Cousins, Part Two

This week the same group that walked to Brick Lane for Indian food met up at the same time in the same place, and we decided to explore the South Bank. This time the goal was to look for a non-chain coffee shop where we could study and get reasonably priced coffee.

There are a ton of Starbucks over here, though not so many as there are in America. Instead of being on every corner and in the middle of every block the Starbucks are maybe every three blocks. They are joined by two other large coffee chains, however, café Nero and Café Costa. Each offers the same thing as Starbucks: a predictable, comfy and over priced cup of joe. I actually am a big fan of Starbucks in the states. I know that they are evil and corporate and that they steal from the mouths of mom and pop coffee shops, and I should be ashamed. I am ashamed, but I do like their coffee (or cara-mocha-frappa-crappas as my sister calls them) and they pay their workers relatively well and offer benefits and use fair trade coffee. However, my Starbucks habit is too costly for the UK (the prices look like they’re in dollars instead of pounds!) and I’m trying really hard not to eat at chains that exist in the US. It’s easy when it comes to passing up Burger King, McDonalds and Pizza Hut, but it’s tough for me to walk away from Starbucks and Subway.

Anyway, returning to coffee our walk lead us down to Borough Market. Borough Market is an open air market that thrives on the weekends, but is relatively dead during the week. I went there with my mother on my birthday and got the most amazing piece of gingerbread. Katie and Denise—my roaming companions—wanted to stop there to check out the lone produce stand that was open that day. We were pretty hungry by then, not having had lunch, and as we walked the deserted stalls we came across a butcher that was open during the week, and who was selling burgers that he grilled on the spot. These were no ordinary burgers, but included Lamb burgers and pork and Stilton burgers. Yum. I got a lamb burger with grilled onions and the other two tried the pork and Stilton. They were everything you’d expect a designer burger from a butcher in an upscale open air market to be.

As we left the market we decided to go back on a road that was closer to the river, and ended up stopping in to see Southwark Cathedral. Southwark (pronounced Sutherk, of course) is a gorgeous old building that had been made a Cathedral in 1905, but had been standing as some sort of religious church since the 13th century. Inside it looked like a mini Westminster Abbey. There were the same sarcophagi topped with effigies of their inhabitants, and the floor was a maze of stones telling us who was buried beneath them. I have to say I find walking over dead bodies kind of unsettling. Yes, there’s the obvious creepiness factor, but aside from that I imagine the bodies must resent it. You walk out of there knowing that if there is an afterlife, it already contains people who resent you for disturbing their beauty sleep.


The inside of the cathedral was gorgeous. There was an elaborate stone carving behind the altar that I thought was breathtaking. My favorite part, however, was the effigy of Shakespeare, which sits a top an empty sarcophagus, reclining with a bouquet of flowers. The whole thing looks sort of campy, but I like the merging of religion and literature, since literature is basically my religion. The statue of Shakespeare stands beneath a triptych stain glass window that contains characters from his various plays. We were able to identify Falstaff, Prospero with Ariel and Calaban, King Lear, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Touchstone, but there were many characters that none of us could identify, and we are all English majors.

The reason for Shakespeare’s presence in that particular Church was that the man who reconstructed the Globe Theatre was apparently buried there. There were also lesser tributes to Chaucer and Dickens, who were connected with the neighborhood, as the lady in the gift shop informed me, but not the church.

On the way back we walked along the river. We were walking the same route that I had traveled on Friday when I ran into my random acquaintance for the first night. So I was amused and shocked when, walking the same route, I ran into my cousin. Not the cousin I had had dinner with the night before, but my second cousin who lives in Seattle and is also studying abroad this semester, though with an American university program instead of at a London school. She had gotten into town the previous weekend, and as such we had agreed to hang out but had not made any concrete plans. It was great to meet her there (she was on her way to the Tate Modern), and we made nebulous plans to hang out on Saturday. I’m going to have to be more careful when it comes to walking the Thames path, weird coincidences seem to abound there.

That night my flatmates were going out again, but I had gotten myself into giving another presentation, this time for Experimental Theatre, so I opted to stay in. Curling up with my copies of Genet and Artaud, I settled down and enjoyed a productive evening in. 

Shakespeare's Globe