys) for an online inventory.  Some of the boxes I don’t even open from move to move (old photos, archived files, etc.), so I don’t have to re-do any of that work.  And if I move the contents of a smaller box to a larger one or vice versa, I just swap the ID pages and repoint the online content listing.  When the movers come, I print out a copy for them and myself, and we use the same file for insurance.

When I store my stuff, I just store the boxes in numerical order.  If I need something, I look the location up on my website.  When I was in the US and my stuff was in storage in the UK, I needed my tux (dinner jacket) for the Christmas party.  I looked online and saw that it was in box 13 — if only it had been as easy for my UK-based friend to ship it through customs as it was to identify the correct box.

Normally primary/surrogate keys don’t convey any information, but I took advantage of a few mnemonics:  I put Christmas ornaments in box 25, my old (paper-based!) journals in 17 (my birthday), and my go set (a Japanese board game) in box five (the Japanese word for five is pronounced “go”).

Today is grey and gloomy in London, with spattering rain.  Typical mid-summer weather!  Maybe because of the rain, but probably partly because I’m leaving soon, a poem I memorized at university was running through my head today.  The original is German, here’s a translation:

The Flying Robert

Escapism, you cry out to me, 
reproachfully. 
What else, I reply, 
with this lousy weather! 
I open my umbrella 
and launch myself into the winds. 
From your point of view 
I become smaller and smaller, 
until I vanish. 
I leave behind nothing 
but a legend, 
with which you green-eyed monsters 
pester your children, 
when it storms outside, 
so that they do not fly away from you.

  — Hans Magnus Enzensberger

 ”You green-eyed monsters” is a loose translation of “ihr Neidhammel” (you envious people) in the original.  ”Hammel” is wether in English, and if you grew up on a ranch you might recognize that word, but if not, you probably think it’s a typo for “weather” or “whether”.  It means a castrated male sheep, the sheep-world equivalent of a steer.  That may seem like an obscure word, unless you recognize it as part of “bellwether”, a word you’ve probably used.

Here’s the original:
 

Der fliegende Robert

Eskapismus, ruft ihr mir zu, 
vorwurfsvoll. 
Was denn sonst, antworte ich, 
bei diesem Sauwetter! -, 
spanne den Regenschirm auf 
und erhebe mich in die Lüfte. 
Von euch aus gesehen, 
werde ich immer kleiner und kleiner, 
bis ich verschwunden bin. 
Ich hinterlasse nichts weiter 
als eine Legende, 
mit der ihr Neidhammel, 
wenn es draußen stürmt, 
euern Kindern in den Ohren liegt, 
damit sie euch nicht davonfliegen.

— Hans Magnus Enzensberger

As part of the wealth reduction plan I began by quitting my job, I spent the day giving things away: A futon from Isetan Tokyo; a magnetic whiteboard I had custom-made according to the golden ratio; a new leather Tumi computer briefcase; five large bookcases; cookbooks, a double boiler, an ice cream scoop, and other kitchen equipment; several “50 best” editions of Time Out I had collected (best websites, best breakfasts, best pubs and clubs, etc.). I decided to get rid of anything I could easily replace.

Homo economicus would reason that it’s cheaper to replace commodity items than to ship and store them. But the main motivation was irrational: I’ve had some of this stuff since university, and much of it since I moved to Tokyo over eight years ago. I believe (am hoping) that after this time off I’ll have a different perspective on the world, and perhaps even different ideals and goals. Do I want to come back to the same furniture?

I may have less cruft than some people since I’ve moved long distances often and have had correspondingly many opportunities to purge my possessions. But most of those moves were made quickly, and I never considered giving away items that still had substantial utility. Now that I have a few weeks to go through everything carefully, I’m testing things not according to their usefulness, but their replaceability.

Why give things away? I was not really tempted to sell my stuff on eBay largely because I don’t want to spend the last two weeks here taking and uploading photos and arranging to meet sometimes flaky potential buyers. But I am tempted to haul everything down to Brick Lane or Old Bethnal Green Road where my neighbors sell each other stolen bikes, used combs, half-complete Hogwarts Express train sets, and other inconsequential things from blankets on the sidewalk. The pre-internet eBay. I probably don’t really want to spend a day doing that either, though, so giving things away is a good option. My friends (or the local charity shops) benefit, and it turns out that I benefit too: Manny traded me a new backpack just the right size (and color!) for my trip.