The World In One City

Now it's the End (of the World (in One City))?

2007-10-24T20:00:00.001Z

Halleluiah!

Alex Horne - 24th October 2007 (United Nations Day)

We met our Qatari at the appointed time! He used to be an ambassador but isn't now so he counts! And he's extremely good at soundbites!

And, Jody, our Nauruan Nurse/Angel got our messages and bravely called us back - despite the fact that we must have looked much more like stalkers than anything else! She's at The Globe at Baker Street right now with Owen! And I'm going to join them in about 8 minutes!

But first, a couple of hastily thought out conclusions:

London scored 189.

That's pretty good. No, there isn't someone from every country in the world living here, but it is now officially the most cosmopolitan city in the world.

Until another city beats 189.

So, no, the story doesn't end here.

For one thing, we plan to write a book about the whole adventure AND have the ultimate global party with someone from every country in the world in one place at one time (hopefully early next year - more information to follow...).

But also, we want to beat 189 ourselves! Whether it be New York, Montreal or Hong Kong, we're almost certainly going to give it another crack...

So please do stay in touch and keep visiting the site for more updates. We may well need your help again soon!

No.189: Nauru

2007-10-24T19:30:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 24th October 2007

Yesterday, we got an email from a nurse called Jody. Jody is from Nauru! (Well, half from Nauru, but at this stage of the project, half-Nauruan definitely counts).

We both replied, we went to bed, we woke up (all these activities were done individually, in our separate houses), and saw that Jody had not replied. We ummed and ahhed. I had a shower. (I don't know what Alex did). We phoned each other, and decided that as Jody had told us where she worked, we should go to where she worked. Which is a intensive care unit for children in the Royal Brompton Hospital.

It's amazing how far into a hospital you can get without really being ill or injured. We were on the point of going into a classroom for ill children in search of a nurse from Nauru, but saw another nurse in the corridor and asked her instead. "Jody?" she said. "Oh, she was on night shift last night, so she's probably in bed now. Do you want to leave her a message, in case she's working tonight?" Alex scribbled something, in the kind of handwriting a stalker might use, and we hoped for the best.

Later this afternoon, while Alex and I ate lunch (this time, together, at my house) Jody phoned. A Nauruan! Finally! On the very final day that a Nauruan could have phoned!

She told me that she wasn't working tonight, and in fact wanted to come to our last night party, bringing her sister, another half-Nauruan with her. (Two half-Nauruans, in my book, always add up to one whole Nauruan).

---

Jody and Catherine came to the party, stayed for hours, and put up with everyone else saying, "So, YOU'RE the famous Nauruans!" again and again. But they are the famous Nauruans, in our eyes, and it was a fitting end to the project to interview someone in the final hours of what has been the most amazing year of our lives.

No.188: Qatar

2007-10-24T18:05:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 24th October 2007

If he is to be our final find, we couldn't have asked for anyone more appropriate or erudite than the former Ambassador of Qatar, Mr Al-Khalifa. We met at 6pm, six hours before our deadline, in a perfectly cosmopolitan cafe in Mayfair, where he now resides.

Some Qatar Quotes:

On Londoners:
'I don't expect people to smile when walking around. You're busy, you have to get somewhere! People in London are nice.'

On London:
'Now it is a global city. No one can claim it. You find yourself in places now and you don't know where in the world you are.'

On multiculturalism:
'When people move around they become aware of each other. They understand each other. That way, there are no more wars. Unfortunately politicians all over the world are backwards when it comes to multiculturalism.'

On Ken Livingston:
'The Mayor is a good man. He is ahead of his time. He understood what people who come from abroad can do for this city. It used to be dark after 5pm on the streets. Not any more!'

On Doha:
'You can't compare it to London. It's a much smaller city. It's a new city with new people. 80% of the people are non-Qataris. There are people from all over the world there. You could find someone from every country in the world there.'

The End of the World (in One City)?

2007-10-24T13:27:00.000Z

Alex Horne - October 24th 2007

So, we've got less than ten hours left till our year long search comes to an end and there are still five countries to find. Why am I wasting time writing this then? Good question.

Well, first of all, Happy United Nations Day! Good.

And second, I'm afraid we've almost exhausted both our options and ourselves. Here's a quick breakdown of the current situation:

Qatar: We are meeting a Qatari gentleman (a former ambassador in fact), at six o'clock this evening. If this falls through we will feel extremely foolish.
Tuvalu: We can confirm that there are absolutely no Tuvaluans living in London. I have, however, met the closest Tuvaluan to London, a lady called Suliana whose house I visited yesterday - more details to follow.
Palau: Again, we are as sure as sure can be (is that a phrase? It sounds like one but doesn't seem to make any sense) that there are no Palauans in London. We've looked everywhere. The Mayor's office have looked everywhere. People from Fiji, New Zealand, Kiribati and Tuvalu have looked everywhere. In fact, we don't even think there's a Palauan in the whole of the UK. An interesting if frustrating fact if true.
Marshall Islands: No - no Marshallese people in London I'm afraid. But we have had an email from someone who is half Marshallese, half Nauruan (see below) who lives in Gravesend. We were hoping to pay her a visit but unfortunately we're still waiting for her to get back in touch. Also, we were contacted yesterday evening by...
Nauru: A nurse from Nauru works in the Royal Brompton Hospital! She emailed us, we emailed back - incredibly excitedly - then nothing... Obviously we paid the hospital a visit this morning only to be told that our one Pacific lead was on night shifts. She's almost certainly asleep as I write this. But we've left messages for her at the hospital and on her email so are hoping to meet her some time before midnight tonight.

Also before midnight tonight we're going to have a drink. In fact, we're hoping to have a drink with a lot of the people we've met over the last twelve months. And even some of the people we haven't met. So if you fancy coming along, we'll be at the Globe* Pub opposite Baker Street tube from 7.30pm tonight.

Again, Happy United Nations Day!

*Globe, by the way, is clearly a deliberate pun - but a multilayered one at that, being as it is an anagram of e-blog. Thank you.

Countries that we're still very much looking for:

2007-10-24T11:43:00.000Z

WANTED

Hello there. Due to popular demand (and because it's a good idea which we really should have thought of ourselves), here is a list of the countries for which we still have no leads. If you are from one of these countries and you now live and work in London, please do get in touch (worldinonecity@hotmail.com)! Or, if you know someone who fits that bill, please do also get in touch (same email address)! Here they are:

Marshall Islands
Palau
Tuvalu

A Tiny Update

2007-10-24T04:38:00.000Z

So Near...

On October 4th I wrote this to show where we stood with our last nationalities and we've been updating it ever since. It's now a bit confusing but does say something about how we're getting on and is quite useful for us to see where we've been looking and what we should be doing next. So don't worry too much if it doesn't make much sense but do let us know if you think there's a stone we haven't yet turned.

"We've got twenty days left so I thought I'd start a bit of a countdown to show how we're getting on with the remaining countries. I can't speak for Owen but I'm starting to become entirely consumed by this thing. I've dreamt twice about meeting a Marshall Islander and woken up distraught that it hadn't actually happened.

After 345 days of searching, the end is in sight. But will we succeed? Will we prove that people have come to this tiny corner of the world from every other corner of the world (accepting that there are 192 corners in the world)? I hope so. Or at least I hope we do everything in our power to prove that they haven't...

So here's where we are with TWENTY days to go (4-10-7) (Owen - please correct my mistakes):"

ANDORRA: After a postponement yesterday and a close call with an Andorran who actually lived in Manchester the day before that, Owen is hopefully meeting Kim this afternoon. COMPLETED 4-10-7!
BARBADOS: Owen is all set to meet a Bajan pupil at a school in Croydon tomorrow (as well as discussing the project in an entertaining and educational way with the other kids. Well done and good luck Owen). COMPLETED 5-10-7!
BOTSWANA: After spending yesterday evening going to a gig by a Botswanan band that never actually showed up, I was today contacted by a man called Kabelo to whom I am immensely grateful and whom I should be meeting on Monday. COMPLETED 8-10-7!
CAMBODIA: After two time-consuming trips to the Vietnam Laos and Cambodia Refugee Centre in Kingsland I finally met Mr Gak (from Vietnam) who gave me the phone number for a Mrs Owen (the head of a Cambodian society based in Southampton) who is now trying to find me someone from Cambodia who lives in London. There are also unconfirmed rumours about a Cambodian restaurant in Camden. Day 19 update: Mrs Owen has given my number to a Cambodian refugee who lives in London and should be calling me soon... Day 17 update: she phoned! And I'm going to meet her in Hackney on Sunday!COMPLETED 14-10-7!
CHAD: Owen has found someone on a London socialising website. This is a tenuous lead. Day 16 update: Alex has a new email address. We might be getting somewhere. COMPLETED 11-10-7!
CONGO (Republic of the): My dad has found me a very nice guy called Mr Padzhou whom I was meant to meet yesterday but who had to postpone and so whom I will hopefully be meeting next Monday or Tuesday in Walthamstow. Day 16 update: I should now be meeting Mr Padzhou next Monday. Fingers crossed.COMPLETED 15-10-7!
COTE D'IVOIRE: A friend of my brother's has given me the phone number of a guy he calls Drogba who I have spoken to and whom I should be meeting on Monday. I have also been chatting to Kolo Toure's agent but we don't know if he actually lives in London yet. COMPLETED 8-10-7!
DEMOCRATIC PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Owen and I have planned a trip to New Malden next Wednesday. Day 15 update: Owen and I did indeed spend this afternoon in New Malden and spoke to ten South Koreans but zero North Koreans. We did, however, find three leads which Owen is going to chase vigorously. TRIPLE COMPLETED 19-10-7!
DJIBOUTI: We have nothing. Day 14 update: We have someone!COMPLETED 11-10-7!
DOMINICA: Owen is hopefully meeting a Dominican this evening. COMPLETED 4-10-7!
FIJI: A friend of a friend of my wife's is Fijian and returning from a holiday in the middle of next week. Owen may also find one watching their team play South Africa at the rugby world cup on Sunday. Day 17 update: Owen didn't find a Fijian at the rugby and South Africa won. His Samoan did, however, provide us with another lead. Day 14 update: We've also got a lead through Facebook. Day 12 update: Alex went to the Fiji Day celebrations in Aldershot, and met a Fijian. COMPLETED 13-10-7!
GABON: Oscar from Equatorial Guinea has invited us to the Equatorial Guinea Independence Day next Friday. I can't go unfortunately, but hopefully Owen and someone from Gabon will. Day 13 update: Oscar introduced Owen to the deputy ambassador for Gabon, but meeting him was breaking the rules. Day 10 update: Owen has met someone on Facebook who he is hopefully meeting on the final Monday. COMPLETED 22-10-7!
GUINEA-BISSAU: Owen's friend Andy might know someone. Day 8 update: we've now been contacted by two more people that may have leads so are starting to feel confident. COMPLETED 23-10-7!
HAITI: We have nothing. Day 12 update: An email has come in ... COMPLETED 16-10-7!
KIRIBATI: Tonga from Tonga might know someone from Kiribati. Day 12 update: A lead for Alex from the Fiji day celebrations - hopefully meeting Mr Burentarawa on Tuesday. COMPLETED 16-10-7!
LAO: Jessica from the last live show has given us an email address whom we are waiting to hear back from. Day 9 update: we still haven't heard back from this contact so are now scouring restaurants. Day 8 update: we have confirmation of a chef from Laos working in a pub in Richmond. I'm going to pay them a visit tomorrow. COMPLETED 18-10-7!
LESOTHO: We have been trying to find a convenient time to meet lovely Likeng in South London for the last three months. Hopefully it will happen soon. Day 10 update: unfortunately Likeng is now out of the UK until after our deadline. However, I do have a friend from university from Lesotho who lives outside London but whose brother lives in Finsbury Park and who I'm hoping to meet. Day 10 update: Owen has also found someone on Facebook. DOUBLE COMPLETED 17-10-7!
LIBYA: A friend of a friend of my brother's has located a Libyan whom I emailed today. Owen also might know someone called Molly. Day 17 update: Owen met Molly but Molly lives in Sunningdale - outside of London! I have meanwhile been corresponding with another Libyan lady called Sara whom I hope to meet in the next day or two. COMPLETED 10-10-07!
MALDIVES: We have nothing. Day 15 update: my elder brother's fiancee has a friend who has a friend from the Maldives who's in the Maldives at the moment but whose brother is in London and who we might be able to meet.COMPLETED 12-10-7!
MARSHALL ISLANDS: We have nothing. Day 3 update: Somebody living in Gravesend (just outside London) is half-Nauruan, half-Marshallese. We're going to try to speak to her before our deadline.
MAURITANIA: A very nice person called Fatima (from Sierra Leone) has put me in touch with her aunt's husband Gibril whom I am meeting on Tuesday. COMPLETED 9-10-07!
MICRONESIA: One of our previous finds has set up a secret meeting... COMPLETED 20-10-7!
NAURU: We have nothing. Day 2 update: A Nauruan nurse (IN LONDON!) emailed us. We're going to go looking for her on our last day. COMPLETED 24-10-7!
NICARAGUA: Owen's contact has had to pull out due to poor health. We are back to square one. Day 16 update: Alex appeared on LBC Radio and now we have a new lead. COMPLETED 10-10-7!
NIGER: Doundosy from Burkina Faso may be able to help. Day 6 update: Ibrat from Uzbekistan phoned - he's found us a man from Niger who works at the World Service, and Owen is meeting him on Monday.COMPLETED 22-10-7!
PALAU: We have nothing.
PAPUA NEW GUINEA: Nick, a contact whom we had almost give up on, phoned Owen today and they're hopefully meeting next Tuesday. COMPLETED 9-10-7!
QATAR: Surprisingly, we have nothing. Day 15 update: Sara, our Libyan, may know someone. Fingers crossed. Day 1 update: We should be meeting our Qatari this evening .... COMPLETED 24-10-7!
SAMOA: Owen is hopefully meeting a lady called Pele tomorrow. COMPLETED 5-10-7!
SAO TOME AND PRINCIPE: See Gabon. Day 13 update: Unfortunately, there were no Sao Tome and Principians at the party... Day 9 update: a very nice BBC World journalist put us in touch with someone called Sao whom I am meeting tomorrow! COMPLETED 19-10-7!
SOLOMON ISLANDS: A very nice Priest gave me another Priest's (from the Solomon Islands) phone number but so far there's been no reply. Day 19 update: Ben, the Solomon Islander Priest has called! We are hopefully meeting on Tuesday... COMPLETED 8-10-7!
SURINAME - Very nice Fatima put me in touch with someone called Rachel from Suriname who's on holiday but returns next week. Day 17 update: Rachel has been in touch and we're trying to meet tomorrow. COMPLETED 9-10-07!
SWAZILAND - My other brother has tried to help but as yet there's been no reply from his contact so we are still pinning our hopes on Richard E. Grant whose agent says he's too busy. Day 16 update: we've been emailed by a Swazilander! And we're arranging a meeting.COMPLETED 11-10-7!
TUVALU - Owen's friend Zane has put us in contact with someone called Joshua who put us in touch with the wife of a guy called Avau whom we're waiting to hear back from. Day 11 update: I also got a couple of contacts from people I met through Patrick and Philomena at the Fiji Independence Day Party in Aldershot. Day 6 update: we are now being told by everyone who might know that there are categorically no Tuvaluans in London. I have been emailing a kind and patient lawyer/author called Philip Ells who doesn't know any, Owen has visited the Honorary Consul who lives in Tuvalu House down in Merton but is actually from Tanzania, and I've just spoken to a Mrs McNaughton who is from Tuvalu but lives in Ayrshire, Scotland. She told me she knows all four of the other Tuvaluans in the UK and they live in Exeter, York, Carlisle and Alton respectively. Still, we have not given up yet... Day 1 update: By now, we're pretty sure there are no Tuvaluans in London.

That's it. It's tangible. But time is running out.

If you can help with ANY of these countries please get in touch.

As always it's worldinonecity@hotmail.com.

We would love to hear from you.

Missing Country C: Marshall Islands

2007-10-24T02:50:00.000Z

'I'm going to stop you right there'

Alex Horne - 24th October 2007

I spoke to a man called Giff Johnson in the Marshall Islands on Tuesday night (although it was Wednesday morning for him). He's been the editor of the Marshall Island Journal for the last 22 years (that link would not have been possible two weeks ago, by the way - the islands' best (and only) newspaper's website went live for the first time on October 10th).

'I'm going to stop you right there', he said in a strong American accent when I'd told him roughly what I needed. 'We tried to find someone in London last year for another organisation and we searched and searched and couldn't find anyone. I'm sure nothing's changed since then'.

So there we go. There's no one here from the Marshall Islands. Just as we suspected but didn't want to believe.

The organisation doing that research last year, by the way: The Daily Mail. Ironic?

Missing Country B: Palau

2007-10-24T02:35:00.000Z

A mysterious wreath

Owen Powell - 24th October 2007

Last Thursday, Alex and I were standing on top of the GLA building, with wonderful views of Tower Bridge to the east and St Paul's to the west. We had been discussing our project with the Mayor's office, and they were extremely enthusiastic and helpful, and now we were up on the tenth floor thinking about ideas for parties and massive international get-togethers in 2008. It's nice to think that 'The World In One City' might end up being an ongoing project, rather than reaching a partially-triumphant conclusion tonight.

Alex pointed out to the east, nudged me and said, "Is that where Rotherhithe is?" I confirmed that it was (it's only a twenty minute walk from where I live). "Great," he said, "let's go and find our Palauan after this meeting has finished ..."

You're probably expecting me to be more excited about having found a Palauan. After all, we have just spent a year trying to meet people from every country on the planet, and with a week to go Palau was almost top of the list of the countries we had heard nothing about. But it was with a fairly heavy heart that we jumped on the 188 at Tower Bridge, made the short journey to St Mary's Church in Rotherhithe, and stood by the grave of Prince Lee Boo.

In all our research, the only Palauan we can conclusively prove to have lived in London is Lee Boo. Unfortunately, for him and us, Lee Boo died aged 20 in the year 1784. He was picked up on the East India Company's ship, 'The Antelope', when his father, the King of what is now Palau, asked the Englishmen who were travelling home via China to take his son with them and make him an Englishman. Lee Boo firstly visited China, where he saw his first mirror and first cow, then arrived in London, witnessing the first balloon flight in England a few months later. (There is more on his story here.)

Sadly, after five months of living in London, Prince Boo caught smallpox and died. He's buried in the churchyard of St Mary's, and you can see a 360-degree image of his grave here. We stood there for a while, and I copied the authentically eighteenth-century inscription into my notebook (sample: "stop reader stop let Nature Claim A tear / A prince Of Mine LEE BOO Lies Buried Here").

St Mary's itself was quite quiet. Alex spoke to the priest, who looked a bit like Friar Tuck, and he said that once every three or four years, somebody from Palau comes to visit and lays flowers on the grave. This year, however, a mysterious person had laid a wreath and he wasn't sure who it was. Could it be a London-based Palauan? We're not sure. Probably not. We think we would have found them by now.

We waved goodbye to the church and Lee Boo, and Alex went to meet a chef from Laos.

Missing Country A: Tuvalu

2007-10-23T14:30:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 23rd October 2007

When I was about 8 years old our family dentist moved his practice from Midhurst in West Sussex to Alton in Hampshire. Showing unusual and perhaps unnecessary loyalty in the field of teeth, we then spent the next ten years travelling twenty one miles West North West to have the same man make our mouths hurt.

Up till now, therefore, Alton has been a town of uncomfortable memories for me. Yes, we got given a sticker on the way out of the surgery as some sort of compensation but I mainly remember the painful needles, grinding drills, blinding lights and weird pink water.

I'm going to the dentist for the first time in Chesham this Friday, by the way, so I guess I might be a tiny bit preoccupied with the whole business.

Today, however, my view of Alton was altered forever and favourably by Suliana and her husband Paul who not only welcomed me into their home but even picked me up and dropped me off at the station (without once mentioning things like fillings, dentures or headbraces).

They met on the main island (and capital) Funafuti when Paul was working there as the People's Lawyer from 1990 to 1993. Some of you may have read a book called Where the Hell is Tuvalu? by a man called Philip Ells. I have. He was also the People's Lawyer in Tuvalu. In fact, he took the job over from Paul. I contacted the author a few months ago, he replied and we ended up having something of a fun dialogue. But he didn't know of any Tuvaluans in London.

He did, however, know Paul and Suliana, having gone out for a couple of drinks with the former before going out for a couple of years to Tuvalu. They haven't been in touch for a good few years so I've promised to pass on each others' email addresses (I found Suliana through Patrick and Philomena, my Kiribati contacts, incidentally*).

Anyway, Suliana has lived in Alton for fourteen years. The last time she flew back to Tuvalu was on September 11th 2001. Suliana, Paul and their three children were meant to be flying via America but were rerouted through Hong Kong. It's not the easiest place to reach at the best of times.

'When do you think you'll next go back?' I asked.

'When I win the lottery', she replied.

Suliana confirmed definitively that there are definitely NO TUVALUANS LIVING IN LONDON. There are three in her house (her niece and mother also live there at present), one in Scotland, one in Exeter and one in Sheffield - but that's it. Her cousin was also living in Cornwall but she's not there at the moment.

We also talked briefly about global warming, the subject for which Tuvalu is most (if not solely) known.

'If it's mentioned in the paper my workmates get excited and say 'have you seen what's happened? It's going to disappear! You should phone home and check your family's ok!' It's nice they are worried but they make it soundsso dramatic. I know what it's like. It's not really happening. Slowly, yes, the sea is coming. But the people there just don't want to move away...

Yes. I miss home.'

* Argh! Inci-dental-ly! I can't stop thinking about it...

No.187: Guinea-Bissau

2007-10-23T11:54:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 23rd October 2007

With only a day to go, I feel like I am inundated with non-working phone numbers for people from Guinea-Bissau. Finally, I have some luck with a number sent across by Jamie from the Mayor's office (oh yes, for this final week, we've got the big guns in).

I meet Nayanka at SOAS where she studies Politics and Development. Born in France, but the proud owner of joint Guinea-Bissau/Portuguese nationality, she is a suitably cosmopolitan person to allow us to reach the point where we can say that people from every African nation (more than a quarter of the world's countries) live in London. We've also met people from every European country, every country in the whole of the Americas (North, Central, South, Caribbean), and every country in Asia. After tomorrow, we hope we can say the same for the Middle East. It's just Oceania that's proving a little harder ...

No.186: Niger

2007-10-22T18:24:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 22nd October 2007

Ibrat from Uzbekistan knows I'm on the lookout for a person from Niger (a 'Nigerien', as I later learn - not to be confused with a 'Nigerian', somebody from Nigeria). He asks around at the BBC World Service where he works, and locates Elhadji, who works in the Hausa department.

Elhadji is now pretty settled in London, his family is here (including his third child, only five months old) and he's been at the BBC for nearly ten years. But journalism wasn't his first career - as he was good at science in school, the government gave him a scholarship to study Mining Engineering, in what was then Czechoslovakia at the end of the 1980s. "There weren't many other black Africans around," he says, "so it was sometimes quite difficult. London feels far more mixed and welcoming."

No.185: Gabon

2007-10-22T12:26:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 22nd October 2007

Michel came over from Gabon when he was eight, with his mum and younger brother. They moved to Newham - Michel had never seen snow or white people before, and couldn't understand why his mum was speaking this funny new language (they had grown up speaking French). Now, however, he thinks of himself as an East Londoner. Are you losing your sense of being Gabonese, I ask him? "I've lost it all together, if I'm being honest," he replies.

Michel became an uncle over the weekend.

No.184: Micronesia

2007-10-20T11:20:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 20th October 2007

You'll have to trust me on this one. I met a Micronesian, but I did it in a sneaky way and I feel worse about it than I did about meeting the man from Myanmar. So, no details yet ...

No.183: North Korea

2007-10-19T12:09:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 19th October 2007

Alex and I made a trip to New Malden last week, where we spoke to EunJung Lee, a (South) Korean lady who runs an educational consultancy. She thought that a teacher she knew may have had some North Korean students, and a few phone calls, emails, and days later, I'm back in New Malden, waiting for Denise to take me to her classroom.

Now, I promised Denise I would let her see my write-up of my meeting with her students, so all I can confirm here is, yes, I met not one, not two, but three people from the People's Democratic Republic of Korea, their names (as far as I am concerned) were Geraldine, Keith and John, and while a couple of them have seen Buckingham Palace, none of them have had afternoon tea with the Queen.

No.182: Sao Tome and Principe

2007-10-19T05:41:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 19th October 2007

Whilst working in a school in Ghana earlier in the year, my brother Mat happened to read an article by a lady called Maimouna Jallow who had moved from London to Sao Tome and Principe. You can read the article here.

On a whim, I guessed her email address, received one back pointing me to her actual address, and sent her a message pleading for help.

Within hours she'd put me in touch with her friend Conceicao. Within days I'd spent a fascinating and hugely enjoyable hour and a half with this former BBC World journalist, renowned poet and truly inspiring woman.

No. 181: Laos

2007-10-18T08:19:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 18th October 2007

Following a tip-off from a very helpful correspondent called Marc, I headed down to a pub called the Racing Page in Richmond this evening. The train was bursting with commuters. In fact, the only person in my carriage not wearing a suit and tie was the drunk-ish old-ish man next to me who spent most of the journey impressively listing the Eastern European countries who've most recently joined the EU and concluding that they should all return to their homelands because he hadn't invited them over here. He then looked at my yellow shoes and concluded that I'd almost certainly bought them in Oxfam. I didn't agree with him.

Toi presumed I was there to talk to his dad. 'He's quite a famous Laotian chef and artist', he explained. 'A lot of people come to talk to him about his recipes.' But I was more than happy to meet his son, a chatty 29 year old who'd arrived in the UK aged two and grew up in Worthing, just like my mum.

No.180: Lesotho

2007-10-17T11:43:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 17th October 2007

Refiloe is not in London entirely by choice. "In Lesotho, I was a qualified advocate - what you call a barrister. I practiced for a year and a half, it was great work. Then my partner got a job in London. We tried to make it work long distance, but it was hard. If it wasn't for her, I wouldn't have come."

He now works in the legal department of Camden Council, and is going to be taking a Masters next year in Compliance and Commercial Law, with a view to (one day) working back in Lesotho again. It's clear where Refiloe's heart is ("This is great!" he says at one point, "I never get the chance to talk about Lesotho like this, normally!") and he brings me up to speed with a detailed survey of Lesotho life.

Some facts about Lesotho:
1) The only country in the world that is ENTIRELY a kilometre or more above sea level.
2) One person from Lesotho is called a Mosotho (the plural is Basotho). The language is Sesotho.
3) Lesotho's motto is 'Peace, Rain, Prosperity'.
4) During the apartheid era, Lesotho (which is surrounded by South Africa) gave asylum to political activists, and provided education for those unable to receive it in South Africa.

No.179: Haiti

2007-10-16T08:08:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 16th October 2007

Both of Kathleen's parents are from Haiti. Indeed, all four of her grandparents are Haitian. But Kathleen herself has never actually lived there, having spent her first nine years in New York, the next nineteen in Montreal and then living in Miami before moving to London in 2004.

On a table outside the same Starbucks on Chancery Lane where I'd met Ohood from Bahrain three months earlier, we chatted merrily away about how different people view different nationalities. In Britain people think she's American, but in America people think she's Canadian. Nobody seems to know how to respond when she says she's from Haiti. 'I have no country!' she laughed.

It's hard to get the tone right in these brief blurbs but I should make it clear that this was a very upbeat conversation about race. She may not fit in to any easy category, but Kathleen has clearly enjoyed her life wherever it has taken her, this 'outsider' status a quirk not a burden.

Still, I did feel quite pleased with myself when, having pronounced her 'genetically Haitian' and eminently qualified to represent Haiti here, Kathleen smiled broadly and said, 'I love that'.

No.178: Kiribati

2007-10-16T06:16:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - October 16th

Kiribati is pronounced keery-pus. That's according to 62 year old Mr Maritino Burentawara (pronounced purentawara) who's now living in Sutton (yes, that is London, it's in the London Borough of Sutton). He's been a missionary and a headmaster in his time and has lived in Papua New Guinea and Australia as well as Kiribati and London. When he and his wife, whom he met while she was working for VSO on the islands, first came to the UK they stayed on the floor of her parents' farm in Scotland. 'That is the coldest part of this country', he told me.

No.177: Republic of the Congo

2007-10-15T08:33:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 15th October 2007

My dad found us Mr Pandzou after hearing his accent on the phone and demanding to know (purely because of this project of course) where he was from. They were chatting about a charity Mr Pandzou is running in Walthamstow, helping elderly people in the area go about their everyday lives. He is also trying to set up a charity in the Congo where the suffering, he told me, is unbelievable.

No.176: Cambodia

2007-10-14T08:38:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 14th October 2006

In the kitchen of her house in Hackney, Muyeng first soothed my rugby-inspired hangover with a cup of tea and a slice of moon cake then told me her moving and inspiring tale of fleeing Pol Pot and the Khymer Rouge through the Cambodian jungle to a refugee camp in Thailand. That was in 1983. After five more traumatic years she was finally taken to London, where she's lived with her family for the last nineteen years and where I also met her first grandson, a smiling six month old baby called Charlie.

No.175: Fiji

2007-10-13T08:51:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 13th October 2007

The UK's Fiji Independence Day celebrations this year took place in Aldershot. There I sung the national anthem, watched but didn't join in traditional dancing and eventually met Uncle Joe outside the army community centre cum traditiontal Fijian 'Fale' - whilst also attempting to get contacts for the likes of Kiribati and Tuvalu.

No.174: Maldives

2007-10-12T11:20:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 12th October 2007

Ismail is in his second stint in London. The first came as a student, firstly doing a degree in Biochemistry, then two years at the London Film School. I hover my pen over my notebook, trying to make the link. "I had no interest in Biochemistry," says Ismail. "My parents were keen for me to have something to fall back on, but now I feel it was wasted time. I always wanted to go into film or TV - in fact, I made short films even during my first degree."

He arrived back in London this year, after five years studying film and working in TV in Los Angeles. (If you've seen any of the US Big Brother, you may have seen some of Ismail's editing work). He's now looking to move away from the 'reality' genre into more narrative work.

He goes back to the Maldives regularly to see friends and family (many of his friends are in Sri Lanka, where he went to school). While he was there in 2004, his plane was on a runway when the tsunami hit. "Things were a lot worse elsewhere, further south. But the runway flooded, and we were stranded for twelve hours. I remember I'd felt the earthquake earlier in the day - I'd felt a few in LA - but this went on for over a minute."

No.173: Chad

2007-10-11T13:22:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 11th October 2007

'Everybody who has left Chad wants to go back soon', Theo told me. 'We're not rich - in fact we're one of the poorest countries in the world - but we just love our country.' Theo himself is no exception. Having completed his LPC he's now working for the Brixton Legal Centre whilst applying for a training contract. 'That is my purpose here - to be qualified as a business sollicitor. My ultimate aim is to have a practise back home. That is my dream.'

No.172: Swaziland

2007-10-11T11:08:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 11th October 2007

"One of the first thing I bought when I moved here five years ago was a fishing rod," says Tracey-Ann. "I'm a proper farm girl, I'm outdoorsy, I can't quite get used to the pace of urban life. Walking down a street when everyone's got umbrellas up - that's a mission."

Despite that, Tracey-Ann works in the heart of London, in the Treasury in Whitehall. "I always say to the guys I work with - Look where you work! It's amazing! Some of them don't appreciate all the building and the architecture like I do - I love working here." Compared to the work culture in South Africa, where Tracey-Ann previously worked, she finds British people friendly and less macho.

"My favourite place in London is Camden." Tracey-Ann starts to laugh. "I took my dad there when he came over, and we just wandered around looking at all the freaky people. By the end of the day, I had bruised ribs from all the times he had nudged me."

No.171: Djibouti

2007-10-11T01:31:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 11th October 2007

Following up the last of Philippe Sibelly's leads I trudged pessimistically up to the Argos on Kilburn High Street where, four years before, a man called Hufane from Djibouti was working. I asked the security guard if he knew anyone called Hufane. He shook his head, pointed at the customer service desk and went back to looking for shoplifters (not an easy crime in an Argos). After the man in front of me had returned a faulty iron, I asked again about Hufane. 'Hufane?' they replied. 'Hufane' I said (proncouncing it hu-fan).

'Hufane from Djibouti', I presisted.

A pause.

'Ah!' they eventually replied, suddenly enthusaistic. 'You mean D J Hufane! (pronounced hu-fay-nay) Hang on - I'll see if he's upstairs...'.

I hung on and he was.

No.170: Nicaragua

2007-10-10T23:51:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 10th October 2007

Ada is a beauty therapist living and working in South Kensington, which she describes as like "a village - it's very friendly and you know most of your neighbours." In fact, her Italian neighbour pops into the cafe where we're chatting, and suggests that Ada and her Swiss husband Nicolas go out for a rum and coke later.

"The sad part of London," says Ada, "is that although you meet lots of new people, you also lose them. People move on quite a lot, they don't tend to stay."

No.169: Libya

2007-10-10T13:46:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 10th October 2007

Sara Nashnush has one of my favourite surnames of the project so far. She told me it was a big family name back in Tripoli. She herself moved to London when she was just a year and two thirds old (well, her family brought her really) but she did live in Libya for a year in 1993. 'That made me feel a bit more connected to my family and friends', she told me. 'But being Libyan in London has never been an issue for me. I've got my own culture and religion alongside my London life but I don't ever really think about it. Maybe that's because of London. I don't have to think about it here because it's such a multicultural city.'

No.168: Papua New Guinea

2007-10-09T15:03:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 10th October 2007

Papua New Guinea gained its independence in September 1975, and Nick was born there in November 1975, making him probably one of the oldest official Papuans that you could ever hope to find. He grew up speaking pidgin, but at the age of five went to live in his parents' original homeland of Australia.

Now working as a consultant in London, he likes exploring the obscurer places in the capital. "Whenever my friends come here they tell me I should write a guidebook," he says.

No.167: Suriname

2007-10-09T13:53:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 9th October 2007

Rachel thinks she could be the only person in London with an actual Suriname passport. Most people who emigrate tend to either live in the Netherlands or get a Dutch passport.

She's also the only person in London to have ever given me a calendar of herself.

Rachel is a model. A very successful model. And a TV presenter and a DJ and an actor and a writer and she speaks four languages and is learning Japanese. She's also setting up a charity back in Suriname. That's where the calendar comes in...

No.166: Mauritania

2007-10-09T09:05:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 9th October 2007

Ignoring an 'Area Closed' sign, Gibril took me to the top floor of the MacDonalds in Wembley and told me all about the third biggest country in Africa. He was a passionate man wearing a white suit, a white t-shirt and a black woolly hat.

Like almost all former French colonies, his is a country suffering from deeply ingrained corruption. We spoke for about an hour.

'I have told you what I believe, what I see, what I believe is right,' he said before we parted.

No.165: Cote D'Ivoire

2007-10-08T16:52:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 8th October 2007

Everyone calls Huberson 'Drogba' because he's from Cote D'Ivoire (the Ivory Coast) and looks a tiny bit like Didier Drogba, the frustratingly gifted Chelsea striker. Huberson has actually met Drogba a number of times and says he's a nice man who devotes a lot of his time and money to charity.

Huberson himself, meanwhile, is planning to return to Africa next year. 'I was at university with someone who is the Prime Minister now', he told me. 'Now it's time for me to go back home and be useful to my family.'

No.164: Botswana

2007-10-08T10:58:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 8th October 2007

I met our Botswanan on the 29th floor of the Euston Tower. It was the highest of our encounters so far.

Kabelo works for an engineering consultancy firm called Atkins that employs over 16,000 people - more than the entire population of both Tuvalu and Nauru.

Despite spending what he describes as 'the most important years' of his life in London, he still can't stand the weather here.

No.163: Solomon Islands

2007-10-08T07:03:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 8th October 2007

Arriving in London just two weeks ago, Father Ben has so far found his experience rather confusing. 'Most people can't speak English!', he told me with a genuine look of bewilderment on his face. 'I sit on the bus and can't understand anything. Especially the domestic workers. This surprised me. I always thought people spoke English in London!'

Sent here as part of a staff development programme by his church on Malaita in the Solomon Islands, Father Ben is here to study anthropology. One day he will return to work as a tutor and lecturer along side his job as a priest.

On his first trip to a church in St Martin-in-the-Fields he was amazed both by the number of Chinese people and the lack of young people in the congregation.

No.162: Barbados

2007-10-05T10:43:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 5th October 2007

Sometimes Alex and I get encouraging emails from people. (We also get lots of emails that say, "Why don't you try embassies?" even though we're pretty clear about not trying embassies). One of the most encouraging, recently, came from a teacher called Michael who told us that he was using our blog as a way to teach Citizenship to his GCSE class, which we found incredibly flattering. Oh, he added, would we like to meet Rashad from year 10 who was originally from Barbados? And would I like to travel on a tram for the first time in my life?

Sometimes you just have to say, 'Yes, please.'

To get to Addington High School, I had to travel on a bus, a tube, a train and, most excitingly of all, a tram. The school is so far from central London that the phone number doesn't even begin '020'. But it is definitely in London, and Rashad is definitely a Londoner. He left Barbados aged twelve, three years ago, and the kind of lifestyle that meant he "swam in the sea every day after school. Oh, and on Saturdays too." He's going back at Christmas to see family (he's the grandson of famous West Indies cricket umpire, Lloyd Barker, and a cousin of recent fast bowler Tino Best).

No.161: Samoa

2007-10-05T10:23:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 5th October 2007

Pele lived in Samoa until she was twelve, when her father was appointed as the Samoan ambassador the US, and the family moved to Washington for three years. "I had never seen an escalator before," notes Pele. "Oh, and I got to meet the first President Bush."

Later on, she studied Chemical Enginering in Melbourne, and managed oil distribution centres all around the Pacific - Fiji, the Cook Islands, New Zealand. Often, she was in charge of a dozen or so oil workers in an installation in the middle of nowhere. "Some of the men had children who were older than me," she says. "Sometimes it took a year to bring them round."

Then, an epiphany. "I sold everything, packed my whole life into two boxes and a suitcase, left the boxes at my sister's house, and came to London. I don't regret quitting my job. It's not about money - it's about looking back at 60 and seeing what experiences you've had."

See Pele's blog here.

No.160: Andorra

2007-10-04T12:02:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 4th October 2007

Kim is our final European, proving that at least one continent is completely represented in London. Like every Andorran, he speaks fluent French, Spanish and Catalan, but also English as well, having been in the UK since arriving at prep school aged seven.

No.159: Dominica

2007-10-04T09:51:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 4th October 2007

Wayne, another of Milena's friends (although he's technically her boss) is a very very fast young man. "Four or five years ago," he says, "while I was still training, I could run 100 metres in 10.93." My eyes goggle. That's pretty swift.

He moved from Dominica when he was two, and doesn't feel any lasting connection to his place of birth. "If I reach 100, you know, only 2% of my life will have been spent in Dominica. I'm a Londoner now."

No.158: Madagascar

2007-10-03T18:59:00.000Z

James Bond and a Baby

Alex Horne - 3rd October 2007

This morning, for the first time, I felt a tiny bit pessimistic about our task. Three weeks to go and thirty five countries to find is not a great equation. We do have leads for about twenty of those nationalities but several of them seem to be going cold and we’ve got no clue at all how to find someone from Palau, the Marshall Islands or Haiti.

So what I’m saying is, if you’re reading this and you think you can help, please get in touch. Soon. And if you’re living in Palau, the Marshall Islands or Haiti and you’re thinking about moving to London, go for it.

My spirits were lifted, however, by a coffee with two people from Madagascar (now, I know they’re called Malagasy people but I still don’t know whether they’re called Madagascans or Malagasians – I’ll stick to ‘people from Madagascar’ for now) who reminded me that even if we don’t find someone from every country in the world, we’ve certainly had an awful lot of fun trying.

I met Vaonarivo (a traditional Malagasy name) and Eric (a traditional French name – ish; it definitely came from the French colonisers anyway ) in one of the Starbuckses on Fleet Street. As usual I went to the wrong one first but they eventually found me, I accidentally bought three enormous hot drinks and we got down to business, starting, as so often, with a faux pas from me:

‘So you two are married, aren’t you?’

They shook their heads and giggled at my mistake.

‘Oh no’, explained Eric, ‘we’re neighbours!’

‘Yes. Good’, I said, recovering well. ‘Neighbours here in London?’

‘Oh no’, Eric repeated. ‘We were neighbours back in Madagascar, in the capital, Antananarivo, (would anyone have got that?) but we didn’t come here together. We didn’t even know the other one was here. I’d been here for six months, went into the consulate where Vao was working and thought, ‘hang on, I know you!’ After being on my own for so long it was great!’

I like stories like that (see Azerbaijan for another). And if you’re thinking, ‘She works in a consulate! She’s ineligible!’ well done for paying attention, but don’t worry, the consulate shut six months ago and we didn’t set foot anywhere near it. Everything’s ok.

While Eric came to the UK to study (he’s on the verge of completing an MBA funded by relentless 6am shifts at one of those EAT cafes) Vao came to be with her English husband. ‘We met in Madagascar’, she told me a little shyly. ‘We came here for six months to see if I liked living in London, went back to get married in Madagascar then came back to stay here in December 2000. And now I’m pregnant!’ She patted her modest bump as she said this last sentence. I’m a bloke so hadn’t noticed. But I’m a broody bloke so got quite excited.

‘Brilliant!’ I said, a little too loudly, ‘and how pregnant are you?’ (not quite the right terminology but a good effort). ‘Twenty two weeks’, replied Vao, smiling broadly now. We all agreed it was an exciting time. And I decided that after eleven months of searching I was now meeting two and a quarter people from Madagascar in one go and that this was also exciting news.

Eric is actually planning to go back home fairly soon. He’s been away from home since 1999, spending two weeks in Kenya, two months in Ethiopia and two years in Tunisia before finally arriving in London. ‘It’s tough living in here as a foreigner’, he told me. ‘It’s difficult to get the papers to work legally now. There’s a sort of employment hierarchy with British people first, Europe second, the Commonwealth third then people like us at the bottom. And it costs us £500 to renew our visas every year. It used to be free. But that’s a lot of money’.

I agreed and asked if most people he’d met here knew where Madagascar was. He smiled. ‘Not really. People often say, ‘Madagascar, wow! I didn’t know there were people there!’ (there are, in fact 18 million people there). But they’ve heard of it now, thanks to the cartoon*’. He kept smiling. ‘That was great actually. We got to go to the premiere, it was a lot of fun’.

‘And we went to the premiere of the new James Bond as well’, chimed in Vao enthusiastically. ‘Really?’ I said, genuinely jealous. ‘Yes, well I helped with the film. There was a scene that was meant to be set in Madagascar but they filmed it in the Bahamas so my job was to go back home and take pictures of the buildings and people which they could use to make it more realistic. Then when they’d filmed it we went into the studio and recorded Malagasy voices so that they could use them instead of the Bahamian ones...’

‘So you were in James Bond?’ I asked incredulously. ‘I must have heard you in James Bond!’

‘Yes!’ they both replied. ‘There are some advantages to being part of a small community in another country’.

I wondered if they could recognize other Malagasy on looks alone. ‘Oh no’, said Eric. ‘We all look quite different. People have said I look Brazilian, Ethiopian, Malaysian and Arabic. We’re quite a mix ethnically.’ (Eric, by the way, is 29 years old, just nine days older than myself, but looks enviably youthful. Just last week, in fact, he was turned down twice, first trying to buy cigarettes in a shop then beer in a pub. Vao and I were both quite jealous about this).

‘But we could recognise each other by whistling’, Eric continued. ‘By whistling?’ I asked. ‘Yes, whistling’, he replied, patient and amused. ‘I don’t know why but we all know a certain whistle, ever since we were little’. I asked him to demonstrate. ‘I can’t whistle while I’m laughing!’ he said, before composing himself. He then did the whistle. It was a good whistle. Much better than our unofficial national whistle of the wolf variety.

Vao too was full of surprises. Not only had she bagged herself a speaking part in an iconic British film, she was also the producer of a soap opera back in Madagascar (‘it was called Sarivolana – it was a bit like The Archers’) and is now one of the main organisers behind ‘Madagascar on Thames’ a group dedicated to celebrating Madagascar’s culture in London. I was gutted to have missed their inaugural event just ten days earlier (an enormous party on an enormous boat with an enormous barbecue) but will keep my eyes on www.mada-on-thames.co.uk for future get-togethers (do have a look at the site for some great pictures and cracking facts. Madagascar, for example, is the world’s fourth biggest island. Good fact. Can you name the three bigger?).

Vao was keen and proud to promote her homeland. ‘It’s a hidden paradise’, she said. ‘There aren’t many tourists and you don’t hear much about it over here. Except for vanilla. The best vanilla is from Madagascar.’ ‘And the prawns’, added Eric. ‘The jumbo prawns’. ‘That’s right’, laughed Vao. ‘In the Marks and Spencers’ adverts they always say, ‘these aren’t just prawns, they’re Madagascan Jumbo prawns’ or ‘this isn’t just ice cream, it’s ice cream made with vanilla from Madagascar!’ She did the voice too. It was very funny. Eric and I laughed a lot. It was a lovely encounter. And I can’t wait for the next thirty four.

* A 2005 Dreamworks film which, according to wikipedia, ‘tells the story of four Central Park Zoo animals who have spent their lives in blissful captivity and are unexpectedly shipped back to Africa, getting shipwrecked on the island of Madagascar. The voices of Ben Stiller, Jada Pinkett Smith, Chris Rock and David Schwimmer are featured.’

No.157: Central African Republic

2007-10-01T09:43:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 1st October 2007

Amandine's a friend of Doundosy's, living in the same building. They said hello one night, and Doundosy heard the French accent and introduced himself. Now he's helping her find a new job (she works evenings as a cleaner at the moment, while learning English during the day). It's the only interview so far that I attempt to do entirely in French! It doesn't go that well - I keep using "tu" instead of "vous" and Amandine starts giggling. Neverthless, I do manage to discover her age (22) and where she lives (London).

No.156: Myanmar

2007-09-28T16:06:00.000Z

Jo Brand in the rain

Owen Powell - 28th September 2007

I sort of hate myself. I’ve come to the protest outside the Burmese embassy to try to find someone from Burma for our project.

Burma (or Myanmar) is in meltdown. People are being shot in the streets, monks and students are risking their lives in the name of freedom, and the international community is definitely thinking about planning to do something about it. In Mayfair, a crowd of protestors, some journalists, me, and Jo Brand are shuffling about on a side-street under a dirty autumnal London sky, getting slowly drenched. Just when I’m plucking up the courage to ask someone if I can speak to them, a man grabs a megaphone and starts to sing. Everybody (except me and the journalists and Jo Brand – I think she’s here with Amnesty) joins in, men with red bandanas punching the air.

In the break between the second and third songs, which get more and more rousing, a builder on his fag break next door says, a bit too loudly, “Give it a rest!” Even if it’s meant somehow ironically, which I somehow doubt, it’s still one of the most repellent things I’ve heard in recent weeks. Maybe no-one else hears, certainly no-one reacts, and after he finishes his cigarette he goes back inside again. To my immense shame, its main effect is to make me feel a lot better about what I’m doing. I’m here! I think. I’m in the crowd! I’m protesting, just by my very presence. I’m protesting in the rain! And, in a minute, if I pluck up the courage, I’m going to speak to a Burmese person and ask them about what’s going on, which is probably a lot more than most people I know would do. I almost feel virtuous, despite the nagging doubt that I’m here on false pretences.

Once the songs and speeches are over, I notice several other (for want of a better word) white people come out from under doorways and begin thrusting cameras, microphones and notebooks at some of the protestors. Ah, I think, it’s fine! It’s a public demonstration, so they probably want attention. I’ll just act a bit like a journalist, and it’ll be ok. (Some of the journalists have laminated badges that say ‘PRESS’ on them. I don’t. I don’t even have an umbrella).

I ask one man, who had been singing particularly lustily, and he points out another man who might be more prepared to talk, who sends me over to another man. I begin by saying, “I’m writing a book about London and all the nationalities there are in it,” which is neither grammatically or ethically very satisfying, but he’s happy to speak, so we go over and cower in a doorway. His name is Ye.

I start by asking about the protest. “We’ve been here since the monks began marching in Burma,’ he says, “since 18th September. We have also protested in Parliament Square, and outside the Chinese Embassy.” Another song starts, and I get the impression Ye wants to join in, so I ask him about it. “It is a song from 1988, after the uprising then. It was a big thing. I was in High School, and we got involved in the demonstrations. Since then, we have tried to keep protesting, peacefully.” Ye has been in the UK for five years, but still has family back in Rangoon. “I spoke to someone this morning,” he says, “and they are still firing on the crowds.”

A policeman, very politely, asks us if we wouldn’t mind moving out of the doorway onto the street, as people are trying to get into their offices. It’s all very English and nice, although some of his colleagues are carrying machine guns. We shuffle back into the rain, and my pen and notepad start to stick to each other. I vow to remember what Ye is saying rather than write it down, which isn’t hard as it’s pretty fiery stuff. “The situation in Burma is worse than Iraq!” he says. “The regime there believes in Command, Order, Hatred and Fear. They believe that all problems must be sorted out with weapons. They are killing monks! You know, these are peaceful people. And it is not just monks and students, there is a big alliance against the regime. Civil servants as well, people from all backgrounds are protesting. You know, we had elections in 1990, and within ninety days, lots of the candidates were in jail. All we want is democracy but the regime are not interested in that. The government don’t treat people as people, they treat them as the enemy.”

On a banner being held nearby, I see a face I recognise and a name I cannot pronounce. I point to it. “What about Aung San Suu Kyi?” I ask. (You can imagine me pronouncing it correctly, if that helps). “What is the latest news about her?” Ye looks downcast. “We think she is back in prison,” he says. “She has been under house arrest for years, but we have heard that two days ago, she was taken away from her home.” In the 1990 elections, Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy Party won 392 of the 492 seats, which should have been enough to install her as Prime Minister. Instead, she is the only winner of the Nobel Peace Prize to be currently under detention, as she has been for the majority of the time since the election seventeen years ago.

I ask Ye what can be done internationally as a solution to the ongoing crisis. He looks a bit cynical. “The government in Burma can only get away with this because they have the backing of China. And the US want to keep a good relationship with China, so they only pay lip service to the idea of doing something. We are in a difficult position, on the borders of India and China, where there is 40% of the world’s population, but it seems that nobody wants to help us.”

The songs start up again, and I thank Ye for his time (after finding out that he lives in Cricklewood). The rain doesn’t seem to affect the ongoing demonstrations, but I scurry off – I have to be home by two so that I can show the new Polish cleaner around.

No.155: Egypt

2007-09-27T09:35:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 27th September 2007

Milena, from Bulgaria, has introduced us to more people than anyone else, I'm pretty sure of that. One of her work colleagues, she excitedly told us in an email, was an Egyptian who had once been kidnapped. Well, we had to find out more ...

I interview Shaka sitting in his van, as he zooms round West London on his evening London Lite run (picking up the merchandisers stalls and umbrellas). He was indeed born in Egypt, although his parents were from Sierra Leone - a country he returned to when he was quite young. Shaka's story is a bit too complicated to go into here, but it's worth saying that the kidnapping story is true, and also that Shaka gave me a lift home in the van after his shift finished.

No.154: Tonga

2007-09-27T07:20:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 27th September 2007

Tomorrow Tonga is going to watch the crucial England vs Tonga rugby world cup match at home on the sofa. He's nervous already. He says he can't enjoy games in a crowded pub because he gets extremely passionate about his rugby.

Tonga, I should explain, is both the name and country of origin of our Tongan representative. A bit like Israel from Spain but even more confusing.

I should also say that Tonga himself is a renowned rugby player. When I met him he was wearing his London Irish training top and shorts. We were the only people sitting outside the incongrous walled garden cafe where we met. He was the only one not wearing trousers.

I'm sure when I come to write this up properly I'll use the phrase Gentle Giant at some point.

No.153: Burundi

2007-09-26T08:09:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 26th September 2007

I met Berenice with Jim, her Glaswegian future father-in-law, outside a Cafe Nero in Enfield. Neither Jim nor I had ever been to Enfield before.

After her obligatory military service in 1998, Berenice went to university in Burundi's capital Bujumburu. A year and a half into the course the university was closed down on account of the massacres taking place across the country. After being sent to a private university she then joined the socialist party, attended various demonstrations and was eventually jailed for two weeks. At this point her parents became extremely worried about her future and sent her to Europe.

Unfortunately for Berenice, she first went to Belgium, Burundi's former coloniser. 'I didn't like the Burundi community there', she told me. 'They stick so closely together. Many people don't even speak French. I didn't feel comfortable'.

She therefore spent a thousand euros (my old computer doesn't seem to have the symbol for euros), bought some papers ('it was really quite dodgy', she said) and made her way to Calais where the authorities looked at these dodgy papers and sent her right back to Brussels.

A month later she managed to persuade a Burundian friend of hers who'd been born in Belgium to lend her her Belgian passort and tried again. This time it worked. She was waved through and finally found refuge and a fiancee in Glasgow.

She recently finished her teacher training degree at Middlesex University and is applying for British citizenship in December.

No.152: Belize

2007-09-25T11:54:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 25th September 2007

The first recipient of the MBE we have met, Errollyn is an internationally-performed award-winning composer and songwriter. She takes inspiration from anywhere, even the noise of the cafe staff bashing the coffee pots around. "That might pop up later in a piece," she says.

Live shows.

2007-09-24T16:50:00.000Z

.
Hello everybody!

Real quicky: as the project reaches its exciting last few weeks, we're going to be doing a weekly show at the Soho Theatre on Dean Street. The shows start on Monday 24th September and run weekly until Monday 22nd October. There's more information here.

If you're from a country we haven't yet found, then you can get to see the show FOR FREE! Email us on worldinonecity@hotmail.com to claim your tickets.

Keep checking the blog for more details about the show.

No.151: Rwanda

2007-09-21T12:06:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 21st September 2007

Mary runs SURF, the Survivors Fund for Rwandans who lived through the 1994 genocide. The organisation recently raised funds for a memorial centre in Rwanda where people's testimonies and stories can be recorded.

No.150: Togo

2007-09-21T11:19:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 21st September

Alexis, who lives and works (as a physiotherapist) near Twickenham, was a keen footballer when younger, and was picked in the Togo squad for the under 16s World Cup. "I was a thinker on the ball," he says. "I'd come off the pitch totally clean."

No.149: Saudi Arabia

2007-09-20T16:26:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 20th September 2007

At six foot five, Hussein is so far the tallest of our representatives. He was also one of the most relaxed.

When we met he was waiting to start a new job at KPMG so was happy to spend time telling me about a country that has no rivers or lakes and where a quarter of the population are foreign. 'If you trace the origins of the people in Jeddah', he told me, 'you won't find any Saudi people. There are a lot of expat workers, people from Iraq, Yemen, India, Sudan, Malta, Syria, Uzbekistan... In fact the El Saud Royal Family are the only actual Saudi family.'

No.148: Ecuador

2007-09-20T12:38:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 20th September 2007

'People from our country like travelling', Christian told me. 'You'll find us anywhere in the world - even Alaska!'

During what turned out to be a tutorial in Ecuadorian history and geography, he also told me about the Chaskis, Ecuador's traditional postmen who delivered mail back in 1000AD before the wheel had reached South America. Travelling on foot, these runners would rest in tambos dotted along the way between Quito and Cotopaxi. When he's saved up enough money here in London, Christian plans to recreate fourteen of these hostels to provide shelter for the cyclists that now follow in the Chaskis' footsteps. 'That is my life goal', he said. 'There will be health service for emergencies, mechanical aid, solar cells and ecological eduation. This is my project. I think of nothing else.'

No.147: St Vincent and the Grenadines

2007-09-20T08:48:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 20th September 2007

Gus left the Caribbean to join his parents in Essex when he was thirteen years old. That was about 1978 and his family was one of just two black families in the area. It was then that he made a conscious decision not to worry about what he has no control over.

In January he landed a job working for the Hong Kong government, effectively selling the island to the British. 'I didn't think I'd get it', he told me. 'I thought to myself, I'm clearly not from Hong Kong! But maybe that's a good thing for them. It says, 'we're international'. I guess it shows forward thinking.'

* St Vincent and the Grenadines, by the way, is the country whose name sounds most like a band.

No.146: Bhutan

2007-09-18T20:39:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 18th September 2007

Thinley's father hasn't yet visited her in London. 'I'd love him to come', she told me. 'He's a contractor and he loves architecture. I work in Southwark so I cross Blackfriars Bridge every day and see Parliament and the Tate Modern. London is a very beautiful city.'

She thinks there are only ten Bhutanese in London. I liked the fact that I was sitting at a table with a tenth of London's Bhutanese population. We discussed Buddhism, beggars and her forthcoming marriage. But mostly we talked about football.

Like me, Thinley is a Liverpool fan. We're both quite impressed with Benayhun. Neither of us can believe Heskey's playing for England again. She said that if I can get her a ticket to Liverpool vs Tottenham (my dad's a spurs fan...) I can come to her wedding in Bhutan.

No.145: Tajikistan

2007-09-18T19:08:00.000Z

The Roof of the World

Owen Powell - 18th September 2007

I'm sitting in the front room of a terraced house in suburban Ilford. It's about as normal and English as you could get (on the bus, I went past fourteen consecutive streets with the suffix " – Gardens"). But above me, over the door, is a vast portrait of stern but warm-looking presidential figure, pen poised to sign a decree, and over by the window is a huge red, green and white flag. Most of the books on the shelves have titles in what looks like some kind of Arabic or Persian script, and the smell of some exotic cooking drifts in from further into the house.

A man I know only as Latif comes back in from moving his car. "My name is not Latif," he says, shaking my hand. "I am Behzad." He nods down the hall. "She is cooking," he says, and wafts his hand in front of his face while smiling broadly.

Behzad sits, and looks momentarily worried. "How long will this take?" he asks. "It's just that I have to pick some of my kids up from school." I say, perhaps slightly disappointed, that we can do it in ten minutes. I try to get the basics established pretty swiftly.

Behzad came to London from Tajikistan nine years ago, with his wife and two young children, and they have had two more since then (the kids range in age from twelve to six, and the eldest, who I meet, says that she doesn't remember much about her pre-London life). He's a TFL-registered minicab driver, studies English and IT in his spare time, and is considering applying for a British passport soon, although he's been granted indefinite leave to remain. But he's itching to tell me more about Tajikistan.

"We have a very strong culture. We are a very new country, but also very ancient." I ask about the books, and also notice some inscriptions hanging in frames on the wall. "It is Persian," he says, "like in Iran and Afghanistan. It is my main language, but I also speak Russian. Some people use Sanskrit." Behzad shifts in his seat, and his eyes light up. "Tajikistan is a wonderful country! Full of mountains - we call our land 'The Roof of the World'! If you go there, you will find the people are very kind, very ... what is the word? Like 'hostage', or 'hostile'?" Hospitable, I suggest? "Yes. Very friendly." He glances at his watch and makes a face. "Ah. I must go to pick up my kids. Where are you going?" Umm, I say ... back to the station? "I will give you a lift. We can talk more in the car. Come on!"

Behind the wheel, where I guess Behzad spends most of his working day, he really opens up. "I will tell you everything about Tajikistan!" he announces, as he pulls away from the kerb. Taxi drivers probably have an unfair press as far as their opinions on religion and culture go, but even the most enlightened is likely to compare quite badly to Behzad.

"I am a Zoroastrian," he says. "You have heard of this?" (I nod, slightly unsurely. My brother, fascinated by religion, has mentioned it once or twice to me, I think). "It is an ancient religion. Four thousand years old. Before Moses. In all other religions, God is a man – the bible says 'He did this' or 'He did that'. In Zoroastrianism, God is both man and woman. Men and women are equal!” Behzad holds his fingers up. “There are also six angels, three men and three women. One for every day of the week, and God for the seventh day. In these other new religions like Judaism, they say there are seven days because that’s how long it took God to make the world.” Behzad puts his indicator on and turns left. “They made this up.”

I’m desperately scribbling away, loving how Behzad (partly with tongue in cheek, it must be admitted) dismisses Judaism as a “new” religion, and I don’t really have to ask any questions.

“In Tajik culture, men and women are the same. In English, you have different words for ‘he’ and ‘she’, but in Tajik we have one word for both. Now, this is true also in the Georgian language, but that is mainly because it is a poor language without many words. In Tajik, it is because we see men and women as one thing. Everything is logical. In English, you have ‘husband’ and ‘wife’.” We’re sitting in traffic, and Behzad holds up a finger from each hand to illustrate how far apart these words are. “There is no connection. In my language, it is the same word.” He brings his fingers together. “Hansa. My wife is my hansa, and I am her hansa. Han-sa. It means, ‘same-head’. It means, once you have your hansa, you share your brain, you have the same mind.” Behzad laughs. “It’s a good idea, yes?”

I’m still scribbling, my notebook a mess of ideas and religions and half-heard, phonetically spelt words. Behzad looks over at me, perhaps having his doubts about whether I am really a writer (or, more fundamentally, whether I am really interviewing him). “If you do not ask me a question,” he playfully admonishes, “I will ask one myself! What do Zoroastrians believe in? Well, there are three parts to our religion: good thoughts, good words, good deeds. We do not want to kill unbelievers, do suicide bombings, it is a religion of peace, very thoughtful. If a Christian has a child, or a Muslim has a child, that child is Christian or Muslim. In our culture, we cannot understand that. It is a child! When they get to sixteen, seventeen years old, then they can choose which religion they want. But nothing is forced. We never say, ‘You have to do this, or that’.”

“I worry about the Muslim religion. In my country, you are free to worship how you want. We have churches, temples, mosques. People are free. But in Arabic countries – more restrictions. In some countries, women are not allowed to drive!” Behzad hits his steering wheel, incredulously. “There are lots of Tajik people in the north of Afghanistan, where it is peaceful. In the south, that is where the violence is.” I think at this point, my face betrays the fact that (despite some research) I don’t really know where Tajikistan is. Behzad leads me carefully through the history of the Tajiks.

“The Tajik people were first called ‘Tajik’ eight hundred years ago,” he explains. “It is an ancient land, on the border of Russian, Persia, China and Afghanistan. I was in Uzbekistan recently, and there, there are many millions of Tajik people, but the government has forced them to change their names in their passports – they are scared to speak the Persian language. I was in Samarqand, and I looked around – no Persian newspapers or books. They don’t want the Tajik people to understand that they are Tajik. I tried to take a Persian book with me, and the police told me to throw it away or I could not travel any further. I said, ‘If you give me the whole of Uzbekistan, I will not put this book in the bin.’ In my culture, books are very precious. You do not throw them in the bin.”

Behzad has travelled home to Tajikistan over the years, although not as often as he would like as there are no direct flights and it’s very expensive. I ask if he has seen many changes in the last few years. “Yes! Things are getting much better,” he says. “The new President has made things better.” The man in the photograph, I say? “Yes. A very intelligent man who likes his culture very much.” Behzad looks out of the window as we crawl through East London. “It would be good to make more links between Tajikistan and Britain. The government should encourage more students to come here. And – more than anything – you in Britain should visit my country. There is lots to see!”

The lights were waiting at turn green, and Behzad zooms off, excitedly. “The Christmas tree! You live in a Christian culture, but no-one knows why you decorate a tree at Christmas. It is a Tajik custom! The father of the Persian language was Tajik! Everything in the world – anything of any importance – can be linked back, traced back to Tajikistan! Here. We are at Stratford.” He pulls over and I get out, my head spinning. “Anything else you need – you want to talk about religion, culture, anything – come and see me again. Goodbye! It was nice to meet you!” Me too, I say, me too, as Behzad drives off to pick up his kids.

No.144: Monaco

2007-09-18T19:07:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 18th September 2007

When I asked Pierre whereabouts in Monaco he used to live I stupidly said, 'by the sea?'

'Of course', he replied patiently. 'Right by the heliport.'

I think he noticed my tiny gasp.

'It's not all luxury there though! People think it's all beautiful cars, beautiful people and casinos. But there are lots of normal people too - lots of industry and businesses.'

Pierre now works in almost-as-glamorous Mayfair in the Monaco tourist office but recently spent six months at the University of Hull. 'They do a very good business course', he told me diplomatically.

There are just 36,000 Monegasques in the world so Pierre was a cracking find. I spent most of our chat smiling broadly and telling him he was a cracking find. In return he furnished me with this tremendous flag fact: Monaco has the same flag as Indonesia - they're the only two countries who share insignia (Poland, of course, is the same but the other way round).

No.143: Cuba

2007-09-18T16:59:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 18th September

A friend of Helder from Mozambique, Reinaldo is very cool indeed. He plays the bass guitar. He ordered an espresso. He's 52 years old. 'I live just for the music', he told me. 'I play everything - jazz, salsa, Brazilian.' He invited me to his next gig this coming Sunday at No.1 Poetry Street by Bank Station. I said I'd do my best but realistically I doubt I'll make it. Going out late on a Sunday night? At my age? I don't think I could stand his pace.

No.142: Timor-Leste

2007-09-18T04:37:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 18th September

I didn't know a lot about Timor-Leste before embarking on this project. In fact, I didn't even know that Timor-Leste is the official name for East Timor. I also didn't know that after gaining independence from Portugal in 1975 it was immediately invaded by Indonesia with just a little help from the USA or that it regained independence just eight years ago after a UN-sponsored referendum.

Vito told me all that. He was there when the fleeing militia bombed Timorese houses in 1999 and he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder for years afterwards. Now, however, he wants to focus on the positive. 'It's a beautiful place, he told me, 'and once everything's settled, Timor will be one of the most outstanding countries in the world.'

Here in London he is frustated by the lack of Timorese ingredients when it comes to cooking. He went to B&Q but couldn't find the right sort of bamboo.

No.141: Slovenia

2007-09-17T09:29:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 17th September 2007

Vid is possibly the second most famous philosopher from Slovenia. (Slavoj Zizek, something of a cult figure, is probably the first). Vid's fame came before he was even a philosopher, however, as when he was still a teenager he appeared as an improvisational comic actor on Slovenia's leading tak show for adolescents, 'The Youth Relay'. "I got recognised once or twice in the streets," he says, modestly. Now a post-graduate philosophy student, he's planning a PhD while doing work experience writing for Time Out.

No.140: Turkmenistan

2007-09-15T14:05:00.000Z

An Englishman, Kyrgyzstani Lady and Turkmenistani Lady Go into a Kebab Shop…

Alex Horne - September 15th 2007

I went to a friend’s belated birthday party in Kensal Green tonight and had a couple of drinks. My wife had generously offered to drive us home and for nearly all the hour-long journey back to Chesham I, apparently, waxed lyrical about this project, saying, at length, how great it was to meet all these people and how honoured, in particular, I was to have become friends with Mariam. I’ll now try to recreate that eulogy, albeit with a touch more coherence, in this entry.

Mariam, from Kyrgyzstan, had got in touch recently to say that after a busy couple of weeks she’d now got time to help us find people from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – not the sort of offer Owen and I were going to refuse in a hurry. So this morning, fairly early for a Saturday, I made my way up to Wood Green, North London, where she was already waiting for me.

And it was great to see her again. As she guided me round her local patch in search of these two tricky former-soviet–stans she told me what she’d been up to since we’d last met at the picnic on Regents Park, how she was finding London life and what she was going to do next. I won’t include the details here – I fear I’ve already shared more than enough of Mariam’s personal life on this blog – but let’s just say that things are basically going pretty well for her right now.

It turned out too that we had a fair amount of time to do our catching up as the places we’d hoped to find our people proved frustratingly unproductive. We were aiming for kebab shops. But we’d met at 10.15am. Neither nationality was due to start their shift until noon. Which was a tiny bit problematic as both Mariam and I had other commitments in the early afternoon. Pragmatically we decided we’d try to meet Turkmenistan now and Uzbekistan later* then, over the course of three scenic bus journeys around her local area, chatted happily away about this, that, and the other – not necessarily in that order.

Why kebab shops? You may well ask. I certainly did. And there a couple of reasons: First, Mariam enjoys exploring London and at the weekends likes to take her kids to different restaurants, which, on occasion, have included Turkish cuisine. Second, people from the Kyrgyzstan/Kazakhstan/Turkmenistan/Uzbekistan area tend to be able to grasp the Turkish language fairly easily, meaning that if they come to the UK they can often find employment in Turkish restaurants. Third, Mariam is very good at spotting people from those countries and will often strike up conversations and then friendships with them, whilst dining with her family.

And so at a quarter to twelve we arrived back at Wood Green (after a trip to the Rose Restaurant and Barbecue in Crouch End) and sat down to wait for the Turkmenistani employee to start her shift at the Kebab Centre. I had a coke. Mariam didn’t. It’s Ramadan (cf Samia from Yemen). We talked about this. And I’m pretty sure one of my drunken themes on the way back home that night was how glad I was to be able to discuss things like religion with people from all over the world. I’d never really thought about Ramadan before – it didn’t effect me so I didn’t find out about it. Now, thanks to this project I learnt all about how Mariam had to eat her last mouthful at 4.54 this morning and then nothing until 7.22 this evening. Not even a glass of water. I had no idea. And, sitting in the mouth-watering atmosphere of the Kebab Centre I doubted I’d have the will power.

As we were wondering if Ramadan was why the restaurant was so quiet, Mariam finally caught sight of her contact. ‘That’s her’, she whispered then, after some swift negotiations with both the manager and the girl herself, Mariam introduced me to our Turkmenistani.

‘Her name means love’, she said. Muhabbat nodded with a grin. ‘Yes it does’, she confirmed. We were off.

She came to London two years ago from Ashabat, the capital, to learn English. Like so many immigrants here she’s now working flat out every day – either at school or here at the Kebab Centre, in a bid to pay for and make the most of her opportunity. ‘Are you getting much sleep?’ I asked. ‘Not enough’, she said, with a somewhat weary smile. ‘To be honest’, she added, ‘I want to go to Canada’.

‘So what do you like and not like about London?’ asked Mariam, easily wresting the reins of the interview from my hands. ‘Well’, said Muhabbat, ‘I was shocked when I found out so many people don’t speak English. My English was actually better before I came here, while my Turkish has improved! But I like that the government takes care of the people – everyone can get a house on a credit mortgage or live in a council house.' Mariam agrees. ‘We don’t have council flats back home’, they both say before concluding, rather heart-warmingly, that the British welfare system is the best in the world. Muhabbat’s daughter was born in an NHS hospital. She’s now being looked after by Muhabbat’s mother back in Turkmenistan. ‘The doctors were very good’, she told me. ‘I’m happy she was born here.’

Mariam’s heading back to Kyrgyzstan for her niece’s first birthday in a few weeks time. ‘There’s always a big party when they are one year old’, she said, ‘because in the old days babies would rarely survive for a year. Now they do, of course. In fact, under Soviet rule if you had ten kids you’d get a medal and free travel!’ I suppose medals are certainly one thing the welfare system here doesn’t provide.

* An excellent choice in the end as, without my knowledge Owen had actually met someone from Uzbekistan the night before. Well done Owen. So now, we have just one –stan to go – the rather reluctant nation of Tajikistan…

No.139: Uzbekistan

2007-09-14T11:57:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 14th September 2007

Like Valeria from Argentina, Ibrat works for the BBC World Service, but his radio show is considered so incendiary that he has been banned from returning to Uzbekistan. When he first arrived in London, he tried going out to pubs as he'd seen how sociable it looked on 'Eastenders', but the reality of British pub life disappointed him.

No.138: Benin

2007-09-13T23:59:00.000Z

Rome goes down all roads ...

Owen Powell - 13th September 2007

“Whenever anyone asks me about where I live,” says Rome, “I tell them: London is overcrowded, London is expensive, London is dirty. I love it to death.” He flashes a big smile.

He certainly has a lot to compare it to. Rome has lived in more places than most of the people I’ve met, and has also seen more of London than most people who live here. Although he was born in Ghana, he is Beninese and grew up there, but also spent time in Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, Cyprus, Senegal, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, most of Western Europe (including several months spent in Germany) and New York – where he was just prior to arriving in London nine years ago. Most famously (in terms of our project at least) he has spent a fair bit of time in Sweden, where Sarah, his wife, is from. (Sarah and Rome are, so far, the only married couple to represent different countries in 'The World In One City'). “Sweden is nice,” he says. “They have a good quality of life, it’s clean, but it’s a lot quieter. London may not look as nice, but it’s addictive.”

I express a slight worry that as Rome (short for ‘Romeo’, rather than being named after the city) was born in Ghana, we shouldn’t really count him as from Benin, but I’m quickly reassured. “My parents were from Benin, I grew up there. I’ve got a Beninese passport, as well as a Ghanaian one. Pretty soon I’m going to take British citizenship, and I’ll have to discard one of my old ones.” I lean forward. Which one will it be? “I’m keeping Benin! I suppose that’s where my roots are, although I’ve travelled so much I’m happier being in new places. I’m like a gypsy from Africa! When I came to London aged 26, I found it pretty easy – it was just another move. I feel like I could live anywhere – I could live here, I could live in Africa, I could live up a tree.”

We talk a bit about the citizenship ceremony, and I’m probably a bit sniffy about it, saying that it’s hardly fair to make foreigners learn the ins and outs of British culture and politics, when many British people make their ignorance on such matters quite clear, and swear allegiance to the Queen, something that many British-born people would have a problem with. But Rome sets me straight, saying that people who arrive here should be expected to learn the culture, the language, about the government and legislature. “You should do as the Romans do, you know? It’s foolish to expect London to change for someone who has come here – you need to be prepared to change so you can fit in.” That’s not to say that London has an exclusively ‘British’ culture – fitting in means learning about the mixture of people and cultures you’ll find here already. “Living in London gives you an open mind,” says Rome. “You become able to socialise with anyone, interact with anyone.”

One of the first people Rome met in London was Sarah. Three years later, they were married, with three different ceremonies. The first was at a Swedish church in London, followed by an Islamic ceremony in London, then (most fun of all, it seems) a big celebration in Accra, with Sarah in full African dress and all of Rome’s family there. London is their home now, although not one particular part of it – “I must have moved house 25 times since I came here”, say Rome – and he feels that he knows the city as well as anywhere he has lived. “You know what the sign of a real Londoner is?” asks Rome. “If you can drive everywhere, but don’t use a TomTom. Me, I know my way around. I don’t need Sat Nav.”

Rome has to drive everywhere largely because of his job. When he was younger, he studied administration, but arriving in London in his mid-twenties he realised he wasn’t an office person, and wanted to get his hands dirty. He started working in engineering. “Now,” he says, laughing, “I have to do some admin as I’m a boss, so I spend half my time in the office. I usually get there about nine o’clock at night, and start to plan what work we’re going to be doing.” If that sounds like a topsy-turvy day, it’s because Rome works for a subcontractor who maintain London’s tube lines. It’s tough work, and strange hours. “If you think that the tube runs most nights until 12.30, 12.45, and sometimes starts up again just after four in the morning, that doesn’t give us long to get the work done. We have so many checks to do before the line can re-open again that we’ve really only got three hours to work in. That’s where the planning comes in. In my office I’ve got a big bunch of files, drawings, plans – lots of emails to check – then I have to arrange all the equipment we’re going to need, how many workers it will take, what each worker needs to do and how long it will take.” It’s a big responsibility, I suggest. Doesn’t he worry that if things go wrong, he’ll be first in line for the blame? “Of course. If we make one tiny mistake, it could be dangerous. The Met police might come round and knock on my door ... But I trust myself and my workers to get it right. We’re like a family. Also, I’m a workaholic. I make sure I get everything right.”

It becomes clear why Rome only had a diet coke when I offered him a drink at the bar earlier. “Oh yes,” he says. “At a minimum, I’m tested twice a week for drugs and alcohol, so I don’t drink or smoke. It’s not a big sacrifice – it’s a good job, it’s pretty good money, and if I can stick at it for another ten years or so, my ambition is to retire at 45 and start working for myself. I’d like to move to Ghana, where I’ve already got a house, and be at the centre of the African boom. That’s where it’s going to happen next – they’ve discovered crude oil, the economy is stable, I could take my engineering skills there and help develop the railways. But I’m not narrow minded – I could do anything. I might start to develop properties for tourism.” Rome is nothing if not ambitious, and explains that he’s inspired to do well because of his childhood. “It was tough, we were very poor – some days there wasn’t much food,” he says. “But I don’t let it make me miserable – I reckon that I’ve seen the worst now, and this is my opportunity to do well. Make hay while the sun shines, you know? If you’ve had an easy time growing up, you don’t really know the value of things, so maybe you’re not as committed to things like your job or your family. But I want to be successful. And I want to enjoy it while I can. There’s no point finally getting wealthy at 55, you know? I can’t drive a Ferrari when I’m 55, I’ll probably want a Bentley then. Right now, what I want is a bright yellow Ferrari."

After an hour or so, I put my pen and notepad down and we start chatting about our lives in London, places we’ve been, people we’ve met. Rome hints at some forthcoming spectacular changes to the tube system (“It’s a whole world underground – people don’t realise what’s down there”) including the introduction of mobile phone reception everywhere, and some others too secret to even be discussed. He’s a very wise man, and I feel like I’m learning a lot about why I’m doing this project, about what London is. In fact, something he says that I’ve jotted down could stand as a pretty good description of the London that Alex and I are discovering. (I think Rome says it in relation to Arabic – that a different dialect is spoken in every different region of the Arab world, but in the West we assume it’s all one thing. In, fact I think it might be an Arabic proverb). It goes: “From afar, a forest looks like a single thing, but when you get there, you see that there are gaps between the trees.” I like it. It’s like a better, more thought-provoking, version of “You can’t see the wood for the trees”.

No.137: Burkina Faso

2007-09-13T16:29:00.000Z

'Etrangers'

Owen Powell - 13th September

For me, the last few days haven’t been all that successful. I lost my diary over the weekend, which made me feel even more incapable than losing my phone (July), my computer memory stick (June) or house keys (yesterday, but I found them again). Somehow, not knowing what I was supposed to be doing in the days and weeks to come made the whole world appear like a terrifying blank canvas. I took to scribbling things down on receipts and in notebooks, but I was losing control. I bought a new diary.

I also haven’t had much luck with the world in one city quest. We’re at the sharp end now, only 50-odd countries to find, and it’s getting tougher. Gone are the days of waltzing into a café and expecting to find a chef, waitress and a couple of customers from several different continents, from nations we had never met before. Now, it’s a case of dedicated internet research, and long bus journeys.

Yesterday morning, I phoned the Nicaraguan embassy. (I wasn’t cheating). The lady who answered the phone said something in Spanish. I did my usual Hugh Grant thing and spluttered my way through an opening sentence in pretty unintelligible English. She asked me to slow down and try again. I took a deep breath. “I notice that it’s Nicaraguan Independence Day on Saturday,” I said. “Do you know of any events that are happening in London to celebrate it?” She thought for a while. “No,” she said. “Thankyou,” I said, and put the phone down.

Then I called the Hackney Caribbean Elderly Organisation. I’d seen several of them photographed for an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery back in June, and had meant to contact them before now. No-one picked up. “Ah well,” I thought. “They’re elderly. Maybe they don’t answer the phone.” I jumped on a bus.

An hour and a half later, I was standing outside the HCEO, ringing the bell. No-one answered. I was hoping to meet people from Dominica and Barbados. In their photos at the NPG they looked happy, smiling and laughing. Some of them were over ninety years old. None of them were in the HCEO this afternoon. It was locked up.

I got on a different bus, and went back to the Community Centre for Refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, where we’d been in July (finding it locked). It was locked again. Never mind. I also had a lead for someone from Laos who might work as a chef in a Thai restaurant near Victoria. I got on two buses. It took nearly an hour. The restaurant was open for lunch and dinner, but not at half past three in the afternoon, which it now was. I was defeated. I went to a hardware shop and bought a massive drill bit, then went home and spent the evening drilling holes in my bedroom wall.

This morning, after a photo session for a German magazine where a German photographer got Alex and I to throw six kilograms of German confetti onto each other, I decided to go to Acton. Not entirely on a whim – I’d met an oyster-seller in Borough Market called Jason who was sort-of Samoan (Samoan parents, but born in New Zealand), and he said that the Redback Tavern, in Acton, was where all Australasian people go. Some of the bouncers in particular, he said, would be islanders. “Islanders” to me now conjures up magical names: Palau, Nauru, Tuvalu. These are going to be some of the hardest places to find representatives from (Tuvalu is the smallest country, by population, in the world) so any lead was a real godsend. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover the Redback Tavern didn’t open until 6pm, but I still felt a bit cursed. I was stuck in Acton. I wanted to go home and do more drilling. I didn’t care how I got there, so I got on the first bus that arrived outside the pub, and rode it to the end of the line, at Shepherd’s Bush.

Standing on the pavement as I got off the bus, deep in conversation, was a man wearing a bright red and green T-shirt with the words ‘Burkina Faso’ emblazoned across it. Oho, I thought. My luck is starting to change.

Then the doubts set in. The conversation went on quite a long time. By this stage, I was leaning against a wall, pretending to read a newspaper (Yes! Like a spy would!). I was pretty sure that I’d lost the ability to go up to someone in the street – even someone advertising their homeland so openly – and ask them to talk to me about their life. What would Horne do, I wondered. Horne wouldn’t be so cowardly. He’d just bloody well go up there and say hello. The two men shook hands. Now’s my chance, I thought. But then they realised they were going the same way (always a fun bit of street theatre to watch), so set off away from me, still chatting. I tailed them. The feeling-like-a-spy part of my brain was giving me extra confidence. They stopped at a bus stop. Oh no! I thought. What if he gets on a bus? Do I get on as well? Isn’t that a bit weird?

His friend got on a bus. The man in the shirt turned back down the street and started walking towards me. I gripped my atlas.

“Hello?” I said. “Are you from Burkina Faso?”

It was fine. He laughed when I told him I was a writer. “This is a day of writers, for me. You’re the third writer I’ve met. I’m looking for someone to help write my biography.” I explained that I was very interested in his biography. We went into an internet café and I bought him a hot chocolate.

Doundosy came to London about six years ago, to study English. He’d done an English A-Level, and was pretty confident reading and writing, but needed to improve in order to get accepted onto a Law degree. “I was really keen to study Human Rights Law, in particular,” he said. “It’s a good thing to do, I think, to try to help people who are in trouble.” But then, as so often happens in the stories that we hear, events intervened. “I met my wife,” says Doundosy, and his eyes light up. “It was a shock! We got married in 2004, a posh wedding in Fulham Town Hall, and now we live in West Kensington. I think my plans have changed, and I’ll be staying here now.”

But Doundosy is now going back to something he used to do in Burkina Faso – music. “In 2001 I had a hit in Burkina Faso. I’m a singer and songwriter, and wrote a song called ‘Etrangers’ – I was inspired by watching lots of news on the television about the abuse by citizens of one country against the foreigners who live there. Particularly in France – we speak French in Burkina Faso, and lots of people I heard about who were in France were treated really badly. They were called sans papiers, ‘without documents’, and were imprisoned. There were lots of people struggling and I wanted to say something about it. Even here, you look around you and you think that this country was built up by foreigners. This café is owned by an Indian, foreigners have done so much, so why attack them?”

Thankfully, though, Doundosy has found London fairly welcoming. “Yes, it is a good place to stay and learn, I’ve met nice people. If you don’t like somewhere, you don’t stay, and I haven’t been home in six years, so it must be a nice place. I have a new lifestyle here, and now I have a wife, so I think I will be staying. And I would recommend it as well, if you are ambitious and focussed, London has all to give to you. You can get your future sorted, but you have to be strong and willing to achieve it.”

Doundosy has certainly been busy. As well as spending time in the studio recording his new album (“I use an instrument called a sikassaka – it’s like a round maraca, a percussion instrument”) he’s been working as a translator in the local police station, putting his new-found confidence in English, his French, and a number of African languages to good use. He’s also worked in security and as a ticket collector, but music is where his heart is. He’s currently in the middle of creating his own website (keep checking back as he plans to finish it in October), and you can even see him performing one of his songs on YouTube here. If there’s a live show soon, I’ll be in the front row.

No.136: Mozambique

2007-09-13T13:14:00.000Z

Bending the Rules

Alex Horne – 13th September 2007

Strictly speaking, Helder is ineligible for our project because he currently lives just outside London’s vague borders. But what’s the point of speaking strictly when you’re having so much fun with a self-regulated endeavour and have just spent a joyful hour being hugely entertained by a talented and occasionally dancing stranger from Mozambique?

Well, you might say, surely the whole point is lost if even one of your countries is unrepresented in London? Good point. But worry not (and chill out a bit, everything’s ok) for Helder knows a couple of Mozambiquanos (yes, that’s the correct word, despite what Microsoft spellchecker is telling me) who do actually live in London and who he’s going to introduce me to in the next week or two. But for now, I want to write about Helder because Helder gave me coffee and biscuits and is a musician. I’m sure I’ve already mentioned that I’m in constant awe, occasionally spilling over into envy, of musicians. I’d love to be a musician. And this one told me I still could – he said anyone can, it’s never too late – so now I’m an enormous fan of Helder.

And anyway, Helder has lived in London for nine years (dwelling in Golders Green, Willesden Green, Hendon and High Barnet before realising his dream of living in the countryside and moving to Datchet, a stone’s throw from the London Borough of Hillingdon and just 20 miles from Charing Cross and so closer to the centre of London than places like Cranham that is officially in London, located as it is in the London Borough of Havering...), so for me, his story and opinions are as valid as anyone’s and a lot more valid than mine (Chesham is four miles even further out of town than Datchet and I was only a Londoner for six years).

I was given his number by another musician (and, therefore, object of my awe/envy) called Joe who I grew up with back in Sussex. Joe had told me Helder no longer lives in London but I gave him a call anyway, intending to ask if he could help me out with a more London-based Mozambiquano, only to be foiled by a torrent of hospitality that resulted in me neither mentioning our crucial London rule nor turning down an invite to his home. So now, a couple of days later, I was warmly welcomed into a splendid house filled with the unlikely combination of tranquillity and drums. ‘I’m a percussionist’, he shouted from the kitchen as I wandered into the living room, ‘I also play a little bit guitar and piano but not enough for my musical conception’. ‘Fair enough’, I shouted back.

Helder encouraged me to make myself at home on the settee by the coffee table where a joystick was burning while he produced the coffee and biscuits and whistled (‘I have music 24 hours in my head. My wife sometimes says ‘please, give me a break’, he told me with a smile broad enough to signify that this wasn’t really the cause of any actual marital strife). Not just any coffee and biscuits either, coffee painstakingly prepared with boiled milk (‘my grandfather used to say never to mix something boiled with something not boiled’, he explained. ‘He also said never mix tomatoes with lemons…’) and biscuits (charmingly pronounced ‘biscwits’) in the form of four (Yes! Four!) hobnobs. I was a happy guest.

‘Now’, Helder began after finally joining me on the couch. ‘I will tell you a superficial history of Mozambique then something a little deeper – if that’s ok?’ I nodded, sipped my coffee, nibbled a biscwit and listened. But then his wife came home early and we both spent quite a long time saying hello to her instead (she is from Germany, by the way, and, specifically Bavaria – a place which, like Guernsey, French Canada and Palestine, many of its inhabitants insist is a country, despite not appearing on our list).

‘So’, Helder began again when the atmosphere of calm was restored. ‘My family and I left Mozambique when I was fifteen and, like a lot of people, we went to Portugal. I lived there for eighteen years and then came here. I’ve never been back to Mozambique.’

‘Did you come here for the music?’ I asked, thinking that I sounded pretty cool. ‘Yes’, he replied before pausing. ‘…also, to be honest with you, in my country it’s very multicultural, we have influences from everywhere – Greece, Turkey, South America, everywhere – but mainly from Asia. And I think we identify ourselves a little bit with oriental philosophy, the oldest philosophy; our way to see life is quite profound. And so I think I left Portugal not just for the music but to try to find a place for my roots. And now I’m quite happy here because I’ve met lots of people with the same beliefs and foundations as me. And yes, some of them are English too.’

I drew breath. It seemed we’d skipped the superficial history bit and were going straight for the deeper stuff. That was fine with me. I’d got my biscwits and, to be honest as well, Joe had hinted Helder had some fairly weighty things to say and I was looking forward to a bit of philosophy. After learning rather a lot of sometimes trivial facts about the 135 countries we’d already met, I was ready to tackle some less tangible sentiments. And Helder was happy to oblige.

‘I try to understand life in a very profound way’, he continued. ‘Most people try to understand it in a very superficial way which doesn’t really help to make it better. The thing is, London is a very old town and in any old town I believe lots of things have happened and certain developments have happened a long time ago with the people who were born here. In this place, for a long time, they have tried to experience things here. I had an opportunity to move to Florida instead of here, but I didn’t take the invitation seriously.’ I nodded. It might not have been clear but I thought I could see his point.

He moved on to still deeper matters. ‘We believe in a spiritual journey and reincarnation – that makes sense for me; transmigration from body to body as evolution. So I didn’t go to America. The history here is much longer and my connection with other cultures started a long time ago.’ Again I nodded. This was the first time someone had thrown reincarnation into the immigration debate and it seemed to me to be rather a powerful point. According to Helder, when you die you move from one body to another, so whatever nationality you happen to be now is irrelevant considering you may well have been from a different continent before that and another one before that.

Helder went on to express further, more practical doubts about the issue of nationalism: ‘We all have a tendency to tell people, ‘I’m Brazilian’ or ‘I’m English’, but this is all our planet, where – as soon as we do the right thing and actually cooperate – anywhere is the right place to be. My father was educated by a Hindu man who said your place is anywhere in the world where you feel you’ve found your position. He was right. We are citizens of the same planet. I don’t have national pride – I think that’s wrong. For me it’s just the next starting point’.

I drew another breath. Helder smiled. I did too. I told him I understood where he was coming from (in the short term) but thought it might be hard, in practise, to factor this belief, this philosophy (‘it’s not a religion’, he insisted) into immigration legislation. He agreed but pointed out that, setting rules and regulations to one side, London seemed to be an ideal example of ‘the next starting point’ for an awful lot of people.

I was feeling pretty thoughtful by now and, as if in some drug-induced trance, meditated for a while on what a fantastic notion it might be if someone from every single country in the world had indeed come to London to start again and how the city was in turn blurring the very idea of nationality. But then I reached for another hobnob and realised that whilst still being peckish I had in fact exhausted my capacity for deep contemplation.

I asked Helder to tell me about music instead. Again, he was more than happy to oblige.

Helder’s dad was a tango champion but didn’t have access to musical instruments as a child. He therefore supported his son’s talent as soon as it became evident, helping Helder to start playing professionally when he was nineteen years old. Now forty eight, he told me he still has the enthusiasm he had then before proving it by scrambling around for a CD he’d recently recorded with the German saxophonist Ingrid Lanbrook, grabbing a series of drums and playing along. I watched in wonder.

After getting some miraculous noises out of something called an Ibo drum (which, in my hands, was simply a vase) he then stepped up to his beloved bongos and started to demonstrate how he’d become a better drummer when he’d learned to dance. I was just a tiny bit worried I’d have to join in but Helder seemed content to throw himself into the music while I sat on the sofa with my cup, saucer and notepad, feeling more British than at any other time during the project or my life.

But I wasn’t uncomfortable or embarrassed. This may well sound like an excruciatingly awkward situation but I was loving it. Helder was brilliant and when it was time to go I felt the same remorse as when you unexpectedly lose a bit of your twix. ‘I was enjoying that’, I thought, ‘but now it’s gone’. Thankfully, before I left he gave me the number of a man called Rey from Cuba – ‘one of the best double bass players there is’ – so I’m hoping there’ll be more to come. I really am in awe of musicians.

‘I believe in one thing’, he said as I headed back to my car, ‘and that’s nature’. I said thank you, waved and drove back round the edge of London to Chesham. I didn’t need to write down this final thought. I’d already scribbled the words ‘force of nature’ while he was talking and then underlined them when he was playing. I wouldn't forget.

No.135: San Marino

2007-09-13T06:10:00.000Z

You Phoned My Wife!

Alex Horne – 13th September 2007

Whilst England were beating Russia 3-0 at Wembley last night, 600 people were in Cyprus’ national stadium watching their side beat San Marino by the same score-line. But their victory wasn’t greeted with quite as much hysteria over there as ours was over here, partly because the British press is, frankly, hysterical, but mainly because San Marino is the fourth smallest country in the world with a population of just 28,880 whose national team has only ever won one match; a 1-0 thrashing of Liechtenstein in a friendly in 2004. Andy Selva, San Marino’s top scorer and greatest ever player, got the crucial goal.

*****

Apart from our football team’s performance, yesterday was a fairly unsuccessful day for us. Owen walked around most of London only to find himself thwarted at every turn while I failed to add to my, admittedly impressive, weekly score of four. I did, however, line up the target for today that, if hit, would easily be worth a day’s wandering.

I have to thank Philippe here again too, without whom our total would be even smaller and our deficit even bigger. He’d given us another fairly cryptic clue about a man, from San Marino, who used to run a café near London Bridge three years ago. ‘Be extremely diplomatic’, he warned, ‘Walter didn’t appreciate that the San Marino government gave me his details.’ And there you have the subtle difference between our project and Philippe’s. We’re not allowed to go through governments. But we are allowed to get hints from people who have.

And I have to say that I’m enjoying the treasure-trail element of our quest that Philippe’s pointers provide. Even though we’ve only actually attempted to find a handful of his own participants, it’s still interesting and telling to see how many of those have moved on in the few years since he tracked them down. Walter’s café by HMS Belfast, Owen and I discovered, was now no more, replaced, fairly recently, by an enormous café called ‘Over The Moon’ which I most certainly was not. Disheartened but hungry, we took the opportunity to buy a baked potato from a much cheaper vendor and plotted what we’d do next on this fruitless afternoon.

As well as the address, however, Philippe had also given a phone number which I rang, presuming it was the café’s old number and hoping to at least be told what had happened to the San Marino guy’s place. A lady answered. ‘Sorry’, I said. Not what you should say when you first pick up a phone. ‘You don’t happen to know what happened to Walter do you?’ I continued. It wasn’t getting any better as an opening to a phone conversation.

‘I’m his wife’, came the reply in a slightly shocked, slightly cross tone. ‘Oh!’ I said, trying to sound apologetic whilst I was actually thrilled to be one step closer to someone from San Marino. ‘I thought this was his café’s number. I’m near London Bridge. I’m trying to find his café. But it’s gone!’

‘Oh yes’, replied Mrs Walter, much calmer now. ‘It’s moved to Old Cavendish Street.’ ‘It has?’ I asked unnecessarily, ‘that’s great – thank you!’ and hung up before she said too much and Walter would be cross with her for giving away his details this time.

Later that afternoon, at around half past four, I located the café. I was sure it was the one. It had to be the one. But it was closed.

Luckily it was about 800 metres from my brothers’ flat where I was to watch the football match that night and sleep on a sofa. So, at half eight the next morning I set off, slightly stiffly, with my older brother Mat; him to work, me to finally meet a man from San Marino. And what a meeting it was!It was open this time, of course (and of course it was shut at half four, I should know how London cafes work by now). I started by ordering a generous breakfast for myself. Not because I was being greedy, you understand, but to ingratiate myself with Walter. I then introduced myself to the slightly surly man behind the counter who looked pretty much exactly how I’d expected.

‘No, I’m not Walter’, he said, in a distinctly English accent. ‘He’ll be back in a minute’. ‘Good, thank you!’ I said, almost unruffled, and sat down with my coffee.

Exactly a minute later, my sausage sandwich and San Marino man arrived – I didn’t know where to look. I was over-excited on both counts. I explained the situation as quickly as I could, he said, ‘Ah, did you phone my wife?’, I said, ‘Yes’, he grinned, thumped me on the back and said, ‘Come on, let’s sit outside, I can’t smoke in here’.

It wasn’t a busy morning at the café. Walter and I sat at one of the two tables outside on what was surely one of the last warm mornings of the year and he told me all about his life. I gobbled up my food and scribbled down the odd note, not wanting to ruin things by looking too much like a journalist.

He told me, with the glintiest of glints in his eye, that he’d been here for forty years. I told him how pleased I was to meet him. ‘There must be more of us in London!’ he cried. ‘Where?’ I cried back. ‘I dunno!’ he laughed.

He told me he’d moved to Rimini in his twenties and still has a little flat there that he rents out. ‘Come and see me’, he insisted, ‘we’ll do a deal!’ We’ve been tempted to visit many of the places we’ve found so far, but this was the first time I started thinking seriously about when I’d be free to make the trip.

Travel for him has never been easy thanks to his rare status as a San Marino citizen. ‘I went to New York, but they’d never heard of my country. I had to wait at the airport for an hour, then another hour, it was ridiculous. But I never want to lose my residency because it’s an amazing place. There’s no tax. When I eventually sell this café and move home, if I want a job and a flat the government will give it to me.’ I told him he’s a lucky man. ‘I know’, he replied. ‘Someone tried to get me to get him a property using my passport before, an Italian guy – but I wouldn’t do it. It’s too risky. But everyone wants to live there. It’s great. When it comes to voting, they pay for me to fly home and do it. They pay for my accommodation too – so I go and stay with my mum and spend the money!’

Even the Italians themselves love it, he told me, because petrol and alcohol are cheaper, and the whole surrounding area benefits from the tourism. The Most Serene Republic Of San Marino, to give it its full name, really does sound too good to be true. ‘And why isn’t it part of Italy?’ I asked. ‘Oh’, he sighed, ‘it’s a long story’.

Indeed it is. But a good one. It was officially founded as a republic on September 3 301, after a man called Marino fled to Mount Titano, site of the country today, having been persecuted in Rimini because of his Christian sermons. By the middle of the fifth century a community had formed on the mountain and continued to thrive autonomously until being recognized as an independent state by the Pope in 1631. Two centuries later, Napoleon declined to take over the country, commenting, ‘Why, it’s a model republic!’ During World War II San Marino was then protected by the Americans, who themselves had a distinct soft spot for the tiny republic; Abraham Lincoln, himself an honorary citizen of San Marino, once wrote that ‘the republic proves that government founded on republican principles is capable of being so administered as to be secure and enduring’. He was right.

When I got home I told Rachel about Walter’s proposition. To my delight she was as excited as me. It sounds like an extraordinary place to visit. And an even more incredible place in which to be born. So if Helder from Mozambique is right and we are all reincarnated, I'd be over the moon to be the one in every two hundred thousand people who happens to start their life there.

No.134: Yemen

2007-09-11T14:25:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 11th September 2007

On my birthday entry I mentioned that I was following up a lead for a friend of a friend I'd met at that friend's wedding. I finally tied up that loose end today. And actually, that original, now married friend is a guy called Day (yes, Day) who actually inspired this whole thing and who Owen and I are incredibly grateful to. And that friend of his is a guy called James who I would now count as a friend too. Good. He works for the foreign office (usually in Syria) and gave me the number of someone who works for a charity called the Amal Trust, whom he'd met at the British Embassy some time ago.

Unfortunately I didn't say all that when I first spoke to Samia on the phone. I just said, 'Hello. I'm a friend of James. Can I meet you?' after which she was justifiably suspicious. Thankfully when I phoned back later with more details of my alleged friendship she kindly agreed to meet me outside Bayswater station after her work the next day.

Samia has been in London for twelve years now and is a lot more streetwise than me. Keen not to take up too much of her time I started our chat on the street by the station entrance. 'Shall we sit down somewhere?' she suggested sensibly. 'Erm... well... I don't want to hold you up...' I spluttered. 'Let's just go to MacDonalds', she said. So we did, and sat down at a table downstairs WITHOUT BUYING ANYTHING. 'Brilliant', I thought. 'Good decision'.

'I consider London my home now', she said during the very comfortable conversation that followed. Her family all came over together in 1995, her parents to work, herself to learn English, and after studying in Eastbourne she's been in London ever since.

No.s 131, 132 & 133: Kenya, Equatorial Guinea and Jordan

2007-09-10T10:04:00.000Z

Happy Birthday

Alex Horne – 10th September 2007

It’s my birthday today. But also, we’ve got six weeks and two days to find 62 people who’ve moved to London from, I suppose, the hardest to find countries in the world. So instead of a relaxing day, wallowing in my new-found twenty-nine-ness, I gratefully accepted a lift into town with Rachel and set off from the BBC at 8am, a whole day ahead of me, determined to make some sort of dent in our monstrous target.

I had several sketchy plans. Unfortunately, the well of people contacting us has now all but dried up, so instead I was following up leads offered by our French photographer Phillippe, a friend of a friend I met at a wedding and my own brief investigation on the internet over the weekend.

But first, a trip to Willesden to chase a man I really should have found several weeks ago when I still lived a mile away from his auto-electrical shop. Back in January the radio on my car finally gave up. Whilst he installed a new (and excellent despite its very reasonable price-tag) model, I asked the engineer (I guess that’s the term) where he was from – presuming, I have to admit, India.

‘I’m from Kenya’, he replied. ‘My family was originally from India but, like a lot of people from Asia, they came to Africa at the beginning of the century…’ ‘Cool’, I said, doing my best to hide my excitement. I had something incredibly important (I expect) that I had to rush off to do so didn’t mention the project just yet. I’d be back.

Of course I wasn’t back until today. I’m not sure why not. I guess we thought we’d stumble across a Kenyan anyway so were fairly relaxed about the country. And anyway, up until Edinburgh in August we felt like we had ages to find everyone.

But we didn’t stumble across anyone from Kenya in the meantime and so at 9am, after what was now a two hour journey from home, I got off the tube at Dollis Hill (Where? Yes! Dollis Hill! It’s next to Willesden Green on the Jubilee Line) and walked round the corner to find Neasdon Electronics… shut.

Mmm. Frustrating. I retreated to a café, ordered a sausage sandwich (it is my birthday) and waited.

Half an hour later I returned. It was open! Wonderful news! I burst in, Iqbal (the manager) sort of remembered me, and just about agreed to be involved. He didn’t have long but explained that he had arrived in London in 1978 and that he very much liked it here. I got excited at the mere mention of 1978 – ‘that’s when I was born!’ I exclaimed, thrilled that he’d been here exactly the same length of time that I’d been alive. Perhaps it actually was exactly the same length of time - perhaps it was his anniversary too, I thought. ‘What month did you arrive?’ I pressed.

‘Oh no’, he replied after a little think. ‘It was 1977. December 1977’. ‘That’s fine!’ I said. ‘Fine. It’s my birthday today. So I guess you arrived here pretty much when I was conceived…’

Yes, it was an odd thing to say and one that signalled the end of our chat. Still, at this stage it’s all about the numbers. And I was more than happy to return to the good old days of ‘in and out’, grab a nationality and move on. So move on I did…

…back down the Jubilee like to Bond Street, out and round the corner to Brook Street, the uber-trendy side of Oxford Street, and the location of Royal Jordanian Airlines’ London office. Or at least that’s what I thought – that’s what I’d scribbled down in my folder after I’d had a brainwave on Saturday, found their website, and generally felt pretty pleased with myself.

Luckily, the phone number I’d scrawled was actually still correct. ‘Oh no, we’ve moved to Hammersmith’, I was told. ‘Fine’, I said. ‘It’s my birthday!’ ‘Happy Birthday’, they said, ‘But we’re still in Hammersmith’. ‘Fine’, I said again, ‘thanks for your help’. Grrr, I thought (a much easier sound to write and think than actually make).

Still, as I kept telling people, it was my birthday so I held my chin up high – well, returned it to its normal height - and pressed on with what I was determined would be a Good Day.

This, of course, worked.

Phillippe, our fellow nationality collector, had given us the address and phone number of a man from Equitorial Guinea called Oscar. He said we had to meet him. Initially, however, we were quite keen to find our people ourselves and not rely on tip-offs, although we were, of course, extremely grateful. But with the year slipping away we couldn’t afford such ambition.

Oscar, Phillippe had told us, worked in Sutton, in a bag-shop, a short walk down the hill from the station. This represented yet another lengthy journey but it was still early and remember, I was determined.

Both sensibly and luckily, I decided to call Oscar first to check he was working that day. He wasn’t. ‘I’m in central London’, he cried (I think he was on a windy street), ‘I can meet you in Westminster at 12 O’Clock!’ ‘Brilliant, see you then!’ I shouted back (thinking he was on a windy street). Things were back on track.

I now had an hour to kill so checked up a couple of other leads on the internet (quick London tip – if you’re in central London and need the internet for a few minutes, try the Apple Store on Regent Street – plenty of computers to ‘test’, all connected to the internet. Not sure how ethical that is, but it’s certainly a useful place to know) then headed back to the Jubilee Line and down to Westminster.

Oscar was waiting for me. ‘Quick’, he said, bustling me along the street, ‘we have to go this way.’ ‘Do we?’ I asked, reasonably enough. ‘Yes, I also have another appointment at 12 O’Clock, with someone else from Equatorial Guinea. I thought you could meet us both!’ ‘Great’ I said, and off we went.

Oscar, I found out as we marched alongside the Houses of Parliament, is 37 years old. In fact, most of what I learned about him and his journey here were gleaned on our five minute walk which unfortunately meant I was desperately trying to remember the facts, whilst asking pertinent questions, whilst wondering where exactly we were going. Still, it was my birthday…

He’s been in London for five years having been born in a tiny village called Mbini and grown up in the capital, Malabo. As well as working in the bag shop in Sutton, a job he hopes to move on from soon, he’s also Secretary of the Equatorial Guinea Community in the UK, a title I would not forget thanks to the colourful card (not of the birthday variety, but still a card) he presented me with as we neared our destination.

‘Are you free on October 12th?’ he asked me. ‘Well, I expect so’, I said (I’m not, it turns out, but Owen is). ‘Well, it’s the thirty ninth anniversary of our country’s independence’, he explained eagerly, ‘and I’m organising the party. There’ll be food and dancing and loads more people from Equatorial Guinea…’ ‘Any other nationalities, do you think, Oscar?’ I lobbied, a little cheekily. ‘Well yes! Our neighbours from Gabon and Sao Tome should be –’ ‘We’ll be there!’ I exclaimed. Good. Anniversaries our good.

By now we were entering the offices of DEFRA, the governmental Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs where Oscar’s friend works. We caught our breath, had a glass of free and, I’m sure, exceptionally clean and organic water, and I jotted down as much as I could remember of our chat so far before asking Oscar why he came to London in the first place.

‘Most people to go Spain’, he said. ‘We speak Spanish so it’s much easier. Those who come to the UK come for more opportunities or to improve their English. That’s why I came here. But also I found it difficult to stay in Spain because there’s a lot of racism. I mean, there’s racism everywhere in the world, but there’s too much in Spain.’

This was an answer I hadn’t expected, but Oscar mentioned it so matter-of-factly that it was apparent it was something he had just come to accept. His father was from Spain and Oscar himself had lived in Barcelona for fifteen years before moving to London; ‘they just don’t know about black people,’ he said, ‘but in London, it’s so mixed, it’s not a problem. Anyone can get any job.’

As if to prove his point, his friend then emerged from the DEFRA lifts and made his way towards us. ‘Do you get to go back to Equatorial Guinea often?’ I asked hurriedly, before his friend arrived – not an easy thing to do with a country as blessed in consonants as Equatorial Guinea. ‘I haven’t been back in twenty years’, he said with what looked like happy resignation. Or melancholy humour. Or something that was both sad and accepting. ‘I want to go back right now’.

The three of us then spent a lot of time shaking hands and taking pictures of each other before promising to see each other again on the twelfth if not before. As the two friends then settled down to talk (‘it’s a business meeting’, they explained a touch mysteriously), I retraced my steps, enjoying my sunny birthday weather and feeling just a tiny bit proud of the majestic parliament buildings now on my right.

An hour later I got off the tube (for the first time in my life) at Upton Park and strolled down a slightly less well-kempt street beneath the shadow of another great British structure – West Ham United’s stadium. I love football grounds – the way they dwarf everything round them; castles, full of promise and potential glory. And on a Monday like today, I love the stillness – like Willy Wonka’s factory the day before re-opening. And this is just West Ham…

I was on my way to a certain house number on a certain street round the corner from the stadium that Phillippe had given us with the instruction: “Solomon Islands: brother Jonas is a franciscan brother or something like that... Upton Park station, go to No.** __________ Avenue.... I think”.

I didn’t really have a choice. I had to go. We’d met neither monks nor Solomon Islanders thus far and our quest wasn’t going to be complete without them.

Unfortunately, therefore, the quest is still not complete.

It was the right address – I was surprised to find St Martin’s Vicarage of the Mission Parish of Plaistow exactly where Phillippe had thought it probably was – but there was no-one in. And, unlike most of the churches I’ve staked out so far, there were no contact details to be found on the walls outside. Desperate not to be thwarted, I wrote a fairly lengthy letter explaining who I was and what I wanted and stuck it through the letter box. We’ll see if anything comes of it.

Having treated myself to a hefty baked potato in one of the many West Ham themed cafes in the area, I staggered back to the tube (District Line this time) for a monstrous twenty five stop east-to-west ride landing me at my final stop, Hammersmith, where the Royal Jordanian Airlines are now located. On the way I nipped into one of Upton Park’s many ‘African Goods’ shop for a bottle of water and instinctively asked the lady behind the counter where she was from – tactfully of course.

‘I’m from Ghana’ she said. ‘Oh’, I said, trying to sound interested rather than disappointed. ‘And how are you finding London?’ ‘I’ve been here thirty eight years’, she replied. ‘I used to love it, but now it has changed so much. And it’s the government’s fault. They make it too easy for people. All these benefits. Like today, they’ve decided to give pregnant mothers money so they can buy healthy food – that’s just stupid. They’ll just spend it on chocolate and cigarettes. And it’s working people like me who have to pay for it. It’s not fair…’ I couldn’t and didn’t argue with her logic. My brief political pride diminished.

An hour later, at around half three, I entered the new and appropriately shiny Royal Jordanian Airlines building and was directed up to the sixth floor by Freddy, a friendly doorman from Grenada (again, I masked my frustration) who had hay-fever.

After my Franciscan Failure I wasn’t particularly hopeful that the busy people of this high-class airline would want or be able to help me, but I needn’t have been so pessimistic. It was my birthday and a lovely lady called Emma was more than happy to help. Intrigued by the idea she insisted we sat on a special sofa and told me, briefly but professionally, how she’d ended up here.

‘My family are Armenian,’ she began – and didn’t get much further before I excitedly told her about Erebuni, by far the best Armenian restaurant in London. She patiently listened then carried on. ‘Back in 1914 there was a genocide in Armenia so my grandmother moved with the remaining community to Jerusalem. She settled there and eventually my father met my mother and because he was working for the Trans Jordan Frontier Force (a British force working in Jordan at the time), they moved to Jordan and that’s where I was born’.

That’s a lot of information in a couple of short sentences and I decided not to interrupt with any more restaurant anecdotes.

‘Soon after, the force was disbanded’, Emma continued, ‘and he ended up working for the British Embassy. When he passed away my mother decided we should move to the UK where there would be more opportunities for the family, so in 1964 we arrived in the UK. And for the last thirty eight years I’ve worked here’.

I couldn’t have asked more a more succinct story. You could have. I realise this is one of the more sprawling entries so far. But it’s my birthday.

We chatted a little about how London has changed since the sixties and she, like nearly everyone we’ve met, stressed how much more cosmopolitan the city has become. If there is a unifying thread to what we’ve been told, it’s got to be this growing cosmopolitanism. Which, apart from anything, is an encouraging thought at this sharp end of the project.

After promising to give Jordan some thought for a future holiday destination (‘people are scared of going because of the geographical location, but there’s no political instability there and there are an awful lot of sites to visit – we’ve got Petra too, the new wonder of the world!’ said Emma, professional as always), I got back in the shiny lift, said goodbye to a wheezing Freddy and took the bus back up to White City, completing an enormous and rewarding irregular hexagon of a journey round London, before meeting my wife and returning to Chesham for a slightly less cosmopolitan (but still lovely) birthday evening outside the big city.

No.130: Comoros

2007-09-07T23:47:00.000Z

L’îsle Oublié

Alex Horne – 7th September 2007

‘We’re the forgotten island’ were the first words Dalila said to me after we’d met outside Kentish Town tube station; me, hungover after my early birthday party; her, keen to remind people about where she’s from, however much they’d drunk the night before.

To be honest, it wasn’t even a case of not remembering Comoros for me, despite my dozy morning-after-an-evening-in-the-Windsor-Castle (just off Edgware Road, currently my favourite London pub) state. I’d never even heard of Comoros. At least I didn’t think I had. Comoros… Comoros… No, I was pretty sure I’d never come across Comoros in my life.

I held my head in shame. And pain.

Dalila – and yes, it’s a cracking name; I told her so, she told me it was a traditional, somewhat old fashioned North African name and that she liked it to – had just turned 29. I will turn 29 in three days time (I hope to have recovered enough by then to celebrate all over again). I think we’re the closest in age of anyone I’ve met so far. And it is quite funny to meet someone the same age as you who’s from a county you’re not even aware of. I’d thought I was so wise. Obviously not.

‘The thing is’, she began, ‘we’re one of the most indebted countries in the world and our government isn’t very proactive when it comes to tourism. We have a sad record’, she continued, obviously keen to now brand Comoros on my addled mind, ‘which is that we’ve had nineteen coups d’état (no idea where the ‘s’ goes there, just as I’ve no idea if the title is actually French for forgotten island) in the last twenty two years.’ That’s quite a statistic. Nineteen coups! I’ve seen none in my lifetime! Nineteen! That’s loads! And because I said those exclamations as well as writing them here, Dalila did her best to explain why there’d been so many (even handing out wikipedia notes at the end of our chat to make sure I’d understood).

It goes something like this. Comoros is made up of four islands located off the eastern coast of Africa between Madagascar and northern Mozambique. It gained independence from France in 1975 although one of the islands, Mayotte, voted in favour of French rule and is therefore still now officially part of France.

Her island, Anjouan, is perhaps the most contentious of the other three. ‘We have issues with the other islands about where the capital city is’, she said. ‘It’s officially Moroni so all the aid goes there. That’s not particularly fair so in 1995 we decided to have a cessation and got our own government. For the next seven years there were loads of problems and embargoes until a treaty in December 2001 eventually installed the Constitution of the Union of the Comoros which basically meant there’s a federal government on each island’.

But that’s not quite it. Six months ago her own island’s president decided that he wasn’t going to stand down at the end of his term so the central government is now keen to take action against Anjouan. Bearing in mind there are only 200,000 people livng on Anjouan, it’s quite a strange, some might even say farcical situation.

‘Have you ever seen it on the news over here?’ I asked, wondering how I’d missed this political soap opera. ‘Twice’, she said definitively, ‘but only because of Bob Denard. He’s our real bête noir’. Unfortunately I thought she’s said Bob Dylan so by now was utterly lost.

If you want the full story, have a look at wikipedia for yourself, but I’m sure even that will leave you fairly confused. It seems this guy Bob was a mercenary who, for more than twenty years, was apparently paid by the French government (bearing in mind this is all according to wikipedia) to remove presidents from office and replace them with other people who were in turn ousted by opposing factions. As far as I can tell, this happened on at least five occasions with at least a couple of people dying in the process. I think the fact that he’s called Bob made it all a bit too surreal for me, especially the day after the night before and all that.

‘He was on trial in France recently’, said Dalila when we’d reached the end of the unlikely story. ‘But he got off because he was deemed too old’. ‘Deemed too Bob’ I thought, but I didn’t say it because I don’t think it would have made any sense.

The setting for this rather late geography and history lesson was an unfeasibly low-ceilinged mezzanine in an Italian café called Tolli opposite the station. And I should probably mention that about ten minutes into our chat we were joined by Mali (the third person we’ve met with a country for a name), a journalist from Canada who wanted to do a story about our story and this story in particular. Mali is from Montreal. She therefore speaks French (and was in fact keen for us to include French Canada in our list of Countries That Are Countries Despite the UN Not Thinking So considering their constant struggle for independence – I said I’d think about it). Comoros is another French speaking country (there, I’ve thought about it and have indeed granted country status on French Canada) so there were quite a few rather odd minutes while these two strangers from different continents spoke in a language native to another country in another continent which just happened to be located a matter of miles from this particular non-French speaking stranger’s home.

Congratulations on getting through that quagmire of a paragraph.

Dalila was now faced with two people who knew nothing about Comoros scribbling her words into notepads. Luckily, keen to shake off her country’s forgotten status, Dalila saw this as an opportunity rather than an imposition. She told us she’d actually grown up in France ‘like most people from Comoros’ and Mali and I wrote it down. We also noted that her grandparents and dad still live on the islands and that Dalila visits every few years ‘but it’s a nightmare to get to. You have to fly to Sana’a in Yemen and take a rubbish plane from there.’ ‘How much does it cost?’ asked Mali. ‘£1000’, said Dalila. ‘Wow’, gasped the two stenographers.

‘So why did you come to the UK?’ asked Mali next, by now with a tight grip on the interview reins. I was happy to be a passenger, reassured that an actual journalist was asking one of the questions I’ve tended to pose over the last ten months. ‘Well, the situation in France is obviously ridiculous at the moment’, answered Dalila. Mali nodded. I didn’t. I wasn’t really aware of an obviously ridiculous situation in France at the moment. But I wasn’t going to let them know that.

‘The racial tensions?’ prompted Mali. ‘Yeah’, agreed Dalila and I made some sort of noise to indicate both disgust, knowledge of the situation and the fact that I was still at the table. ‘It’s all over France’, she continued. ‘You just can’t get work if you’re black. There’s no way I could get the sort of job I’ve got over here over there’.

‘Really?’ I suddenly blurted out, ‘because of your race?’ I think I’d surprised myself with how shocked I was. I knew racism was prevalent across Europe from hearing and reading about the abuse hurled from football terraces as well as what people like Mohamed from Guinea had told us earlier in the year, but I suppose I’d never met anyone whom it had so directly affected.

‘Oh yes’, said both Mali and Dalila. ‘It’s impossible’, the latter continued. ‘I couldn’t find a temp job all summer in France, then I came here and landed a permanent job within a week. From then on I wasn’t even thinking about going back there. I told my two brothers what had happened and now they’re over here too’.

‘I now work for a charity called Parent Line Plus’, said Dalila with pride. Her job title is Operations and Quality Assurance Officer and I know that’s accurate because Mali is a proper journalist who made Dalila repeat any crucial details. I vowed to start doing things like that too.

‘What do you like about London?’ was the reporter’s next question and Dalila gave the same answer I’d given to Mali when she’d asked Owen and I what people like about the city the day before – ‘it’s so comospolitan.’ It’s true. It’s a defining characteristic of London and one that continues to attract people, despite the negative press it (often referred to more crudely as ‘immigration’) often gets. ‘People don’t look at you here. You can dress how you want. On the tube in France everyone looks at everyone – their clothes, shoes, the way you speak. Here you can dress how you want.’

‘And what do you miss?’ asked Mali – another classic question. ‘Well, the fact that it is forgotten does make it an amazing place to go to get away from things’, replied Dalila, thus ever so slightly weakening her petition for people to remember her homeland. ‘You’re away from everything else in the world. Calling abroad is extortionate and the internet doesn’t usually work. They now have French channels on TV but I go there to escape so I don’t watch them either. I love it. There’s no pollution, no tourists.’

‘It sounds great’, I said, my first words for quite some time now.

‘Yes. And there is potential for tourism’, agreed Dalila. ‘But only if it’s done the right away. Ecotourism – that’s where it’s at. In fact I’ve bought some land myself there recently. One day I hope to return and maybe start a hotel…’

I guess she does want some people to remember Comoros, but not everyone, and I think that’s fair enough. For now, I’m just grateful to have caught her before it’s too late. She won’t be in London for long; ‘I won’t be going back home for a little while but right now I’m moving to Luton’, she said. ‘I live in Stratford and it’s a nightmare with the Olympics. All the prices are going up – not just houses, but everyday things. So in November I’m off to Luton – I can still get to work on the Thameslink and I’ll be able to fly back to my family in Paris whenever I want.’ And whenever they start doing flights from Luton to Comoros, she’ll be in pole position for a slightly quicker journey home.

No.129: Brunei Darussalam

2007-09-06T11:32:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 6th September 2007

Anismah has been working in London for four years, at the Dorchester Hotel. She also lived in Paris for a while, and prefers London as the people dress more sloppily, and you can see that they're being themselves, not posing.

No.128: Grenada

2007-09-06T05:35:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne – 6th September 2007

With less than two months to go, we’re now in the nitty gritty of the project. And when you’re in the nitty gritty of a project it’s always good to know someone like Jim. Jim was in his last year at university when I was in my first. I looked up to him. He was a bigger boy. And an enormous QPR fan. He now works for the new Wembley (alongside the managing director, a man coincidentally called Alex Horne – something people seem to find inordinately amusing).

Jim knows a lot of people. He put in me in touch with Royan. Royan’s from Grenada. Royan and Jim play cricket together.

‘Yeah, Jim came down to the Caribbean a while ago’, chuckled Royan. ‘Unfortunately it rained and rained so the tour was washed out.'

No.127: Montenegro

2007-09-05T17:29:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Slavic Soul

Alex Horne – 5th September 2007

Not for the first time, living in Chesham made my contribution to this London-centric project a lot easier today. There’s a tube-strike on at the moment. It’s inconvenient for everyone (including the tube-workers themselves, I expect – I’m not taking sides here).

Maja, our volunteer from Montenegro (well, her partner read about the project and actually volunteered her) works in Watford and lives in Stanmore. To get to either from almost anywhere in London during a tube-strike would take an Everest-like treck, an Inca-trail-style hike, a bit of a pain at the very least. But from Chesham, even at rush hour, it was a simple – no, a pleasant – half an hour drive. So I felt pretty smug as I turned up, ON TIME, to the Flag, a cavernous pub cleverly located alongside Watford Junction Station, to catch a quick chat with Maja before she caught her bus home.

Montenegro (anyone know the capital? Answer at the bottom of this entry – no prizes for correct answers but you can feel pretty pleased with yourself*) was certainly amongst those countries that I didn’t really know was a country before commencing our quest. I don’t feel too bad about this as it’s easily the most recent of all the UN countries, becoming an independent state in July 2006, a matter of weeks before we set our sights on 192 countries. I found it odd to think of a country being just over a year old. But then I thought it must be even odder for someone who’s actually from that country. How odd it must be to be older than your country – or to suddenly be told you’re from this place, not that place. Maja’s story certainly reflects something of that confusion.

*****

Before we started our ‘interview’ she asked what the project was all about. A good question. I tried to explain. She was keen to know what we were going to do after we’d found all these people. What was next? To be honest, Owen and I don’t really know yet. We’re still a tiny bit worried about finding ‘all these people’. But we know we want to do something – an enormous party, a great big group hug, just massive big kick around – something. I told Maja the truth – we didn’t really have a plan yet. She said that whatever we decided she was happy to help. I thought that was very nice of her.

Just by the way, we’re currently getting a load of emails from people trying to get jobs at at Liverpool’s Capital Of Culture events. They’ve also got the slogan ‘World In One City’ – we both thought of it independently, I promise – and they’ve got the .co.uk email address while we’ve got .com. We’re forwarding on the messages but if people would like to help our more nebulous cause that would be great! (I also wonder if they’re receiving a whole load of emails from people saying ‘I’m from Tuvalu’ or ‘I know a bloke from the Marshall Islands’ – unlikely, but it would be frustrating…)

She then launched into her own story, speaking rapidly in perfect English with what she acknowledges is something approaching an Italian accent…

(Sorry, that’s all for now, will finish soon I promise…)

*It’s Podgorica.

Podgorica! I went for Montenegro City – always worth a guess but actually rarely right. The only genuine ‘Country Plus City Equals Capital’ examples are Guatemala City, Mexico City, Panama City (all Central America-ish) and Kuwait City.

Other useful tactics include:

‘Just Say The Country and Hope For The Best’ which works for Andorra (well, Andorra la Vella but close enough), Sao Tome and Principe (Sao Tome), Luxembourg (Luxembourg), Monaco (Monaco) and Singapore (Singapore).

‘Pick A Port’ – good for Benin (Porto-Novo), Mauritius (Port Louis), Haiti (Port-au-Prince), Trinidad and Tobago (Port-Of-Spain), Papua New Guinea (Port Moresby) and Vanuatu (Port Vila).

‘Select A Saint’ if it’s a small country or island around North America; Antigua and Barbuda (St John’s), Costa Rica (San Jose), Dominican Republic (Santo Domingo), El Salvador (San Salvador), Grenada (St George’s).

And then there are the following ‘Fun Ones’ which you shouldn’t have too much trouble remembering. Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur), Burkina Faso (Ouagadougou), North Korea (Pyongyang), United Arab Emirates (Abu Dhabi), Tuvalu (Funafuti) and Sri Lanka (Colombo – although that’s only the Commercial Capital – the Administrative Capital is the trickier Sri Jayawardenepura-Kotte).

Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, is just about impossible to learn.

No.126: Cameroon

2007-09-04T20:02:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 4th September 2007

Therese arrived in the UK as a student in 1985, sponsored by the Cameroon government to study Business Management - with the intention she would bring her skills back home. However, an economic crisis a few years later meant the government couldn't guarantee her a job, so they suggested she stayed. "It was a blessing," she says, "as I had already met Richard, and wanted to stay with him."

Now they are married, with eight-year-old triplets, and a house in Harrow that has banana trees in the back garden.

When she visits Cameroon again, she's amazed by how much it has changed. As a child, her father's village was traditionally rural. Now the villages have electricity, televisions, and other aspects of modern Western life. "They're not like villages how I used to know them, they’re like .. [Therese casts around for the right comparison] .. Scotland!"

No.125: Liberia

2007-09-01T19:51:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 1st September 2007

I am embarrassed to say that I don't know much of Saga's story. We exchanged a few emails while Alex and I were in Edinburgh (which explains the four week gap between Moldova and Liberia), culminating in an invite from Saga to her daughter's 30th birthday party in a wine bar in Dalston.

I spend the whole day moving house, and so arrive late at the party, when it's in full swing. Saga greets me effusively, I give Doy a box of chocolates, and we all have a very brief chat with very loud backing music. I discover Saga has relatives from Sierra Leone and Antigua and Barbuda, but as hostess she is needed in ten places at once so I spend a lot of time sampling the fantastic food.

The World In One City (in a different city)

2007-08-15T14:17:00.000Z

.
Hello all.

Since the end of July, Alex and Owen have been in Edinburgh, performing solo shows as part of the Fringe Festival. (Alex's is about birdwatching, and Owen's is about coffee shops. You can find out more info by clicking on their names up above).

Naturally, this isn't all that helpful when we've given ourselves only a year to find all these people in London, but we're keeping the momentum up this weekend by performing the first ever 'The World In One City - Live!'. It'll be a fairly informal, chatty show where we'll explain what we've been up to so far and show some footage of us being questioned by George Alagiah on BBC World, amongst other things.

Do come along - it should be a lot of fun. It's on at the Pleasance, this Saturday (18th August) at 3.40pm, and tickets are competitively priced at £3.00.

(Also, this does mean that if anyone wants to speak to us in London, we won't be back there until about the 28th/29th August.)

No.124: Moldova

2007-07-27T11:35:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 27th July 2007

I met Cornelia near to where she works in Liverpool Street. She ran the London Marathon last year as she wanted to do something authentically nutty, like lots of British people.

No.123: Liechtenstein

2007-07-25T19:44:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 25th July 2007

"Liechtenstein is basically eleven villages in the mountains," explains Silke. "Lots of people in London, when I tell them where I am from, say that they have been around in Switzerland and Austria, and been through Liechtenstein. It only takes half an hour to cross by car."

Silke loves London life, and drinks English bitter, and has a very intriguing middle-European accent. When I mention it, and say I can't quite place it, she immediately says, "Please don't say 'Birmingham'," which is apparently what a lot of people think it sounds like.

No.122: Kuwait

2007-07-25T09:57:00.000Z

Full story to follow…

Alex Horne - 25th July 2007

Mishaal went to university in New York in 1990, the same year that the US and UK invaded Kuwait to remove Saddam. If he’d tried to leave a year later it wouldn’t have been possible. ‘That year changed a lot of people’s lives’, he said. He and a friend watched the fighting on CNN.

‘I was firmly anti war’, he continued, ‘but at the same time I felt ‘that’s my country he’s pillaging – I want them to get him out… diplomacy hasn’t worked for so many years’. At that time my view of war changed. After continued aggression you have to respond to defend. That’s the only way to get back to diplomacy.’

Mishaal, meanwhile, found himself swept up in the internet revolution of the early nineties: ‘It was very exciting and creative. People would just walk in with money making offers. I worked on the first internet banking system. The US was where it was at. That’s why I never considered going back to Kuwait’.

He’s currently working with some scientists at Imperial College on a business plan for a medical device that employs biotechnology to do something that he explained in detail but which I couldn’t really understand.

No.121: Vanuatu

2007-07-24T11:50:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 24th July 2007

Dan was born in Vanuatu when it was still jointly ruled by Britain and France, and came to the UK with his (British) missionary parents when he was four. He's a music producer now, although he's tempted to join the Vanuatuan Olympic team as it's just "Six guys and a flag".

No.120: Malawi

2007-07-24T11:25:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 24th July 2007

Chikondi has worked in London for two years as a Policy and Advocacy Advisor for the VSO, trying to influence international organisations like the IMF and World Bank on teaching issues. She has four children under ten years old (the youngest was born in London) and they've all adapted well to big city life.

No.119: Seychelles

2007-07-24T06:06:00.000Z

Treasure Islands

Alex Horne – 24th July 2007

According to one of the many dubious dictionaries on the net, a blog is supposed to be ‘an online diary; a personal chronological log of thoughts published on a web page’. So I feel I should apologise for this one’s chronological shortcomings and the growing number of entries that have not yet been entered, weeks and months after the relevant country was added.

So far we’ve resisted the temptations of Facebook and other online communities that could well make our search a lot simpler, mainly because we feel there’ll be more interesting stuff to write about if we have to find our people by ourselves using our feet and our mouths. What this does mean, however, is that we end up spending an awful lot of time wandering around London and only a tiny (the opposite of awful?) amount of time sitting in front of our computers, typing up our adventures.

Yesterday* however, we both headed up to Edinburgh for a month at the festival, when and where we plan to ignore the fact that we’re in the wrong capital for a large chunk of our year and use at least some of that time Getting Our Blog in Order. So if you’re waiting for your story to appear here soon, apologies again, but hopefully it will materialise in the near(ish) future.

In the meantime I do want to hastily write about my most recent encounters, if only to make my Scottish workload appear just slightly lighter.

*****

I met two guys a week ago today, Phillip and Stephen, both 26 years old, both white, both university-educated, both with pretty similar backgrounds to my own. We all grew up in close-knit communities in fairly idyllic surroundings (some more idyllic than others, admittedly), and are all now based in London (well, very near London in my case), returning to our childhood homes every now and again for a few breaths of fresh air.

The gap between Phillip’s two worlds is substantially more pronounced than mine or Stephen’s. He was born and spent most of his formative years with 80,000 other people in the Seychelles, a small group of islands off the east coast of Africa. He currently works at Freshfields, one of the world’s largest corporate law firms, and we met in Room 45 on the 6th floor of their impressive offices, overlooking Big Ben, the Patent Office and the Royal Courts of Justice, to where coffee and biscuits were brought midway through the interview making me feel, for once, like I actually had some business in this neck of the woods.

‘I came to the UK to do my GCSEs’, he told me, ‘because my family knew it would be much easier to get on in life once you're in a system like the one here. Obviously you can do well if you stay in the Seychelles but it’s just a lot harder if you’re not on the track’. And so he’s been here ever since, collecting A-levels and a Law degree before qualifying and landing a job at Freshfields two and a half years ago - the British track well and truly trodden.

He used to fly home every holiday (‘it’s amazing how many friends you suddenly make when people find out you’re from a place like that’) and still returns annually to what he freely admits is the closest thing to paradise. ‘You take it for granted when you grow up there’, he said, ‘but now I go back and realise that it really is an amazingly beautiful place’.

He was raised on the most northerly island, three degrees south of the equator, a rock named Bird Island after the three million sooty terns that summer there. I, of course, got over-excited about this (the show I’m doing here at the Fringe is called Birdwatching and is about Birdwatching, inspired by the fact that my Dad is a Birdwatcher. If that tickles your fancy – and I don’t see why it shouldn’t – you can read more about the show here) and explained my own birding heritage. We bonded about dads. Phillip’s, it emerged, is a hotel developer (the Seychelles' biggest industries are tourism and tuna and I can’t help thinking he chose the less predictable option), now retired, who used to pretty much run the ecologically renowned island. He learnt his birds on Bird Island. And he learnt his hotels on a course in the UK where Phillip’s mum was training to be a teacher and living, coincidentally, with a girl from the Seychelles. They met and married within six months. ‘A year later, they moved to the Seychelles - to my grandparents' dismay, I imagine’, said Phillip.

Indeed. I can’t imagine my parents-in-law being entirely thrilled by their daughter being whisked off to a far-flung island after an eighteen month relationship. My wife currently lives on the island next door to her home (we live in England, her family in N.Ireland), and I know even that’s sometimes a struggle for such a close family.

But I did like the idea that within two years of meeting someone, Phillip’s mum’s world could have been turned so literally upside down.

It all seemed so surreal. Us, sitting in a room on top of London, so much in common, except for the fact that he grew up on a tropical island where adults still dig for pirate’s treasure in the hope of finding gold (‘I know one bloke who’s been digging the same hole for the last twenty years. He’s using an enormous drill at the moment. I can’t help wondering how the pirates would have got it in that deep…’).

I pondered the whole situation for a while and it did cross my mind that it could all just be an elaborate hoax. A remarkably well-researched and quite pointless hoax, but a hoax nevertheless. I told him his story was so fantastic, I just couldn’t believe it. He smiled and showed me a picture he’d taken of Bird Island on his phone. Evidence! I succumbed. He’s a cracking laywer.

To be honest, I never really had any doubts. That was just a bit of fun. We were getting on well enough to have a bit of fun after twenty minutes. We probably won’t end up moving to a desert island together but I could imagine us staying in touch. Like I said, we had a lot in common. And anyway, we’ve met enough people now not to be surprised by these exotic backgrounds. What’s more, paradise is never that simple. Fuelled by the freshly brewed and delivered coffee, Phillip went on to tell me about the political problems masked by the Seychelles’ make up.

‘It’s officially the most indebted country per capita in the world’, Philip revealed in typically precise legal English. ‘That’s not a particularly well publicised fact’.

True. I also didn’t know that apart from the odd visit by people like Vasco Da Gama around 1500, the islands weren’t actually populated until the French briefly settled in the eighteen hundreds then the British got even more comfortable in 1812. One hundred and sixty four years later, the Brits kindly granted the island independence, meaning the population today is, to me, quite a bizarre mix of people descended from European colonists, African slaves and Chinese and Indian traders.

He and his family actually left for a while in 1982, when the country was ‘quite a communist sort of place … Having only recently gained independence from Britain and with my mum being British I think we were urged to leave.’

Now the blend is settling, with the islanders speaking a combination of French, English and Seychellois Creole, apparently at random. The last was recognised as an official language in 1995, the only Creole to have such recognition (unlike those spoken in Reunion, Mauritius or the southern states of the USA). When Phillip’s Dad was being educated at a Jesuit college in the islands some forty or fifty years ago, the language was strictly prohibited. Last week, Phillip spoke to his Gran on the phone, almost entirely in her native tongue.

I still can’t quite imagine this London lawyer growing up on the beaches, speaking the languages, surrounded by sooty terns. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can ask for an invitation to see and hear it all with my own eyes and ears just yet.

*****

From Philip’s office I took the central line three stops west to Oxford Circus where I met Stephen in the doorway of the Nike Shop, a place I’ve never actually dared to enter but an excellent spot to locate foreign strangers in London’s most ridiculously busy crossroads – especially if, like me, you’re wearing yellow shoes.

Now, Stephen also grew up on an island, one with an even smaller population of just 65,000. He too studied in the UK and now works in one of Soho’s many post production houses. The only major difference between his story and Philip’s is that Stephen lives in Guernsey. And Guernsey, according to the UN, is not a country.

Stephen contacted us after reading about the project in one of London’s free papers. He immediately checked our Countries Found List, saw we hadn’t got Guernsey and fired off an email. It never even crossed his mind that Guernsey wasn’t ever on our Countries Wanted List.

While I have some difficulty remembering whether the likes of Taiwan, Kurdistan and Reunion are recognized by the UN or not, I don’t think I’ve really given the Channel Islands a second thought. ‘Part of the UK’, I would have muttered. ‘If we’re not counting England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland separately, I don’t see why the Channel Islands should be given special treatment’. But, like I say, I don’t think I ever gave it more than the one thought.

What I didn’t realise, and what Stephen was keen to inform me, however, was that Guernsey does have a number of strongish claims to Being a Proper Country and that the people of Guernsey do indeed presume that designation.

He kicked off with the statement: ‘I’m still not used to the English weather’, which immediately put me on the back foot. ‘Surely it’s not that different?’ I asked, a little aggressively, presuming that Guernsey was just a matter of yards away from the Isle of Wight.

Stephen silently drew me a map. And he drew it with such speed and precision that I had no doubt he’d drawn it for several other ignorant Brits in the past. It turns out Guernsey is just off the coast of France, not England, (although, I still insist the weather can’t be that different), and is only affiliated with Britain now because it stayed loyal to the Duke of Normandy back in 1066.

He went on to describe Guernsey’s own currency - ‘try using a Guernsey £1 note in London’ - Guernsey’s own accent - ‘unfortunately it’ll die out with my Grandfather’s generation, nearly all the kids were evacuated to England during World War II and it’s been diluted ever since’ - and Guernsey’s own government - ‘as I understand it, we’re loyal to the Queen but not to the British Government. We have our own one called The States of Deliberation’ - all of which, he insisted, meant that Guernsey is as much a country as France or, indeed, the Seychelles.

And, just to conclude, here are five other statements that Stephen made and which did eventually sort of convince me that Guernsey is sort of probably a country of sorts:

1. ‘I hold a Bailiwick Guernsey Passport’

2. ‘University in Britain was a massive culture shock. When I was growing up Guernsey was absolutely a white Christian place. I think I had one Chinese friend. Then I went to Manchester University and remember being stunned by my ignorance – ‘why are those people wearing those funny hats?’, I thought to myself. And it was even more of a shock moving to London.’

3. ‘I used to shoot for the school against France and England’.

4. ‘People always ask me ‘why aren’t you French?’, ‘are you cheating on your tax?’ and ‘do you have electricity?’ (I didn’t, but did ask him which one of Graeme Le Saux and Matt Le Tissier was from Guernsey. It’s Le Tissier. Le Saux’s from Jersey. So Guernsey definitely wins that one).

5. ‘It costs me as much to fly home as it does to get to New York’.

*I’m writing this on July 31st, not July 24th, but the Country Concerned was Encountered on July 24th so that’s what I’ve put on the Blog Date. It’s a muddly system.

No.118: Mali

2007-07-23T11:28:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 23rd July

Cisse met his British wife Anne in Mali last year, and only moved to London a month ago. He's learning English, but is already a big fan of Amy Winehouse and 'Curb Your Enthusiasm'.

No.117: Sierra Leone

2007-07-21T19:34:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 21st July 2007

When Patricia is in London, she says she's from Sierra Leone, but when she went back to Sierra Leone earlier this year (for the first time in over twenty years) she felt like a foreigner. "Most of my friends," she laughs, "tell me that I'm such an English lady."

We meet in a bookshop cafe the day after the latest Harry Potter has come out, and Patricia's two young daughters look suitably excited. "I tell them that they are lucky to be growing up here," she says. "I moved to London when I was eleven - if I had stayed in Sierra Leone through the civil war there, then things would have been very hard for me."

No.116: Bahrain

2007-07-20T17:54:00.000Z

Keeping Up Appearances

Alex Horne – 20th July 2007

Ohood is Arabic for ‘promises’. It’s a fine name inferring trust and potential. Not just one promise either, promises. And the Ohood I met has already lived up to the challenge of her moniker.

We hooked up for a coffee by Chancery Lane (she’d found us, of course, I merely answered her email and set up a meeting) and I quickly discovered that this was a girl going places. Maybe it was partly because I’d met her in the same location, but she reminded me a lot of Violeta, the impressive young lady from The Democratic Republic of Congo. On both occasions I came away thinking both that London was lucky to have them and I to meet them.

Ohood arrived in the UK from Bahrain in the year 2000 when she was just sixteen years old. Her parents are Muslim but wanted a secular British education for their daughter so sent her to a tiny Vatican run Catholic school called Sacred Hearts in Hamad, a ‘government city’ built outside the capital Manama. There she excelled, winning a scholarship that took her from this tiny, intimate seat of learning to Cheltenham College, a large and alarming British boarding school. ‘It was very different and so was I’, recalled Ohood. ‘I spoke American English and my accent was much worse then! Did I enjoy it? It was an experience...’

Ohood represented half of all the Muslims at Cheltenham and was the only Arab in her year, but once again, she thrived. The scholarship she’d modestly mentioned was actually the Royal Crown Prince Scholarship, one of just six handed out each year in Bahrain. ‘I’m meant to represent Bahrain over here’, she admitted shyly, ‘like an ambassador’. After leaving school with an impressive set of A-levels she completed a BA at LSE then an MSC at SOAS – and when you’ve got that many initials on your CV I think it’s fair to say you’re representing your country pretty well.

‘My masters is in development studies’, she told me, ‘but since August I’ve also been working for a company called Ralph Appelbaum that’s building museums in Dubai and, yes, Bahrain’. This is a pretty cool job for someone so fresh out of college. She’s effectively freelancing for a globally respected company, dishing out advice on her country’s new national museum. ‘It’s already been built’, she explained, ‘now they’re doing the exhibits and it’s up to me to sort out what information goes with the interactive bits. It was meant to open in September but it’s all running a tiny bit late so it’ll probably be more like February’. ‘Sounds familiar’, I said. ‘Wembley!’ she nodded. ‘Yes’, I smiled. I was bantering with an ambassador.

Ohood is 23 years old now (well, 24 and a half if you’re using the Islamic system of counting the moon’s cycles rather than the sun’s). I told her, as politely as possible, that she seems a lot older than that. Perhaps it’s this youth that makes her so ambitious. ‘This job is just to keep me going’, she told me as we neared the bottom of our coffee cups. ‘I want to go into banking and the emerging markets next. But I would love to stay in London. I feel more at home here than in Bahrain – it’s wierd – I did my growing up here. This is where my social network is. I guess I found myself here’.

Like I said at the beginning, that’s good news for us and good news for London. I told her I thought she was an excellent ambassador for Bahrain. Ohood, however, was worried she wasn’t pleasing everyone. ‘My mum is waiting for me to get married to a Bahrainian’, she said with a slightly nervous smile. ‘Most girls marry between the ages of 21 and 25’. I didn’t ask which way her mother counted but tried to reassure her that she needn’t worry too much. Reading between the lines I can’t help thinking her parents (and namers) are justly proud of their daughter. They grew up in a council flat in Manama before moving to Hamad, her dad working as an engineer, her mum as a headmistress, and even with their combined income, Ohood told me it would have been impossible for her to study in England. For a girl brought up on Mallory Towers and Keeping Up Appearances (yes! in Bahrain! Is no-one safe?) to now be doing what she’s doing where’s she’s doing it in the manner she’s doing it is no mean feat. In her own words, ‘this really is a dream come true’.

No.115: Angola

2007-07-20T14:30:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 20th July 2007

Yesterday, Alex and I appeared on BBC World's lunchtime news show, being interviewed by George Alagiah. (The show has a potential worldwide audience of 250 million people - none of whom live in London, so maybe more of a potential humiliation than a help).

Right at the end of the interview, George cheekily threw us a curve-ball and announced, live on air, that he'd met an Angolan the night before. This was amazing. Without taking my make-up off, I left the BBC and went straight to Grays Inn Road - but the Angolan, a chef, had just finished his shift.

Going back today, I managed to meet Miguel. He's working in London for a year, taking a break from his degree in Sheffield, and cooks in a tiny kitchen alongside colleagues from Brazil and Portugal, all speaking Portuguese.

No.113: Azerbaijan

2007-07-18T14:03:00.000Z

"I Look Foreign"

Alex Horne – 18th July 2007

Because we’ve now got people tracking us down instead of us unearthing them, we sometimes find ourselves in situations when we’re meeting strangers in fairly random London locations having only exchanged an email or two. What this means practically – and what we seem to only realise when it’s too late – is that we often don’t know what the person we’re going to meet is going to look like. Or, even more crucially, whether they’re going to be male or female.

On this occasion, waiting to meet someone called Jeyhun from Azerbaijan outside Shepherds Bush tube station, I had a hunch I was going to be meeting a girl. It just looked like a girl’s name to me.

I sent a text to say I’d be wearing yellow shoes.

I received one back which read ‘I’ve got a green t shirt on and I look foreign!’ I found this quite funny. Not all that helpful, but quite amusing. Until I started looking round for a green-shirted foreigner and realised, not for the first time, that pretty much everyone in London ‘looks foreign’. Everyone looks different. And that’s kind of the point of the project.

When Jeyhun eventually found me (very few people have yellow shoes) he wasn’t a girl. And, of course, he looked no more foreign than anyone else. We found the nearest Starbucks, I bought him a coffee and we started to chat.

Never having met someone from Azerbaijan before but having eaten my first Armenian meal just weeks before and knowing that the two countries are neighbours I chose to open the conversation with a description of the restaurant. ‘Oh yeah’, said Jeyhun after I’d been going for a couple of minutes, ‘you know we’re fighting them’. ‘Oh no’, I said, ‘I didn’t know that’. But I wasn’t surprised. I’ve learnt pretty quickly that there are an awful lot of wars going on in the world that I don’t know about.

‘Actually it’s pretty much stopped now’, Jeyhun continued. ‘They’ve taken what they wanted’.

Jeyhun is 27 years old. He arrived here three years ago and has since married and divorced an English girl. He told me he likes the UK, ‘not because I can earn money, but because it’s democratic. If you’re talented you’ll do fine. If you work hard you can do it. I think that’s great’.

Jeyhun works hard in a gym round the corner from the café in White City. But things aren’t completely rosy in his particular view of cosmopolitan London. ‘There are too many Poles here now’, he said. ‘They are spoiling the name of foreigners. The local people have started complaining and they look at me and think I’m Polish. It wasn’t like this before but now we’re all lumped together’.

There has been a lot of varied reaction to the undeniably large number of Polish immigrants recently and it was interesting to hear the opinions of a fellow Eastern European immigrant on the subject. He was keen to point out he has nothing against Polish people per se, it’s just the high concentration of them that makes people uneasy and therefore has an effect on his life.

‘I work with lots of Polish people in the gym’, he told me, ‘and they’re lovely. But even they say the situation is not right. One of them has a brother who runs a business back in Warsaw but he can’t recruit people any more because they’re all over here. He says the only people left are over fifty years old.’

We returned to the subject of Armenia and, in particular, Edward, the Armenian guy I'd interviewed; ‘Did he have a big nose?’ asked Jeyhun with a broad smile. ‘And your person from Georgia, were they very stern?’ I told him I wasn’t not too sure on either count and evidently looked quite concerned about his line of questioning. ‘Oh no’, he reassured me, ‘we’re all the same – Georgian, Armenian, Azerbaijani – we really are all the same. We group ourselves together. We’re all Caucasians’ (referring to the Caucasus mountains that separate Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan from Russia and which Berdia, our Georgian, had also been keen to praise).

Jeyhun left the region for good when he was twenty three but he’d already visited Britain nine years before that. ‘In 1995 I came here for a swimming competition’, he explained. ‘That’s how I fell in love with England and the English language. I’m self-taught in English now. The competition was in Bath’ – we both, inevitably, chuckled about particular linguistic gem – ‘I know’, he acknowledged, ‘but it’s a beautiful place’.

After leaving school back home, Jeyhun worked in Azerbaijan's capital as a swimming teacher and fitness instructor then moved over to the UK as soon as he was able. ‘I used to miss Baku for the first year’, he told me, ‘and I still miss my family and friends but I’m used to the lifestyle and being independent. It’s different. When I go home I miss London so much – I miss meeting so many people, I miss the big flow of people. In Baku even the town centre is quiet.’

Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. In a couple of weeks he’s taking a British friend of his back to see his homeland and it’s clear he’s looking forward to the trip with some pride; ‘I did some research on the internet and found out that out of the eleven main climates in the world, nine of them can be found in Azerbaijan. It’s a little country but there’s an amazing climate. You can grow cotton, grapes, walnuts, apples, bananas, kiwis, everything’.

I asked him why it’s not more prosperous. ‘It is. Or at least it was, but then there was so much corruption. The government is clamping down now but all the wealth went to just a few people’. To demonstrate he showed me a picture he’d taken on his phone the week before of two expensive looking cars with the number plates B8AKU and B7AKU. ‘I found these outside some massive house’, he told me. ‘Some people became rich after communism. There were a few billionaires. But there were a lot of poor people’.

‘Have you found many people from Azerbaijan in London?’ I asked him. ‘You’ll like this’, he said with a smile. ‘When I came over I know there was one person from my old school here already. Then one day I was walking around Wimbledon and just bumped into this guy waiting to do a driving lesson. Neither of us could believe it. We just stood there gobsmacked. It’s such a huge place but we’d found each other. I hadn’t seen him in ten years and I didn’t know which language to speak in!’

I did like it.

It started to rain outside (no need for ‘outside’, I guess, but there it is). ‘Ah, I love the rain’, sighed Jeyhun. ‘Baku is by the Caspian Sea and it’s always windy. I hate that’.

He did, however, seem happy, for the most part, in London. In fact, he seemed like a typical Londoner – if that’s not an oxymoron considering the third paragraph of this entry.

I guess he seemed happily grumpy. ‘For me it’s difficult to stay here’, he muttered before we said goodbye, ‘but for the Polish it’s easy’. It’s a favourite topic of conversation amongst Londoners and Jeyhun has his unique own angle: ‘It costs £30 to get to Poland but £366 to get to Azerbaijan. Is that fair?’ I didn’t answer. His self-taught English was pretty much perfect and I thought it was probably meant as a rhetorical question. Either way, I really don’t know the answer. It’s quite complex this immigration issue.

No.114: United Arab Emirates

2007-07-18T09:59:00.000Z

Full story to follow...

Alex Horne – 18th July 2007

I met Sava and her friend Nilpa by the escalators of the shopping centre on Hounslow High Street. They were both in school uniform. I felt just a tiny bit dodgy.

Hounslow is a cosmopolitan corner of London as close to Heathrow distance-wise as it is in spelling terms. Closer even. As you walk past M&S, HMV and KFC you are constantly aware of planes swooping yards above your head. It’s a place you’re always conscious of immigration.

Sava herself is 17. She lived in the U.A.E for fourteen years but says she prefers school in London; ‘the people are much friendlier’.

Nilpa, by the way, is brilliant. She wants to be a sports journalist and later supplied us with the phone numbers of both Emmanuel Eboue and Kolo Toure’s agents. They are from the Ivory Coast and play football for Arsenal (at the other Emirates of course). Unfortunately that meant they were too busy to talk either to us or Nilpa.

Read all about it!

2007-07-15T09:39:00.000Z

Hello!

Two or three bits of exciting news this morning.

Firstly, we've only got 80 more people to find - which sounds simultaneously quite daunting and very easy. 80 people isn't very many. It's possible, although unlikely, that we could find them all in one go inside one of London's famous bendy buses. It really isn't many people at all.

Secondly, we're in the Observer today. A lovely article by Juliette Jowit and photos of Benjy, Ligia, Berdia and Paola.

Thirdly, we're planning our forthcoming 'The World in One Picnic' on Sunday 22nd July. If you're one of the 112 people we've met so far you'll be getting an email this week about it, but if you're from Andorra, the Marshall Islands or the Central African Republic (etc) and want to come along then email us (worldinonecity@hotmail.com) and we'll let you know where it is!

Owen and Alex

No.111: Vietnam

2007-07-12T11:07:00.000Z

Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 12th July 2007

Nguyen works at the Loong Kee Cafe, a Vietnamese restaurant on Kingsland Road, where he recommends you try the Sizzling Fish and Steamed Spring Roll with Prawns.

No.s 108, 109, 110 & 112: Albania, Finland, Uganda and Senegal

2007-07-11T15:09:00.000Z

A Typical London Day

Alex Horne - 11th July 2007

Actually, this isn’t really a typical day. Most Londoner’s days aren’t really like this. And most of my days aren’t really like this either. But today has been typically unpredictable - which is, I suppose, quite typical of London and really quite typical of our year so far.

So here’s what happened:

6.15am: Wake up and impulsively/sleepily decide to catch a lift with Rachel into London (from Chesham. I live in Chesham now).

8.00am: Arrive at White City, where Rachel works, and spend two hours in a café; the first properly waking up, the second writing up my Antiguan story. Not entirely, obviously, that won’t be done for another few weeks, but I make a start.

10.30am: Head down to Whitehall for an interview with the Daily Politics on BBC2 (I occasionally get asked to do these things and genuinely have no real idea why me. It’s fun though, so I’m happy to say yes and go along with it. I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m boasting). Mention the project to the Politics Team, none of whom can think of anyone from any of our Wanted Countries.

1pm: Comment on Gordon Brown’s first and second Prime Minister’s Questions on the bit of green in front of Big Ben, live to the nation (well, I think they get about 500,000 viewers – still a terrifying herd of people if you could actually see them).

1.30pm: Wander back to the tube across Parliament Square. Notice a six-foot (king-size?) inflatable puffin. Wander over and bump into an (or ‘a’?) RSPB spokesperson whom I also happened to bump into the previous week at a Birdwatching preview. Lembit Opik is posing with the Puffin in a bid to highlight the plight of British sea birds. I was watching him ask Gordon Brown a question just half an hour ago. The RSPB lady gives me a puffin pin-badge so I can highlight the plight too. I’m wearing a smartish suit with a yellow t-shirt and yellow shoes. I think the puffin complements my outfit nicely.

2pm: Notice a mid-size protest on the far side of the square, near that gnarled peace protester whom I childishly idolise a little. Don’t recognize the flags that these other protesters are holding so sidle over to investigate.

2.30pm: Sidle away again after chatting to a man called Mustaf for ten minutes. He and his fellow campaigners are from a place called Ogaden in Somalia. I haven’t heard of Ogaden. I guess that’s why they’re holding banners explaining the situation there. The situation being, according to Mustaf, Ethiopian troops carrying out ethnic cleansing against the Somali civilian population for the last month. Mustaf understandably wants the world to at least take notice and, ideally, intervene. ‘The world cannot afford another Rwanda and Darfur’, reads a slogan. He’s very glad to tell me the story. I promise to at least mention it here but, as so often in these situations, felt slightly pathetic and useless.

3pm: Take the tube to High Street Kensington and walk an incomplete but enormous circle via Shepherds Bush and Kensington Park, ending up at Queensway having knocked on the doors of three different churches which Philippe (our French fellow nationality collector) thought may contain traces of Kiribati. In the first I meet a Lithuanian who says there are at least twenty different nations represented in their congregration but nobody from a Pacific island. In the second, the Parish Church of John the Baptist on Holland Road, I'm greeted by a Priest who says, ‘oh yes, I saw you two on the telly!’ when I tell him what we we're doing, which is nice if slightly odd. He also tells me that followers of the Eritrean Church (the oldest in Christianity) worship there from 6.30am to 12.30pm every Sunday and might just attract a Kiribatian. I say I might return. He understands. The third is shut.

3.15pm: During the walk I come across an enormous map of the world, still in it’s cylindrical casing, that someone has discarded in a skip. I pick it up. I don’t know if that’s theft and I’m not sure that my wife will completely approve but it seems like a good omen. I’ve found the world in the city. Over the past four weeks I’ve also bought one light-up globe, three different sized inflatable globes, one hug-me globe cushion, two pocket atlases and one map of the world shower curtain.

3.30pm: Arrive at The Cow on Westbourne Park Road (a pub, not a particularly well-known animal) and ask for Ousmane, a Senegalese chef whom Philippe said had worked there three years previously. Am amazed to discover he still works there now. Although not today. Today’s his day off. I say I might return. This time I mean it.

4pm: Drink a beer. I don’t often have a beer at 4pm but I feel like I’ve earnt it. Also call Jeyhun, a guy from Azerbaijan who’d contacted us that week. We arrange to meet the following week. Then, Ilia, a guy from Albania who’d been recommended by Owen’s Hungarian. I was excited because she’d mentioned in passing that he had quite a life story that possibly involved the mafia somewhere along the line. We arrange to meet the following hour.

5pm: Arrive at Piccadilly Circus Tube station and manage to find Ilia by calling each other and saying things like ‘Are you there? Yes, I can see you… no, behind you, there… I’m the guy with the yellow shoes… yes, there you are! Should I say goodbye?! Hello?’

5.05pm: Enter a Starbucks. Ilia sits down at the only spare table.

5.20pm: I finally sit down at the table with our coffees after a very awkward quarter of an hour during which I keep glancing back at Ilia, rolling my eyes and shrugging as charmingly as I could at how slow the staff are being. Ilia does his best to do the same gesture back.

5.25pm: After a tiny bit of small talk (that really is little), he starts to tell me his story. It’s a strange one. I’ll try to keep it simple.

Ilia is twenty five years old. He’s got long hair and is the youngest of nine siblings. The rest of his family all live in Greece now. But Ilia lives in London. And he’s currently writing the script for the movie of his life.

I tell him a movie of my life would be a pretty dull movie. He smiles: ‘some people have easy lives, some have it tough.’

Ilia left home when he was eleven years old. He remembers going out of his front door and seeing his mother wash his clothes in rainwater. She was sick and weak with rheumatism. He told her that he was going to leave to work so he could buy her a washing machine. She said ‘no, you’re too young’. He said, ‘one day, I will’. Later that day he ran away. He’s only been back once, seven years ago.

Ilia started working on the mountains, looking after the sheep. He worked seven days and seven nights a week. He told me he saw bodies of people who’d died from hunger or cold.

At the age of thirteen he got a job as a butcher.

At the age of sixteen he came to London.

He’s now the manager of a bar in Green Park.

Unfortunately he’s not willing to share the rest of his tale at this stage. It seems that various people have approached him recently with the idea of writing it up, filming it or some how using it to make money for themselves. He’s therefore wary of giving too much away just yet. He says we should meet up in a week and he’ll tell me some more. I say that'd be great. I’m engrossed.

We still have half our coffees left so chat more generally about Albania. I learn that Ilia’s father was the highest ranking general in the army and tried desperately to protect his family from the violence that was spreading rapidly across the country. ‘Everyone had guns’, he tells me. ‘Everyone was in the army. If you said ‘fuck you’ to someone they would shoot you dead’.

6pm: Say goodbye to Ilia, shake his hand with as much strength as I can muster and tell him I’m looking forward to seeing him again soon, desperate to win his trust. Take the tube up and along to Old Street.

7pm: Finally meet our Fin. This was quite a different chat. We’d actually crossed paths some weeks previously at a gig by a band called Seeing Scarlet whom my friend Tom plays guitar for (have I said before that I’m in awe and envy of all musically talented people? If I haven’t, well, I am. And he’s one of those people. Very very nice but annoyingly gifted). Paivi is a friend of the band and we drunkenly agreed that she would be our Finnish Find as the evening came to a close. Now she takes me to the Foundry, an indescribably cool bar on Old Street, outside which we sit on two rickety chairs and talk. I’m glad to discuss slightly more trivial matters. Like tattoos.

Paivi has quite a collection of tattoos. Whenever she goes to the tattoo parlour, she will always get two done at the same time. She’s now developed a friendship with her tattoo artist. ‘I used to be into piercings’, she says, ‘but now I’m a bit too old for that’. I shyly tell her about my one tattoo – a tiny lizard on my right arm that I got in New Zealand when I was eighteen. I’ve always secretly been quite proud of it. But one’s enough for me.

I ask what her mum thinks of all hers. ‘She’s cute’, she says. ‘She sometimes says things like ‘don’t you think that’s enough?’ and ‘but what if you change your mind?’ but she reckons they’re beautiful. She’s always been supportive. She told us ‘as long as you do your A-levels, after that you can do what you want’.'

Paivi’s favourite tattoo is of an actual-size jar of marmite on the nape of her neck. ‘I love marmite. And I love tattoos’, she tells me. I say that makes sense. She tells me she likes symmetrical designs and was inspired by the Henna Night held for the bride before an Indian wedding. She has a sari of her own that she treasures. ‘It’s six metres of fabric – amazing - that’s all you need!’

Paivi is a creative type. She took a course in tailoring a couple of years ago and now buys her fabric from Green Street in Walthamstow. She makes her living playing music with her brother (they’re called the Dirty Fingernails and are great – www.myspace.com/yourfavouriteband) but also prints t-shirts and makes backdrops for other bands.

She’s 27 years old and very close to her brother. They live together and started the band eighteen months ago, initially looking for a drummer and bass player to join them but then deciding to do it all themselves. ‘It’d be difficult for a stranger to fit in’, she tells me. ‘Instead we’ve got an octave pedal on the guitar and drum machine I bought on ebay for a tenner. And now no one’s ever going to say they can’t make it to a rehearsal because they’ve got a date or something. We’re both in it together’.

Paivi goes back to see the rest of her family once a year. ‘Home is up north, near Lapland. That’s where we lived the longest. We’ve moved around a lot, in different cities and villages but I’ve never lived in Helsinki.’ Her mum works in a school teaching Russian and sport.

Will she stay in London, I ask. ‘Oh yeah!’ she replies with certainty. ‘I don’t want to go back to Finland. There are eight million people in London and only six million in Finland! I like English people and different cultures. In Finland there isn’t that mix. Also, I’ve been a vegan for ten years. Here I can get all the food I need in supermarkets. I don’t like fake meat – I live off salads and soups. But in Finland there was nothing.’

By now the temperature is beginning to drop at the close of what’s been a rare sunny summer’s day (this really isn’t a typical day). We’ve been talking for an hour and I’m late for my next appointment. I rush awkwardly off.

8.30pm: Arrive out of breath at Little Venice where I meet up with four of my old (British, unfortunately) school friends on a barge owned by the parents of one of them. The five of us sail (chug?) to Camden and back, swigging beer and reminiscing as we pass London Zoo and the West Way.

11.30pm. By now I’m fairly tired and drunk and can’t really get back to Chesham without incurring a £50 taxi fare. I phone my friend Tom and ask to stay in his flat in Kentish Town.

11.45pm. Get off the tube at Willesden Green expecting to get the overland train to Kentish Town West. Am told that the last one left half an hour ago. Ah. Stumble out of the station and into the street, eventually gaining my bearings and aiming for Harlesden – not one of London’s more innocent corners, especially this close to midnight, and especially when you’re wearing quite a bizarre combination of clothes.

11.55pm. Manage, eventually, to locate the only minicab firm on the High Street and settle, relieved, in the front seat. The combination of exhaustion, alcohol and not being mugged makes me unable to stop talking so I quickly learn that my driver is from Uganda. I get out my file, persuade him to join our project and scribble down some notes. As far as I can tell, David’s story goes something like this:

He’s been in London for the last twelve years and is now thirty seven years old. There was a civil war in Uganda when he was eleven or twelve and the memories are still fresh in his mind today. Idi Amin assumed power in 1971 after Uganda had become an independent nation (as opposed to a UK protectorate) in 1962. ‘According to Amin, if you wanted to be Ugandan you had to paint yourself black every morning’, says David drily. ‘He’s been dead now for three years, thank God’.

I’m scrawling my notes in our World In One City Panini Sticker Album style folder and as we stop at some traffic lights near Kilburn David’s eyes fall upon the flag. ‘Yes, that’s it’, he says. It’s a memorable flag: six horizontal stripes; red, yellow, black, red, yellow, black, with a picture of a crane (the bird, not the mechanical device for lifting) in the middle. ‘The black is for the black country’, he tells me, ‘the yellow for sunshine and the red for brotherhood’. ‘And the crane?’ I ask. ‘Oh well that’s our national bird. If you kill it you go to prison’, he said. ‘Oh yes’, I say. ‘I think we have the same system with swans here. But they didn’t get the nod on the flag’.

He tells me he loves London. ‘The colonial era doesn’t matter to me. But the policy of divide and rule still affects my country. We still have a huge tribalism problem’. He misses the UK when he returns to Uganda. He goes back every year to see a girl there. He says he’s also got girlfriends in Arizona and Cranleigh. At least I think that’s what I’ve writen. And then I notice we’re outside my friend’s house. I say goodbye and thank you to David.

12.30am: Try to sleep on a leather sofa and realise why most people don’t have leather sheets.

*****

P.S.

The next day I meet up with Owen and walk for miles around East London to find someone from Viet Nam and no one from Laos or Cambodia. I’m sure he’ll tell you about that soon. I then head back to The Cow and successfully hook up with Ousmane, the chef from Senegal.

He’s cooking lunch at the time – it’s a terrific pub, with an open kitchen at the end of the bar and trays of oysters and crabs piled high on the side. He’s conconcting some sort of seafood pasta while chatting to me and in between seasoning and stirring the sauce in the way that only chefs can he tells me he’s been in London since 1991. He’s forty two now and has always been a cook. He came to the UK in the hope of getting a job and developing more skills and it’s worked. He now not only cooks in a well-respected London gastro-pub but is a master of French cuisine. It’s amazing what different people get out of London.

No.107: Antigua and Barbuda

2007-07-06T12:56:00.000Z

Artigua

Alex Horne - 6th July 2007

Now that I live in the countryside with fresh air and plenty of space on the pavement, I often wonder why so many people choose to live in London. Why, for example, would someone decide to move to the capital from somewhere as tranquil as Antigua and Barbuda?

*****

Rachel is an artist. She recently got her degree in Fine Art from the London College of Art and we met for a cup of tea (her idea and my first of the project, surprisingly) on Tottenham Court Road, a place that certainly doesn’t have either of the two qualities mentioned in the first sentence.

She showed me pictures of her work. I’m no art connoisseur so excuse this layman’s description but they are physical pieces; attractively rusting metal and stretched canvas (calica to be exact) combined and deliberately weathered with sea water to create three-dimensional works of art that you want to touch as well as gawp at.

Obviously you won’t really be able to picture them from that so imagine a sail, drawn tight across a metal bar and left in the sun by the sea for several years. Or some debris smoothed by tides, swept on to the shore and again, dried out by the sun. Those are the things they reminded me of. I liked them a lot and tried to tell her so but fear I sounded a little insincere. I think I said, ‘oh, they’re lovely’.

‘Are they to do with boats?’ I ventured. ‘A lot of people say that’, she replied, both rescuing me and making me wish I’d said something a bit more incisive and original.

She never really told me what they were actually meant to be. Maybe they’re not actually meant to be anything. You never know with art these days. Well, I never know. Each of the pieces is untitled (a classy touch in my eyes. I’d love to write an untitled book, song or film). But she did say that they definitely reflect her childhood in Antigua.

‘There’s no way I would have used salt water and rust without having grown up seeing it everywhere. It’s amazing – when I went out on the boat (her family used to ‘camp out’ on the sea all the time, she told me) and a towel flew into the sea, we’d dry it on the deck and it’d get as stiff as a board. There’s a reflection of that in there somewhere. And I’m interested in lines because of the waves on the ocean. Yes, a lot of it is to do with the ocean and where I’m from. Whatever art you do, it’s all about your personal journey, about you and who you are. Well, that’s the case for me anyway.’

I asked her if Antigua is as idyllic as I imagined. ‘Oh yes’, she said. ‘My room is on stilts. Everything is open and outside. When we have hurricanes we have to bring everything in – the table, tv, chairs, everything’. Even the storms sound fun! ‘You wouldn’t believe how much I miss it – the weather, the atmosphere, my friends – just going to someone’s house and chatting about boys…’

Rachel first left the island aged sixteen to do her A-Levels and an Art Foundation course in Farnham. It didn’t go very well. For two years she tried to be a dancer instead. But then she sprained her ankle went back to art, unexpectedly ready to take it more seriously.

Although at first, she told me, she didn’t know quite what to make of her degree. ‘It was 20% thesis, 80% practical, and ultimately all you had to do was create two pieces of work in three years. It was incredibly independent. But that’s why it was great in the end. They just fed us names of all these artists and we had to react. If you want to make it as an artist you have to push yourself our there.’

I told her what Antonio from El Salvador had told me about London’s uniquely eclectic design scene, generated by the city’s exceptional cultural mix. She said it was the same with art. ‘My mum runs an art gallery in Antigua and all the stuff is pretty similar. It’s all beautiful. Things you’d put up in your house, lovely stuff. But everything here is so different and varied.’

‘Like your stuff’, I said crudely. ‘You couldn’t put that up in your house. Unless you had an enormous house. I mean - you couldn’t put it up because it’s big, not because it’s not beautiful. I do really like it. It’s great. But it’s bulky. You couldn’t get it in my house. But I wish I could. It’s really nice…’ This went on for some time.

Luckily, Rachel didn’t really need my approval. Just last week she’d been invited to display her work in the Barbican and had come for tea with me today straight from a meeting with her new ‘employers’. It’s a huge opportunity. She’ll be a part of a major exhibition opening in October. And she was tingling with excitement.

‘I miss my friends. I don’t have many good friends here. I grew up with them in Antigua. There your friends are everywhere. And the rest of my family are there too. But with all of this going on here I think I might just stay in London a while longer. There are just so many opportunities.’
And I guess that’s why people decide to come to the capital from somewhere as tranquil as Antigua and Barbuda.

No.106: Luxembourg

2007-07-04T10:13:00.000Z

De-Luxembourg

Alex Horne – 4th July 2007

After The London Paper published the first bit of press about this project back in late April, we were contacted by a lady called Anne from Luxembourg who was eager to help. Great, we thought. That’s a tricky country caught without too much fuss.

About the same time we also received an email from someone telling us about the ‘Luxembourg Society’ who met once a month at an undisclosed location somewhere in London. We were intrigued. We thanked Anne and said we’d be back in touch soon then sent an email to our mystery society supplier asking for more details about this unlikely gathering.

There was no response.

In fact there has still been no response.

Apparently the Luxembourg Society is a secret society.

Unfortunately by the time we did actually get back in touch with Anne, it was too late. She’d returned to Luxembourg. This was no surprise - several of the people we’ve met so far (David from France and Diego from Belgium, for example) have now returned to their homelands. London’s population is a transitory one. But for the first time, we’d missed our opportunity. We’d got greedy. And now we were kicking ourselves.

But not for long. Luckily for us, Anne had a surprise up her sleeve; ‘I have a substitute Anne ready to take my place!’ she told us. I’m not sure how many of our finds have replacement people from the same country – with the same name – waiting in the wings, but we were incredibly grateful to be able to finally meet someone from the seventh smallest country in Europe and swiftly cease our self-flagellation.

And so on Independence Day 2007 Anne II took me to Le Pain Quotidien, perhaps the classiest coffee house of the project so far, just round the corner from Carnaby Street and the perfect setting for what was probably the best-prepared, most professional interviewee I’ve met so far.

Anne has only been in London since September but her English is spotless. ‘I was an Anglophile at school’, she told me, both demonstrating and explaining her impressive vocabulary. ‘I used to get bullied because I wanted the perfect English accent. They called me ‘Miss Well’. Everyone else wanted an American accent – that’s much easier by the way’.

Like a lot of the people we’ve met, Anne is ambitious. Sat across from me, wearing what I can only describe as an ambitious leather jacket and ambitious jewellery, she told me she had come here to do food journalism, ideally on the radio or TV; ‘I want to look at the sociological implication of our consumption. You’ve got plenty of celebrity chefs already, but I want to be more about the personality than the cooking’.

I nodded and looked over the menu, now slightly worried about the sociological implications of my order. The waitress came over and I asked for a black coffee and some olives. I was panicking a bit.

‘Are you a good cook?’ I asked (Anne, not the waitress). ‘Yes!’ she replied, ‘but I’m a vegetarian.’ I felt better about the olives. ‘That’s fine in London but it’s not easy in Luxembourg’, Anne continued. ‘It used to be a country of peasants, a very poor land. So people still eat a lot of meat and potatoes – things like Judd mat Gaardebounen’ (which literally translates as ‘Jew with broad beans’ – ‘but it’s not anti-semitic!’ she stressed, ‘it’s just smoked pork, beans and dill!’).

Anne spent her last few years in Luxembourg working as a freelance journalist and presenter whilst still at school. ‘I tried to make a cooking show for youtube. Being Luxembourgish opens a lot of doors’. Luxembourgish? I repeated a little incredulously. ‘Yes, well, Luxembourger is the correct term. But my friend says it should be Luxembourgeois – that’s more fitting for the country. But anyway. It’s a small community – very friendly, so networking is important. Everyone looks after each other. If you meet someone here you’d know someone who knows them from home’.

And Luxembourg is no longer a poor land. The native population of 470,000 swells to around 700,000 during the working week as commuters pour into its various lucrative industries. ‘It’s a very international country now’, Anne told me (I’ve since found out that it actually has the highest percentage of resident foreigners of any country in the world – a particularly salient fact in the context of this project).

‘There are a lot of banks’, she went on. Banks from everywhere. It’s the banking capital of Europe’. I asked her if she liked banks. ‘Well, the banks in England are horrible!’ she laughed. ‘They’re much nicer in Luxembourg’. I’d never really thought much about banks before. But then my olives arrived so I didn’t have to.

Anne is 23 years old and already has considerably more forthright views than me. We soon moved on from London’s ‘horrible banks’ to other areas of the city. ‘London is a very ugly city’, she asserted. ‘For me it’s a stepping stone. There are just so many negative factors – like prices and security – especially now. My parents are very worried about me here’.

I asked her if Luxembourg could ever be a target. She scoffed. ‘Luxembourg is a bubble. Now it is very rich and very clean. It is also very safe. There are extremely good services there.’ Better than in London? ‘Not just London, better than the UK. The health service there is much better than the NHS. I have had awful experiences in hospitals here. They’re the most horrible things I’ve seen’.

I’m not sure if I’m presenting Anne fairly here. I can’t help thinking it sounds like she spent most of our coffee complaining about London. She didn’t. We spent most of our time just chatting – about olives, TV, the weather – it was a lot of fun. But none of those things seem as relevant as her strong and fairly negative opinions about the city we were sitting in.

I asked her for how long she expected to pursue her gastro-televisual dream in horrible old London? ‘Well, my limit was 2012’, she told me. ‘I thought I didn’t want to be here for the Olympics. But then I thought – well, I don’t want to pay my taxes and not have the benefit so maybe I’ll stay a little longer. But then it’s Berlin for me. I love Germany and that’s totally my city. All the cool stuff of London in a good place – warm in the summer, cold in the winter, a great underground scene, and it’s cheap…’

What was that? All the ‘cool stuff’ here? See, I told you she didn’t spend the whole time complaining about London. I decided to use Owen’s Special Sunday Question to get her to elaborate on this ‘cool stuff’.

‘Well’, she said, eyes aglow. ‘My perfect Sunday – I guess I’d go to Borough Market – for the food of course. But I wouldn’t buy anything, it’s too expensive, I’d just eat all the free stuff. Then I’d take pictures of all the nice food – I’m going to start a food-blog soon… Then I’d head up to Primrose Hill. That’s what I love about London – the villages. I love exploring corners and mapping out my own city – like Crouch End and Muswell Hill… and then the Primrose Bakery for cupcakes, dinner at Sabor – it’s this South American restaurant in Angel… Maybe I’d go to Old Street for some music – the Mother Bar or the Music Hall…’

I scribbled frantically as she rattled off more names of clubs, restaurants, nooks and crannies. She barely drew breath the entire time we were there. She really was quite something to behold. And I’m sure, sooner or later, you’ll get the chance to do just that when she snares her first job on TV.

No.105: Ukraine

2007-07-04T09:36:00.000Z

Ukrainians Don’t Ski

Alex Horne – 4th July 2007

I like the name Ukraine because it looks a bit like a weather forecast (UK – rain). I also like Oman because it sounds like a frustrated teenager (oh man…), Andorra because it doesn’t sound like it can make its mind up (and/or a…), Bahrain because once I genuinely thought someone was talking about a trendy weather themed pub (Bar Rain), Suriname because every time I see it I think it says Surname, and Bahamas, Cameroon and Congo just because they sound fun.

Good.

So, after tearing myself away from my hero Julio I raced down to Baker Street to meet Alina. Again, I was put in touch with her by a random reader of the blog (thank you JM). He said he liked the project and had a Ukrainian friend – would we like to meet her. We said yes, and that this was exactly the sort of thing we hoped would happen. But the meeting that followed turned out to be unique for three reasons:

1. She was the only person so far to have brought along her passport for proof.
2. She was the only person to bring her friend along too – very wise, I thought. I wouldn’t trust us.
3. She was the only person for whom I didn’t have enough paper to write down everything she said – she had a lot to say.

So bearing these things in mind I hope you don’t mind if a fair amount of this entry is hastily hammered out. ‘Hammered out’ in quite a professional way, obviously, but in a hasty way too. The way proper carpenters wield hammers. Not that artistically but hopefully effectively.

I’ll get the basic details out of the way first. Alina has been in London for eight years. She’s a student now but I think an eight year residence more than qualifies her for our project. Especially since she brought her passport along.

Her family sent her to the UK originally so she could do her A-Levels. The plan was to return soon after but she thought she needed further qualifications so is still here now. If all goes to plan she’ll be a qualified accountant this time next year. ‘I’m applying now to the Big Four’, she said. I didn’t know exactly what this meant but did understand that she’s therefore probably quite bright.

‘I actually want to stay here long-term now’, Alina told me. ‘I’m so used to being here. I’ve been here since I was seventeen. All my friends are here. All my life is here. And my mum comes here quite a lot to see me. It works out well. It’s so cold over there in the winter, -30 degrees or -20. Right now it’s fine – only about -10, but winters in UK are much nicer’. I said that it must be fun to have all that snow – sledging, skiing... ‘Ukrainians don’t ski’, she told me matter-of-factly. ‘It’s only sixteen years since we got independence so we’re not quite ready for things like skiing yet’.

Alina used to live in Kiev which meant that I was able to offer her my history of that particular chicken dish (see Armenia for details). ‘That’s right!’ she exclaimed, making me feel a whole lot better about the snow thing. ‘Borscht is the main dish. But they argue with the Russians over who came up with it first.’ She then described what for me is the perfect food – ‘salo’ – essentially, the fatty bits of bacon that my Rachel says I shouldn’t eat. ‘It’s smoked fat’, explained Alina, ‘it’s what the villagers used to eat with the vodka they made at home with sugar and beetroot. Sixty percent proof!’ I wolf-whistled with genuine admiration.

We’re a long way away from these happy (I would have thought) villages of Ukraine, sitting, appropriately enough, in The Globe pub near Baker Street Station, just down the road from her flat. ‘I’m living right opposite Regents Park’, she told me, ‘It’s amazing, I can hear the festivals at the weekend. I love it there.’ This, of course, leads me on to Owen’s Sunday Special Question; ‘so apart from listening to some free music, what would you do on your perfect London weekend?’ Alina leans forward excitedly (it really is a good question); ‘Well, I would go for a picnic with my friends in the park. I used to go to museums but now I’m into temporary exhibitions, things at the National Portrait Gallery or the Tate, then maybe into the West End. I love musicals. I used to go with my parents but now I’ve found one guy who likes them too! I’ve also been to Sotheby’s recently with a Ukrainian designer. And a polo match in Richmond. And the McDouglas gallery near Haymarket – do you know the place?’

I shake my head in answer to the question but also at my own laziness. It may well be an excellent question but it does sometimes make me feel a tiny bit ashamed about how little I use the capital city. Still, at least I’m meeting some of its inhabitants…

‘…and I went to Ascot too recently’, Alina continued, nowhere near the end of her perfect day. ‘I won £200. Well, £300 but I had to give some of it to my dad… in Ukraine people say that those who do things the first time have a lot of luck. I was lucky with poker when I tried that too…’

I eventually steered the conversation back to Kiev. ‘It’s a properly European city’, she told me. ‘We had Eurovision a couple of years ago and that gave us a real push. And of course we’ve got the football in 2012’. I told her it was refreshing to hear someone talk about both these things without the cynicism so common in Britain. She said she wasn’t entirely positive: ‘Unfortunately all the money is going to the capital so the rest of the country is still suffering. The population is actually going down – it was 52 million in 1991 and is now 48 million – because there’s so much emigration and the death-rates are now higher than the birth-rates. You get given money if you give birth now’.

Again it all seems so far away from this pub in London, where a lot of people are quite happily crammed into a room, drinking beer, watching cricket and not having to worry about mortality rates. She agrees it’s a different world and tells me about her own far-flung family; ‘everyone has relatives all over the Soviet Union nowadays. I have an uncle in Bratsk and one in Siberia. I’ve been there once, that was the best holiday ever – the air, the vegetables, so fresh. It was a five hour flight from Moscow but the people were so friendly, despite the cold weather’.

I realised a lot of our chat revolved around perceptions, generalisations and stereotypes. Siberians are nice even though it’s chilly. Londoners are cynical. That sort of thing. I asked her what people in Ukraine thought of the UK: ‘My friends think I see Robbie Williams and Elton John every day’, said Alina and we chuckled. It’s an odd stereotype for a city to have, and not necessarily one to be proud of.

Alina nodded, then shyly admitted, ‘I did see Elton John once. He came out of a shop in South Kensington with some magazines. He looks like he does on TV. And I saw Beckham when he was doing that Vodafone advert. But I didn’t recognise him’. Stereotypes, of course, can sometimes be true.

But people in Britain, according to Alina, have almost no perception of Ukraine whatsoever. ‘People always say ‘you’re from Russia!’, when I tell them I’m from Ukraine’, she said with just a hint of frustration. ‘Do you know Abramovich?’ they ask’ (she doesn’t this time, by the way).

Near the end of our chat she told me that because of Chernobyl and the revolution there is now a general awareness of her country, but again people’s views are broad and, largely, wrong. ‘They think it’s a dangerous country because they’ve seen it on the news’, she said. ‘The funny thing is the revolution was extremely peaceful. It started in November and ended in January. Ukrainians are very peaceful people. There’s a joke that on Russian TV there’s always war and on Ukrainian TV there’s always singing and dancing – but it’s true! That’s why I don’t have Ukrainian TV!’

I laughed, not so much at the joke but at Alina’s own pithy putdown of Ukrainian TV. And before I go, on the subjects of jokes, here’s one that seems vaguely relevant but again probably isn’t all that funny:

I met a guy from South Korea.
He was very short.
His name was Samsung.
Sorry, that’s a stereotype.

At least it’s well researched.

No.104: Uruguay

2007-07-04T06:24:00.000Z

Julio: Hero

Alex Horne – 4th July 2007

Exactly 231 years after the USA gained independence from the UK, my friend Owen Powell recreated history by taking himself off to Turkey for a holiday. And just as 231 years ago, people this side of the Atlantic had to get on with things as best as possible pretending they weren’t missing out on any sort of party over there (I’m guessing that’s what happened – for some reason we didn’t get taught anything to do with British colonies at school), so on July 4th 2007, I was the one, left behind, doing my best to keep things going.

Or something like that.

The trouble was, I had to go to Hackney and, more specifically, the Bodrum Café on Stoke Newington High Street where I’d arranged to meet a man called Julio. We’d had a brief and efficient email a couple of weeks before (thank you KM) which simply read:

Subject: Uruguayan

Award-winning photographer Julio Etchart www.julioetchart.com

Currently exhibiting in Brighton, lives in North London

So I went to the website, sent an email, and was now on my way to meeting an award-winning photographer from Uruguay. Thank God for the internet.

Unfortunately, Hackney is a particularly Turkish area of London. Everywhere I looked I saw reminders of Owen’s jaunt; the Bosphorus Travel Centre, the Dogin Gida Bazaar, the Aziziye Halal Restaurant below the white-marbled Aziziye Mosque, and several mens’ clubs devoted to FC Besiktas and FC Galatasary. This wasn't fair.

Eventually I found the Bodrun Café. I should have guessed. It was a Turkish café. I decided to lay my envy (and any very weak Independence Day analogies) to one side and try to enjoy myself. After all, meeting an award-winning photographer called Julio in what seemed like a very nice snack bar is hardly hard work. I ordered myself some Turkish sausage on toast and a Bosphorus coffee and waited for my man.

*****

From the moment I set eyes on Julio – and I knew it was Julio as soon as he came through the door with his bicycle panniers and swarthy face – I was a tiny bit in awe of him. He was a proper man. Someone who’d seen the world, done most of things you can do in the world, and who was pretty much happy with his place in the world. When I was growing up, this was the sort of man I wanted to turn out like. I haven’t. But at least I’ve met him.

He came to London 33 years ago from his home in Montevideo (one of my favourite capital cities – meaning, probably, ‘I see a mountain!’ – almost certainly with an exclamation mark). He’s now 57.

‘I left during the dictatorship’, he told me as we sipped our coffees. ‘It was about the same time as the coup in Chile’ (an earlier 9-11 that I know I knew very little about). He had been working as a scientist at the university before the fascist regime closed it down. ‘I was arrested’, he told me unblinkingly, ‘and thrown into military barracks a couple of times. But I was released without charges, my father got me a passport and I left’. I tried to look like this was the sort of stuff I heard all the time and nodded earnestly. Really I was thrilled to be hearing such a story and hoped that at least some of his experience would rub off on me.

‘I had a couple of friends over here’, he continued. He’s got a brilliantly gravely voice, by the way. So imagine all this being said in a low husky growl. Especially the bit about being arrested. Maybe go back and read that paragraph again with a rumbly intonation in your head. Or get someone like Steve McQueen or Sam Elliot to read it for you.

‘And I had a few friends in Paris but I came here for the Wilson government (‘oh dear -he knows about British politics too’, I thought, ‘I could be in trouble here’. I kept nodding). I arrived on the last day of the General Election. Of course Wilson won (‘of course’, I muttered) and that was great. I hadn’t been able to do photography in Uruguay – it was all so chaotic, so I got myself a place at Newport Art College and started getting some freelance work’. Newport College, he told me, was the only place at the time to teach documentary photography.

If you have a look at http://www.julioetchart.com/ you’ll get a better idea of what happened next than from anything I can write here. He’s photographed everyone from Nelson Mandela to Ken Livingstone, everything from Brazilian football to Bollywood movies, and everywhere ‘from the homeless of London to the child labourers of Brazil and Thailand and the refugees of Africa.’

I asked him how often he went back to Uruguay. ‘Oh, my friends ask me back all the time – but I’m not a political animal (‘ah ha!’ I thought, ‘so we do have something in common!’). I want to take photos and I’m into practical politics – things like Oxfam, Save The Children, War on Want. In that sense I’m political, but that’s it’.

He now has two bilingual children of his own. ‘My son is very proud of his dual identity. He asked me to speak to him in Spanish in front of his mates. That’s exceptional – most people his age would find that embarrassing’. He told me they’re quite unusual as Uruguayans in London too. ‘It’s not like the Brazilians, Bolivians or Colombians – most Uruguayans tend to go to Spain, France or Italy. It means I get to be on the guestlist for a lot of the ambassador’s parties! I think there are about 600 of us here’.

‘London’s changed so much in the last ten years. I really enjoy it now, it’s so vibrant. Back then if you wanted a decent cup of coffee you had to go to Bar Italia in Soho, now there’s Turkish coffee everywhere…’

‘Uruguay’, he went on, ‘is a much smaller country. I’m proud of it but it’s tiny. It’s also a very formal country. It’s been secular since 1918. My father was a humanist, my mother was a nominal Catholic but we never went to mass. I’m truly neutral…’

By now, as you can probably tell, Julio was doing most of the talking and I was contentedly listening and scribbling. I felt like the guy in Karate Kid learning from the master. Julio knew everything. He’s a member of the NUJ and talked about Alan Johnston (‘the press used to be untouchable’, he said, ‘it’s so dangerous now’), he’s got a back injury (‘I got it while being tortured in Uruguay – and a lifetime of carrying camerabags doesn’t help…’), he’s even been to both Midhurst (where I grow up) and Corrymeela in Northern Ireland (a peace and reconciliation centre in Northern Ireland where my wife worked for six months; ‘I covered the Gibraltar Three funeral and took a lot of pictures of Martin McGuinness and Jerry Adams…’).

He’s literally done everything.

I was in danger of not saying anything at all for about half an hour and was desperately trying to think of something insightful to ask him when I remembered Owen’s latest ploy: the Special Sunday Question. Owen’s pretty pleased with this. He’s started asking the people he meets how they’d spend a perfect Sunday in London. Well, when the cat’s away, it’s ok to nick his questions...

‘Ah’, rumbled Julio, ‘my perfect Sunday. Well, I’d play tennis with my son. I love that. I learnt as a kid but there’s not much tradition of tennis in Uruguay so coming here was paradise – free courts everywhere. And I’d cook. I like to cook for the kids. Maybe a little barbecue. I live very simply. I think I’ve always been a Buddhist at heart. I’m happy, I can’t complain. Just a simple day like that. I don’t feel like traveling as much any more. It’s not as much fun as it was – there’s so much hassle. I’m happy in London. I’m a good tourist guide for the city! I take people to the cheap and cheerful places’.

Indeed he is and indeed he did. Bodrun was certainly both cheap and cheerful and Julio definitely appeared content. And the fact that he now likes to play tennis and have a barbecue at the weekend restored just a little bit of faith in myself as a man. That’s exactly how I’d spend my perfect Sunday. Now I just have to travel the world, get mixed up in a couple of coups and buy a bike - one day I'll be a proper man like Julio.

No.103: Switzerland

2007-07-01T22:38:00.000Z

Swiss and Sausage Roles

Alex Horne - 1st July 2007

We had a housewarming party today. Unfortunately Owen couldn’t make it as he’s off to Turkey early tomorrow morning (I know, how’s that going to help our cause?!). Luckily, (my wife) Rachel’s friend and colleague Ladonna was able to come all the way out of London and in to Chesham to help us warm our house and, in the process, become our Number 103 – the Swiss Representative.

Now, Ladonna from Switzerland is a bit like Aman from Ireland and Gianina from Costa Rica in that she’s never actually lived there. But she does have a Swiss passport and an intriguing story and that’s more than enough for us.

Her mum is Indian, her dad half-Scottish-half-Swiss, and based on looks alone (bearing in mind that it’s me doing the looking) it’s almost impossible to guess Ladonna’s nationality. She’s exotic looking. Last year, during a show, I accidentally discovered that she was born in Bahrain (sometimes, in a comedy night, that sort of thing happens) and presumed she must therefore be Bahrainian (a nationality we’re still anxious to find, by the way). I’m not saying she looks Bahrainian, but I definitely would have guessed Bahrainian an awful long time before Swiss. But I'd have been wrong. She's a Swiss citizen. And that's a sentence I couldn't say by the end of the evening.

She has been to Switzerland, she told me as we grabbed a sausage and a chat on the fringes of the barbecue (yes, we had a barbecue - because, unlike in London, it never rains in Chesham): ‘I went to Lausanne when I was fifteen to reconnect – and get my French up to speed pre-GCSEs’, she told me. She stayed in Chateaux D’Oex, a postcard-perfect ski resort, tucked away in the Swiss Alps where her Grandmother had grown up. ‘I have a very Heidi-esque image of her upbringing’, she smiled.

Ladonna’s been back to Bahrain too: ‘I’m all about getting to grips with my family history!’ she said. Because even though she feels British having lived here nearly all her life, she told me she likes to think she’s made up of many different parts of the world: ‘I hope I have quite an international outlook. I’m curious about all different places.’ When your parents are from two different continents and you were born somewhere in between, I think that’s fair enough. I’d love to have such a broad family tree to climb. I think I’m about an eighth Scottish and did in fact take Rachel up to Iona to visit my great uncle Harold a while ago – but that’s about all the reconnection I can really hope to do.

Happily, Ladonna’s far-flung parents actually found they had a lot in common when they crossed paths for the first time, thanks largely to their respective upbringings over four thousand miles apart. Both her pairs of grandparents were members of the Christian Brethren (an evangelical Protestant church with followers all over the world) and raised their offspring according to very similar doctrines, meaning that when they met, her parents had an immediate and fundamental understanding of each other that drew and held them together. At least that’s what I scribbled down in what, by now, was a fairly addled state. I was well on my way to Earls Court, as I believe people say nowadays.

Ladonna told me her brothers (and that might have been brother singular – I'd got ketchup on the page) also inherited this international wanderlust; ‘We all want to travel. We’re proud to live in Britain but we’re always wanting to get out of Britain!’ They have, unsurprisingly, visited her mum’s homeland a fair few times over the years. ‘But she comes from a different India to the India most people visit’, Ladonna said. ‘We normally stay where she used to live but we went to Delhi recently and were confronted by things like Bollywood for the first time. That was a shock. That’s not the India she or I know’.

By this stage my sozzled presence was again demanded at the barbecue (I may be one of the least manly men I know but for some reason I’m still trusted with any outdoor cooking that might need to be drunkenly done), so we soon rejoined the group and I reluctantly reverted to more standard party conversation. I’d enjoyed asking the questions we rarely ask people we already know well. I guess, once you’re officially friends with someone, it can feel rude to ask them basic things like; ‘Where are you actually from?’ Luckily, with this project I have license to query. So before heading back to the group I had to ask her about her name:

‘So – ‘Ladonna’ - is that Swiss? Or Indian? Or Bahrainian? I’m fairly sure it’s not Scottish…’

‘Oh no’, she laughed. ‘I’m almost certain it’s made up. It’s sort of Italian – in that it means ‘The Woman’ - but it’s not an Italian name. In Italy they laugh at me! No, if anything it’s probably American.’ Well then, another continent to add to her international make-up, and a very nice name too.

We headed back to the house-warmth and I told her I didn’t think there was anything at all wrong with made-up American-sounding names before turning to my little brother, Chip, who was busy handing out some delicious looking burgers. Yes, I may have had a couple of drinks, but food will always keep me on my toes.

No.102: Armenia

2007-06-28T14:06:00.000Z

Word of Mouth

Alex Horne – 19th and 28th June 2007

Four weeks ago, for the first time ever, I went to a restaurant and ate a three course meal plus coffee, on my own. And not just any old restaurant, Erebuni, the best and only Armenian restaurant in London.*

You’ve probably never heard of Erebuni. It’s not an omnipresent chain like Garfunkels or a glamorous draw like The Ivy. There are no celebrity chefs. In fact, if and when you eventually pinpoint the address on the inside corner of Lancaster Gate (apologies for hedging my bets with that ‘if and when’ – it’s probably ‘when’, you’ll almost certainly find it in the end, but you never know), you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d made a mistake and walking on. That’s what Owen and I did on the first of my three pilgrimages. And we forgave ourselves.

Its official address is 36-37 Lancaster Gate. But 36-37 Lancaster Gate is almost entirely a hotel; the London Guards Hotel, one of those London hotels that hasn’t changed a stitch since the war.

When people are modest you say they’re hiding their light under a bushel. Now, I don’t know what a bushel is but I’m pretty sure hiding your light under a hotel is even more extreme. I mean, if a bushel is just a bush, you’d still see a bit of the light – unless it’s a particularly dense plant. And if a bushel is actually a bucket (as some would have you believe), that’s still not nearly as well hidden as in the basement of an obscure hotel in Lancaster Gate.

After we’d called Yellow Pages and convinced ourselves that this at least used to be the right place we went in and asked at reception if he knew anything about a phantom eastern European eatery. ‘It’s in the basement’, said the bored man. ‘Where the hotel guests have their breakfast. But it’s closed now.’ Ah, of course.

We shuffled back out to the rather grandiose square and I dialled the number that the more helpful man from the Yellow Pages had thoughtfully texted me. After a good few rings, someone picked up. ‘Hello’ said what I hoped was an Armenian voice. ‘Are you there?’ I said. ‘Yes’, he said. ‘Are you the Erebuni restaurant?’ I asked. ‘I am Edward, the manager’, he said. ‘Brilliant!’ I shouted, before explaining who we were, what we were doing and why I was so happy. ‘Fine’, he said, taking the whole matter in his stride. ‘I’m normally in around seven’. ‘Great’, I said, ‘we’ll come back at seven sometime soon’.

Very soon in fact. At seven O’clock that very evening I returned, without Owen this time, and bravely descended a tiny creaking staircase into the depths of the hotel to be greeted by an extremely glamorous waitress. She led me to a table adorned with a red tablecloth and a red rose. There were only four other diners, all similarly glamorous girls sitting round a similarly bedecked table in the corner. I felt a bit awkward. It’s odd eating a meal on your own, especially when you’re in a restaurant that makes you feel like you’re in a foreign country. I did pretend to myself – and anyone watching – that I was a spy, on some important mission. But mostly I felt terribly self-conscious.

‘Is Edward here?’ I asked when the waitress brought over a menu. ‘Not yet’, she replied. ‘Will he be here soon?’ I tried. ‘Maybe’, she said. ‘He normally gets here between 7 and 9’. Well I guess I better order some food then, I thought. And said, very quietly.

I’ve never been to a soviet country so everything on the menu was exciting/terrifying. Should I go for the Chicken Tapaka: ‘extremely popular in Armenia: a whole baby chicken flattened and marinated in spices and lemon juice’ – or ‘a fish broth with complimentary vodka’? An impossible decision. Especially when some fairly dynamic eurovision style pop is blaring out of the speaker above your head at an unnecessarily high volume.

In the end I played it fairly safe with some traditional Ukrainian ravioli style dumplings stuffed with cottage cheese and served with sour cream followed by chicken Kiev. Yes, I know that’s not Armenian. But did you know that it’s not Ukrainian either? It’s actually a dish created in New York by restaurants trying to attract Russian immigrants in the early 1900s. It's a bit like Scotch eggs. Not from Scotland. They were originally a pub snack (much better than crisps) designed and produced in England but given a more hearty name. Which came first? The Chicken Kiev or The Scotch Egg? As far as I can tell, they were both invented at about the same time. Good, that’s a whole paragraph about breadcrumbed chicken bits.

Ten minutes later, the food arrived and I instantly knew I’d chosen well. This was my sort of food. Rich, heavy, creamy, garlicky, delicious. By the time I’d polished off the chicken I’d almost forgotten Edward still hadn’t turned up. It was now eight thirty. I had to leave by nine. I decided to ask the waitress to help but she said she was from Lithuania and that Edward was the only Armenian. Probably in all of London I thought, then gritted my teeth, ordered some coffee and determined to play the waiting game (surely one of the most tedious games around).

Half an hour and some serious coffee later, still no sign. I pleaded with my waitress, she went off, made a call and returned to say he might not be here till ten. I was tempted to, not shoot, but at least be sad in front of the messenger. Instead, I held my head high, paid the (not cheap) bill (plus generous tip) and promised to return.

Ten days later, I did. And this time I’d phoned Edward and told him specifically which day I was arriving. He assured me he’d be there. Unfortunately I hadn’t told anyone else I was going so with seven o’clock looming it looked like I was to dine alone in an Armenian restaurant for the second time in two weeks. Once might be unlucky but twice would be careless.

Amazingly, with two quick phonecalls I managed to persuade Mat and Chip, my two brothers, and Morri, Mat’s fiancée, to join me. It seems that people who aren’t trying to locate every nationality in the world in one city have more free time than people who are.

So, as dusk settled in, the four of us trooped down to the Guards hotel, I insisted this was definitely the right place and, to my surprise and delight, we were greeted by a grinning Edward and some real-life euro-pop melodies pumped out by a brilliantly Russian looking young man with a pencil thin moustache and a classic Casio keyboard. This was going to be a good night.

Edward himself, it seemed, was touched not only that I had returned so soon, but that this time I had brought my entire family with me and after poring over the menu once again and plumping for Khachapury (‘cheese bread straight from the oven’), Bliny S. Miasom with Yaitsa Farshirovannie (‘black caviar’) and, at last, the Chicken Tapaka (squashed chicken), I was invited to join him at his table.

Edward used to be a chef in Armenia. ‘I’m now forty two and manager of the only Armenian restaurant in London!’ he proclaimed with pride. He set it up thirteen years ago after he and his wife had come to stay with his mother–in-law. ‘It was a big decision, but cooking was my job. I thought I’d try it. Why not?’

I couldn’t think of a reason why not.

‘We don’t need to advertise’, he told me when I managed to explain that I’d never heard of his restaurant without being too rude. ‘All the former soviet countries come here. We used to advertise in Russian papers but we soon found that word of mouth was better. There are so many Russians in this area – there are Russian and Armenian churches on Bayswater Road. Everyone is here.’

And so its reputation has grown alongside London’s eastern European population and Erebuni, especially on a Friday, is now a flourishing restaurant in a very wealthy part of town; no tourist trap, cheesy themed gaffe, but a real hidden gem, an authentic treat, off the beaten track, a place the guidebooks won’t tell you above, and all those other gapyear clichés. Exactly the sort of place and person we were hoping to discover with this project.

It’s a magnet for celebrities too, with the likes of David Kronenburg and that bloke Viggo Mortensen from The Lord of the Rings paying regular visits, as well as countless famous Russian singers whose faces you can see on the tremendous Erebuni website (watch out for the widest moustache in the world ever).

Edward was proud to explain the democratic approach he takes to his menu. ‘We started off taking what’s good about Russian cooking and putting our own Armenian spin on it’, he told me. ‘Then if (not ‘when’ this time) people didn’t like something we’d take it off the menu and replace it with something else. We did that for years. Now it’s 100% perfect!’ I like this trial and error style of cuisine. I guess it’s pretty much how I do comedy.

What’s the best food, I asked him. ‘Kebab’, he said with a laugh. ‘We do it differently from the Greeks or the Arabs – we use natural charcoal; come and look!’ And with that he whisked me into the kitchens where I felt genuinely honoured to be shown a thoroughly blackened barbecue with, yes, lots of natural coal. ‘Very nice!’ I remarked. Not necessarily the best response but I’d never been in this situation before.

After some awkward introductions to a couple of his chefs (Edward is now strictly the manager and so seems to spend his evenings at the bar, being the perfect host, smiling a lot) I returned to my family to enjoy the food, music and ambience. This was Friday night, unrecognizable from the previous Monday. The tables were full and glasses were clinking and as soon as we’d polished our plates, up trotted Edward with a tray of straight vodkas (except one that was cranberry flavoured – for the lady). We raised our glasses, shouted ‘Kenaset’ (Armenian for cheers), downed our drinks and winced. Edward insisted that we wouldn’t have headaches in the morning because there was no water in the drinks and the vodka was 40% alcohol and that’s the ideal amount which meant we definitely wouldn’t get hangovers but we weren’t convinced.

Not that we cared. We were having a lot of Armenian-style fun that culminated when Edward grabbed the microphone from the moustachioed pianist and sang quite a lengthy song for us in his native tongue. Chip thought it might have been an elaborate Happy Birthday but Edward breathlessly explained afterwards that it was a ‘Prison Song’. I don’t really know what a Prison Song was but apparently ‘all Russians like them’. I liked it too. Except for when Edward loomed worryingly close to the table and I thought I was going to have to join him on stage. Luckily he was just picking up Morri’s fallen umbrella – a particularly slick move mid rousing chorus.

Thinking back, though, if he had asked me to sing I think I would have. I’d have done whatever Edward wanted. He was great. We all posed for photos with him on our out and I’m really hoping we’ll make the ‘friends’ page on his website some day soon.

*As recommended by a man called Peter Pereira who read about us on the Londonist website. Thank you Peter. And thank you the Londonist website. You’ve made someone (me) very happy (and full).

No.100: Hungary

2007-06-28T12:04:00.001Z

One hundred not out.

Owen Powell - 28th June 2007

I was sitting in the bar of the Soho Theatre when Nedda bowled up quite hungover. She hadn’t been home since the night before. “I would like a tomato juice, please,” she said. She was wearing sunflower earrings and the biggest pair of sunglasses I had seen that month. “You know when you dress up in your mother’s clothes?” she said. “I think they make me look a bit like that.” She lit a cigarette and took a long pull on the tomato juice.

It was Nedda’s sister who had first read about the project, and she sent her the link from where she now lives in Singapore. Nedda had followed her to London originally, where both had started working as au pairs. Both hated it, Nedda only lasting a month. “They were spoilt kids, annoying brats,” she says dismissively. This was three years ago, before Hungary joined the EU, so Nedda worked on an au pair visa – but also managed to get some other work in bars at the same time. “It was totally illegal,” she cheerfully admits, “but people could have checked. I was given proper pay checks, I had an emergency NI code ...” She takes a long drag. “No-one was bothered.”

Nedda is now combining proper bar work – she’s at the American Bistro in Mayfair, whose regular clients include Robert De Niro – with a three year course in Interior Design at the University of Arts, Chelsea. She says she’s a bit disappointed with the course, although she’s learnt a lot, and gets on well with the people she’s doing it with. “A few of us have formed a team,” she says. “We’re from Hungary, Sweden, the US and England, and we plan to stay together after the course finishes, and start working as designers.”

One of her current design projects, although not really connected to the course, is renovating her flat in Budapest. “It has exposed walls, pipes showing – it needs a bit of work, but I want to do it up and rent it out as a holiday home. It’s gone up in value five times in the last seven years since I inherited it from my grandmother.”

Nedda’s grandmother leads us on to a fascinating insight into Hungarian life. “When she was at school, she learnt German as it was the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When my mother was at school she learnt Russian for eight years under Communism. When I was ten, in 1989, that all changed, and we were taught English. In fact, I went to a school run by nuns. Religion came back in a big wave after Communism stopped. These nuns were all 80 years old, and they’d been in exile in Argentina.” However, Nedda didn’t really get on with a religious education. “Whenever we did confession, the priests would tell the teachers everything we had said, it was so oppressive. I was thrown out when I was 14. I still feel religious now, but I don’t go to church any more.” Nedda checks her packet of cigarettes – it’s empty. “I need to go and get some more ...” she says. That’s ok, I say. I’ll get you another tomato juice.

When she gets back, Nedda reminisces about the end of Communism. “Daily life changed a lot. Pioneers, which is a Communist version of Scouts, finished. Suddenly, we went from state TV, where there was nothing at all on a Monday, to Sky, MTV, everything else. But really, it got worse. Before, everyone had good jobs, everyone had money. Then there was more competition, inflation, people lost their jobs. It’s not even what you’d call ‘Westernised’ now, for example, customer service does not exist in Hungary. We are popular with stag parties, though. I once saw a man on a plane complaining about losing his baggage. He was dressed as a beer bottle.”

After three years, Nedda feels at home here, but wouldn’t say yet that she’s a Londoner. “I would say that I am a Hungarian in London.” And are there many other Hungarians here, I ask. “Lots. Some of my friends have plans to work here, save money and buy a flat in Hungary. But they end up sitting in the house all night, buying stuff from Iceland and having a horrible time. It’s hard to save here, there’s too much to do.”

One thing Nedda finds great about London is the ease with which she can travel to the rest of the world. He shows me some photos from her recent trip to Thailand and Singapore (where she saw her sister). She feels much more cosmopolitan now. “One thing I don’t miss from Hungary is understanding all the conversations on the buses. Hungarian people are very negative. If you ask, ‘How are you?’ they will tell you all their problems.” We flick through some more photos. “In fact,” says Nedda, “when I am in Hungary, I miss London. I miss London food.”

Nedda’s going back to Hungary tomorrow, so will miss the start of the English smoking ban. I ask how she thinks she’ll cope when she returns. “Well,” she starts, “The bar where I work is perhaps not too well prepared. The owner smokes even in the non-smoking section, so who knows? They are talking about banning it in cars as well, which I don’t think will be a good idea. If you don’t let people have their cigarettes, they get more angry, and you don’t want more angry people on the roads.”

We head out onto Dean Street and say goodbye. A hundred people, I think. We’ve met a hundred people! How hard can it be to find another ninety-two?

No.101: Tanzania

2007-06-28T09:40:00.001Z

My Favourite Framer

Alex Horne – 28th June 2007

We’ve stayed in touch with a lot of the people we’ve met over the last few months – far more than I expected when we ventured into the Trocadero on that first rainy day at the end of October. We began looking for numbers. It was as simple as that. Could we find 192 nationalities in 12 months in 1 city? But before long we discovered that finding people was a whole lot more interesting. And keeping them was even more rewarding.

And that’s a pretty saccharine first paragraph.

One turning point for me was meeting Nic from Singapore who seemed to understand our project much much better than I did. Walking away from a breathless chat about the potential of our undertaking I felt more galvanised than ever, determined to create some ground-breaking global thing with him and his visionary friends.

Yes, there’s another gloopy set of sentiments.

But it hasn’t happened yet. Nic is a very busy guy. And, with time ticking faster than us, so are we. We still might create something with his film collective. I certainly hope we’ll find time to at least give it a try. But I haven’t actually spoken to Nic for quite some time now. We may have stayed in touch with a lot of people but I wish it was easier to stay in touch with them all. Maybe I should give Facebook a try.

One thing I did do was follow up one of Nic’s international leads by taking a trip down to Southwark and the shop of his favourite framer (I don’t know too many people who have one of those), a man called Nazir from Tanzania.

Owen and I met up in Borough Market around lunchtime in the hope of quickly snagging a Samoan who Owen knew sold oysters (now, thanks to a revolutionary travelcard system – a true symbol of London) and we spent a sensuous hour wandering around in search of this foreign fishmonger. We passed stalls selling salsa from Chile, olives from Turkey, dips from Greece, Italian parmesan, Indian samosas, Spanish meat and cheese from Wales, France and the Isle Of Wight. But none of these were on our wanted list any more. And some of them weren’t even there in the first place. We found a man flogging Sparrow’s Tea from Korea but, much to our disappointment, it was the wrong one (Korea, not sparrow).

Eventually we did find the Samoan’s shop, only to be told that he was on holiday. Frustrated, I bought an oyster from a man from Taiwan* and we headed south west, a touch dejectedly.

After what was then a longer-than-expected trudge around what is a particularly grey bit of London, we finally found Nazir’s art shop; a gem, casually discarded in a decidedly un-arty corner of town (on a road appropriately named London Street).

We went in. Then hung around suspiciously as a man we hoped was Nazir dealt with a customer. She eventually left. ‘Good afternoon gentlemen’, said the shopkeeper, also suspiciously (it’s one of those words that mean two opposite things – anyone know what they’re called?). We stepped forward, introduced ourselves, dropped Nic’s name shamelessly, and eventually persuaded a rightly guarded Nazir – for it was indeed he – to talk to us. ‘I only have two minutes’, he told us sternly. We promised to be quick, just relieved he wasn’t on holiday.

But, as his story started to emerge and we all started to relax, that two minutes came and went, quickly followed by another two, and a whole lot more after that. Nazir left Africa thirty years ago, before I’d even been born. He hasn’t been back for eighteen years. It felt like now he was remembering things he’d not thought about for really quite a long time.

‘From what I understand, things have changed there’, he began. For the better? we asked. ‘I don’t know. It’s more developed. I guess that’s how it happens everywhere. But when you live in a country you don’t notice the changes. Like here’ – he gestured out at London Road – ‘everything’s changed but you don’t notice. It’s only when you look back five years. The change is great’.

Nazir has been running this shop for the last seven years. He arrived in London as a photography student in 1965 then returned to Tanzania for another ten years. ‘I didn’t plan to come back here.’

‘I don’t have time to do much photography any more. I’m always meaning to do more, but that’s London life. Tanzania was so much more open – so green. That’s how I remember it. More rural, more wild, untouched – more laidback. People have time to indulge their own hobbies there. Now I’m in the rat-race. When I get home I’m exhausted’.

Nazir lives at the other end of the Jubilee line in Harrow with his wife. He originally came from the Indian sub-continent but they met here in England. She’s an artist too. We asked if his kids were artistic. ‘Oh yes!’ he smiled, ‘but it doesn’t bring in the money!’

I tried to ask him what went on in the little workshop I could see, tucked away beneath the stairs, but Nazir preferred to talk about Tanzania and the life he’d left behind. ‘I’ve been to the top of Kilimanjaro’, he said enthusiastically. ‘The view is different early in the morning to the rest of the day. That’s when you should be there. To see the sun rising. Once – and this is a long time ago, over thirty years ago – I saw the other side of the peak. A sheer slope, a white sheet – that’s all I remember’. Owen and I listened intently as he spoke with this mixture of nostalgia and excitement. I was glad London Road wasn’t the sort of road on which an art shop might get busy. No-one interrupted Nazir.

‘Of course people are complaining that the world’s getting hotter’, he continued, as much to himself as to us. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if the sheet is melted now. But the wildlife – from what I remember – is just brilliant. We used to camp inside the crater on Ngora Gora…’

Nazir smiled wistfully. I didn’t want to use the word wistfully there but I think it was the only real possibility. He was full of wist. Happy and sad all at once. But then suddenly, it was gone.

‘You have to let it go,’ he said, abruptly turning back to us. ‘I settled here, I had a new life, a family. After eight or nine years I felt a pang for home but then I let go. I mean, how long can you hold on?’ We didn’t know and didn’t guess.

Sometimes we can relate to the people we meet, murmur in the right places and even chip in with our own opinions every now and again. On this occasion we just listened.

Before we left, Nazir told us he’d taken his kids to Tanzania a couple of times when they where growing up. ‘They liked it’, he said. ‘But they are locals here now. They wanted to go to Kilimanjaro and see the wildlife but that’s about it. It was a nice holiday, then it was time to go home’.

*Another addition to our growing list of places that many would argue are countries but which do not figure in the UN’s list. ‘Officially’ it’s a part of China. ‘Unoffocially’ it’s a lot more complicated than that. And I’m not sure a footnote is the place to delve further. If we have time we know an oyster seller who says he’ll tell us more.

No.101: Tanzania

2007-06-28T09:40:00.000Z

My Favourite Framer

Alex Horne – 28th June 2007

We’ve stayed in touch with a lot of the people we’ve met over the last few months – far more than I expected when we ventured into the Trocadero on that first rainy day at the end of October. We began looking for numbers. It was as simple as that. Could we find 192 nationalities in 12 months in 1 city? But before long we discovered that finding people was a whole lot more interesting. And keeping them was even more rewarding.

And that’s a pretty saccharine first paragraph.

One turning point for me was meeting Nic from Singapore who seemed to understand our project much much better than I did. Walking away from a breathless chat about the potential of our undertaking I felt more galvanised than ever, determined to create some ground-breaking global thing with him and his visionary friends.

And yes, there’s another gloopy set of sentiments.

But it hasn’t happened yet. Nic is a very busy guy. And, with time ticking faster than us, so are we. We still might create something with his film collective. I certainly hope we’ll find time to at least give it a try. But I haven’t actually spoken to Nic for quite some time now. We may have stayed in touch with a lot of people but I wish it was easier to stay in touch with them all. Maybe I should give Facebook a try.

One thing I did do was follow up one of Nic’s international leads by taking a trip down to Southwark and the shop of his favourite framer (I don’t know too many people who have one of those), a man called Nazir from Tanzania.

Owen and I met up in Borough Market around lunchtime in the hope of quickly snagging a Samoan who Owen knew sold oysters (now, thanks to a revolutionary travelcard system – a true symbol of London) and we spent a sensuous hour wandering around in search of this foreign fishmonger. We passed stalls selling salsa from Chile, olives from Turkey, dips from Greece, Italian parmesan, Indian samosas, Spanish meat and cheese from Wales, France and the Isle Of Wight. But none of these were on our wanted list any more. And some of them weren’t even there in the first place. We found a man flogging Sparrow’s Tea from Korea but, much to our disappointment, it was the wrong one (Korea, not sparrow).

Eventually we did find the Samoan’s shop, only to be told that he was on holiday. Frustrated, I bought an oyster from a man from Taiwan* and we headed south west, a touch dejectedly.

After what was then a longer-than-expected trudge around what is a particularly grey bit of London, we finally found Nazir’s art shop; a gem, casually discarded in a decidedly un-arty corner of town (on a road appropriately named London Street).

We went in. Then hung around suspiciously as a man we hoped was Nazir dealt with a customer. She eventually left. ‘Good afternoon gentlemen’, said the shopkeeper, also suspiciously (it’s one of those words that mean two opposite things – anyone know what they’re called?). We stepped forward, introduced ourselves, dropped Nic’s name shamelessly, and eventually persuaded a rightly guarded Nazir – for it was indeed he – to talk to us. ‘I only have two minutes’, he told us sternly. We promised to be quick, just relieved he wasn’t on holiday.

But, as his story started to emerge and we all started to relax, that two minutes came and went, quickly followed by another two, and a whole lot more after that. Nazir left Africa thirty years ago, before I’d even been born. He hasn’t been back for eighteen years. It felt like now he was remembering things he’d not thought about for really quite a long time.

‘From what I understand, things have changed there’, he began. For the better? we asked. ‘I don’t know. It’s more developed. I guess that’s how it happens everywhere. But when you live in a country you don’t notice the changes. Like here’ – he gestured out at London Road – ‘everything’s changed but you don’t notice. It’s only when you look back five years. The change is great’.

Nazir has been running this shop for the last seven years. He arrived in London as a photography student in 1965 then returned to Tanzania for another ten years. ‘I didn’t plan to come back here.’

‘I don’t have time to do much photography any more. I’m always meaning to do more, but that’s London life. Tanzania was so much more open – so green. That’s how I remember it. More rural, more wild, untouched – more laidback. People have time to indulge their own hobbies there. Now I’m in the rat-race. When I get home I’m exhausted’.

Nazir lives at the other end of the Jubilee line in Harrow with his wife. He originally came from the Indian sub-continent but they met here in England. She’s an artist too. We asked if his kids were artistic. ‘Oh yes!’ he smiled, ‘but it doesn’t bring in the money!’

I tried to ask him what went on in the little workshop I could see, tucked away beneath the stairs, but Nazir preferred to talk about Tanzania and the life he’d left behind. ‘I’ve been to the top of Kilimanjaro’, he said enthusiastically. ‘The view is different early in the morning to the rest of the day. That’s when you should be there. To see the sun rising. Once – and this is a long time ago, over thirty years ago – I saw the other side of the peak. A sheer slope, a white sheet – that’s all I remember’. Owen and I listened intently as he spoke with this mixture of nostalgia and excitement. I was glad London Road wasn’t the sort of road on which an art shop might get busy. No-one interrupted Nazir.

‘Of course people are complaining that the world’s getting hotter’, he continued, as much to himself as to us. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if the sheet is melted now. But the wildlife – from what I remember – is just brilliant. We used to camp inside the crater on Ngora Gora…’

Nazir smiled wistfully. I didn’t want to use the word wistfully there but I think it was the only real possibility. He was full of wist. Happy and sad all at once. But then suddenly, it was gone.

‘You have to let it go,’ he said, abruptly turning back to us. ‘I settled here, I had a new life, a family. After eight or nine years I felt a pang for home but then I let go. I mean, how long can you hold on?’ We didn’t know and didn’t guess.

Sometimes we can relate to the people we meet, murmur in the right places and even chip in with our own opinions every now and again. On this occasion we just listened.

Before we left, Nazir told us he’d taken his kids to Tanzania a couple of times when they where growing up. ‘They liked it’, he said. ‘But they are locals here now. They wanted to go to Kilimanjaro and see the wildlife but that’s about it. It was a nice holiday, then it was time to go home’.

*Another addition to our growing list of places that many would argue are countries but which do not figure in the UN’s list. ‘Officially’ it’s a part of China. ‘Unofficially’ it’s a lot more complicated than that. And I’m not sure a footnote is the place to delve further. If we have time we know an oyster seller who says he’ll tell us more.

No.99: Malta

2007-06-25T22:51:00.000Z

From one European island to another ...

Owen Powell - 25th June 2007

The working title of Sharon’s PhD is ‘The race to nation: An analysis of the discourse of race and nation in stories of migration appearing in the Maltese press before and after EU membership’. (I hope I’ve got that right). It’s a topic that Sharon has personal and professional (as well as academic) interest in, as she used to write for The Times, Malta’s leading English-language newspaper, for thirteen years. Now, of course, she has personal experience of being a migrant as well, having left Malta in 2003. “In Malta,” she notes wryly, “all people talk about migration purely in terms of people coming in. They hardly notice that lots of young people are spreading their wings and moving out, but this is less newsworthy.”

Alex and I have spent so long thinking about London as a hot seat of immigration that it’s both baffling and fascinating to hear about another place that has had a dramatic history of diverse comings and goings. Malta seems to have an identity crisis – right in the middle of the Mediterranean, its culture, language, and even climate seem to be a mixture of European, North African and Middle Eastern. “Maltese people consider themselves a homogenous mass,” explains Sharon. “The general myth is that we are descended from the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, whereas our language has Arabic roots but is written in Roman script. Our most recent rulers were the British – we still have red pillar boxes – but the dominant cultural influence now is Italy. Maltese people resent being thought of as Arab, or North African – while I was doing my Masters, which looks at Maltese journalism and how people define themselves, we joined the EU, so everyone is happy now we’re seen as European.”

Malta is a tiny island, about 300 sq km in size, but is responsible for a vast area of surrounding sea – more than a quarter of a million sq km. This means that many of the boat people found trying to cross the Mediterranean from Africa to Europe end up being detained in Malta. “Italy has provided us with armed forces and equipment to help patrol our waters – the cynics would say it’s to stop the boats getting further and reaching Italian waters. The Maltese people – although they can be self-obsessed and see Malta as the centre of the world – pride themselves on their hospitality and charity, so we try to help as much as we can. The first visible boat people in recent times came from Albania – they were welcomed, but, then again, they were white and European. After the Lockerbie bombing, al flights from Libya were banned so the main route out became by boat, via Malta, to elsewhere in Europe. So, fairly suddenly, black faces were more visible through the 1990s, policemen would stop them in the streets. There are now 2000 asylum seekers in detention, including lots of Asian people. It’s funny, when I was growing up, there were only two or three Chinese restaurants on the whole island. Going to one was a special treat, but now Malta feels more diverse.”

Sharon says she had a very privileged childhood, and spent much of it reading – despite Malta’s wonderful scenery and climate, she says she’s “not very outdoorsy”. She grew up a Catholic, as do 98% of Maltese people, which is no surprise given that Catholicism is mentioned in the country’s constitution. But she would describe herself as lapsed now. “I was made to go to doctrine lessons, Mass every Sunday – I consider myself brainwashed even now. It’s hard to get out, really. I was lucky, in that when I became a journalist I had to work Sundays, so I could legitimately avoid it.” Much of her work was on crime stories, and so she had to constantly translate from the Maltese used in court to the English used in the paper. Both are official languages, a legacy of Empire, and the British compromising with the locals in order to ensure that Italian wasn’t spoken. Maltese in now an official language of the EU as well, although it’s proving hard to find enough competent translators to get all the necessary documents produced. “It’s a hard language,” Sharon admits. “It’s only been written down properly since the 1930s, and the Academy of the Maltese Language should do more to standardise it, but the teachers all speak it differently. Also, all new words, bespoke words in areas like technology, science and IT are just English words spelt in a Maltese style, like ‘kompjuter’. Even more embarrassing is the Maltese presence on the internet – outside of any official sites, people use text speak, it’s all wrong. We’re meant to feel positive about citizen journalism, but I have my doubts ...”

Sharon has kept in contact with the Times, and still writes a column for them about migration. Although she’s been in the UK for four years, she spent the first couple of years outside London, doing her Masters in Cardiff, then beginning a Research Masters in Glasgow (“I had a full scholarship there, but I ran away – I didn’t like it,” she says). Now her study is based at the Sussex Centre for Migration Research in Brighton, but she’s currently in the middle of a six month intermission to earn money by temping in London. “I’m supposed to be doing research as well, but London’s so distracting I haven’t managed any in four months. I’m tempted to move to zone four to avoid going out in the evening.” Apart from the distractions, and the expense, Sharon loves London – especially the things that drive many locals mad.

“I don’t like returning to Malta in the summer, as it’s too hot – I much prefer London’s climate to the Med. Also, I love how unfriendly it is here. I like getting on the tube to read my book, listen to my iPod. Actually, that’s not entirely fair – any time I’ve been standing, looking lost with my A-Z someone will always come and help me. The same if I have a suitcase on the tube. I love it here. I really haven’t stopped having fun since I came here.”

But would she ever go back to Malta, I wonder? “Well, I need two more years to finish my PhD, then I think I’ll try to get some teaching work, or some more in-depth journalism, writing longer pieces for a monthly magazine. But not back in Malta – I’d reached my limit there, in terms of my social life and my career. When I left, I was 29, all my friends were married, and I was sick of having conversations about bathrooms. What happens to intelligent conversations when you get married?”

No.98: Estonia

2007-06-21T14:57:00.000Z

'Nordic with a Twist'

Owen Powell - 21st June 2007

I’ve done some odd things during this project, but I never thought I’d end up standing inside a fountain with an Estonian helicopter pilot.

His name was Karel, and he’s been in London for three years, since Estonia joined the EU. Three friends of his arrived at roughly the same time, and the Estonian embassy reckons there are now three thousand Estonians in the UK. It’s common, says Karel, for Estonians to live here to save up money, then return a few years later and buy a big house, but that’s not his plan. “I only intended to be here for three months, and even though I’ve been here a lot longer than that I still haven’t saved much. I want to enjoy life now.”

But that enjoyment didn’t initially manifest itself in a job. “Oh god,” says Karel. “I had a job in admin, working for TFL. It was supposed to be temporary, just for four days, but I did it for one and a half years. It was the most boring job ever, and I had lots of creative impulses, so I got out.” Now he’s doing a BA in digital photography, whilst working as a freelance photographer. “Photography has always been my hobby,” he says, “so it’s good to be doing it full time. Ideally, I’d like to be a travel photographer, but most jobs I get are less interesting than that. Portraits, events, things like that.” He takes a photo of me, which is far superior to the one I take of him. It’s a nice sunny day and we’re sitting on the South Bank. We hear the laughs of children playing in a nearby fountain. More of that later.

This is Karel’s second BA, though. The first he took in Estonia, in Aviation Engineering, almost by accident. “I only did the course because I wanted to become a commercial helicopter pilot, but they said that if I did it over four years rather than two, it converted to a degree. I haven’t flown in four years now, and you’re supposed to renew your licence every year, so I guess I’m no longer qualified.”

Maybe I look a bit surprised at how futuristic Estonia sounds (I don’t know how many degree courses in the UK allow you to become a fully qualified helicopter pilot, for instance), but Karel quickly puts me straight. “Estonia is one of the most hi-tech countries in the world. We have 100% wireless broadband coverage, and the people that developed Skype are Estonian. All our banks can do money transfers in seconds. If I’m on the phone to my mum, and ask her to send some money over, I can be online while she does it, and bang, it’s straight into my account. I still can’t get used to British banks – why do they take three days?” Karel does a little smile that suggests he knows exactly why they take three days. “In fact, we’re so hi-tech that we’ve just had the first ever cyber-war.” I sit up. Now, this is futuristic. “We’re pretty independent from Russia now, but there can still be problems. Estonia is one of the major routes for goods to be exported to and from Western Europe from Russia, so they could make things difficult for us by cutting off supplies. About a third of people living in Estonia are actually Russians, so there are frequent riots. After a recent riot, hackers from Russia shut down the entire Estonian computer network. If it had been a real war, it would have been two minutes, then it would have been all over. But it lasted for two weeks, with all our experts trying to fix it. NATO sent people to help, but they mostly just watched and learnt.”

It sounds like there is some residual bad feeling between Estonians and Russians. “Well, don’t forget that we’ve had 800 years of occupation from different sides, being forced to speak different languages. We’ve always considered ourselves Western, like all the Baltic states. In fact, once I went with my family to St Petersburg, and we went to a Russian restaurant. When they found out we were Estonian, we were put in a special room with a TV, as we were used to Western things. Today, Estonia is marketed in Russia as a holiday destination – they say we are ‘Nordic with a twist’. That is the phrase they use.” I look quizzical. “No,” says Karel, “I don’t know what it means either.”

Estonian independence came when Karel was ten. I bet that was exciting, I say. “Everything’s exciting when you’re ten,” Karel quite reasonably replies. He studied Russian at school, but claims not to be able to string a sentence together now. “English is now the most popular foreign language to learn, and in fact Spanish and French are overtaking Russian as well.” One of the biggest changes since independence has been the ease with which Estonians can travel to Western Europe. “I came to London when I was very young, and we came by boat, train, bus. One trip we made, to the south of France, we had to get three different boats, via Finland, on the way back. Now, we just jump on a plane.”

Karel tries to go back twice a year, and his cousins come to see him occasionally. What about his parents? “Oh, they’re more keen to go to the Mediterranean. The climate in London is too similar to Estonia, and they’ve been tourists here before. Even for me, it’s easier to get to Europe than the rest of the UK. I wanted to go to Manchester, but it was nearly fifty pounds on the train, so I paid twenty-six pounds and flew to Vienna instead.”

And is living in London something he would recommend to other Estonians? “Well, I would,” he says, “but there are already too many of them here ... What can I say about London? It’s all right. There are good and bad things, it can get really tiring and it’s hard to have your own moments. But it can be liberating as well – there are so many things to do. I was considering moving to Paris, to learn French, but I’ve recently met someone, and it feels like it might be forever.” I poise my pen over my notebook. Can I put that down, I ask? “You can put that,” says Karel.

Karel used to live in Elephant and Castle, but has recently moved to Old Street. “It’s the nicest place I’ve lived in so far, it doesn’t feel so temporary, and the area is very interesting. Two steps one way, it’s beautiful, two steps the other and you’re in hell. Also, a lot of the people there are wannabees. Everyone tries to look for extreme than everyone else – the visual noise is quite strong.” I ask if he misses Estonian food. Karel looks confused. “Well, what food do you eat? British food? In Talinn we have pizza, pasta, sushi – international food as well. I suppose the only things I bring back with me when I go home are sweets and vodka. Estonian vodka is the strongest in the world – we’re in the Guinness Book of Records for one brand that is 98%.” Have you tried it, I ask? “Are you crazy? No. The strongest you can get in shops is 80%, and that burns. You’re not allowed to take it on planes.”

It’s really sunny now. We wander over to the fountain, and discover it’s actually an installation by the Danish artist Jeppe Hein. It’s called ‘Appearing Rooms’, and is a series of crossing lines on the floor, made up of hundreds of water jets that spray straight up, six foot into the air. The jets in one line turn on and off at random intervals, so individual rooms, with water curtains as walls, keep appearing and disappearing. The idea is that you wait for a wall to disappear, then hop in before it reappears again, then move around inside as the internal walls drop and fire up again. Several children have been trapped inside for about fifteen minutes, as we’ve been watching. I suggest we go in. “Why not?” says Karel.

As the curtain closes behind us, I ask if Karel feels like a Londoner. “Hmmm,” he ponders. “Estonian first.” There is a pause. “European second.” Another, longer pause, as we cross to a new room, looking for an exit. “And that’s it. I’m pretty sure that I’ll go back to Estonia eventually. But London is somewhere I’d like to have one of my three houses in.” At last, one of the exterior walls drops and we hop out, glad not to have been soaked by a stray breeze.

Some Half-Way Stats

2007-06-21T13:48:00.000Z

Owen Powell - 21st June 2007

So. Now we're half-way through the project, it's time to reflect on what we've discovered so far. I was hoping to share some rather profound reflections on life and the world, but I'm currently in the middle of a severe cold (I'm tempted to call it flu) and my head's not quite working right. In lieu of anything meaningful, then, here's a whole host of numbers that might say something about how far we've got.

(Incidentally, it's actually quite hard work dividing up the world. I've gone for slightly more specific categories than just the seven continents, but even looking at the 'UN subregions' for help wasn't that useful. In the end, I've more or less decided on my own categories. I don't know if this is even worth posting now, but it's taken me a whole afternoon with an atlas, the internet and a calculator, so it's going into the blog.)

North America 3/3 countries 100%
Central America 5/7 countries 71%
Caribbean 6/13 countries 46%
South America 9/12 countries 75%

North Africa 3/5 countries 60%
West Africa 5/16 countries 31%
Central Africa 1/8 countries 13%
Southern Africa 5/14 countries 36%
East Africa 4/10 countries 40%

Middle East 8/15 countries 53%
Central Asia 4/9 countries 44%
South Asia 5/7 countries 71%
East Asia 4/5 countries 80%
South-East Asia 5/11 countries 45%

Oceania 2/14 countries 14%

North Europe 6/7 countries 86%
West Europe 6/13 countries 46%
East Europe 5/8 countries 63%
Central and South Europe 10/15 countries 66%

So, there we have it. We're doing quite well in finding people from the Americas, and some parts of Asia, and reasonably badly in sub-Saharan Africa. Europe, interestingly, has been a real mixed bag. The 'West Europe' category (for example) contains several titchy countries that we haven't yet located, so our early expectations that we'd 'complete' Europe first have been challenged somewhat.

Nobody mention Oceania.

------

Of the 96 people we have met, 50 have been men and 46 women*. That seems almost too equal to be true, given how random and disorganised the 'finding people' process actually was. The youngest was 18, the oldest 68 (although we've been a bit shy about asking ages on some occasions). Jobs have ranged from publishers to perfumiers, from architects to butlers, from musicians to security guards. We've met people in shops, cafes and restaurants, interviewed them watching football in pubs, watching American football at two in the morning, working on market stalls and in launderettes. We ourselves have been interviewed on tv, on radio, online and in the papers, and (almost without exception) everyone we speak to gets very excited about the idea. Most people are very optimistic on our behalf, but nobody knows for sure if it's even possible. We don't know if it is.

But all we've got to do is the same again, and we're there.

* Real WIOC enthusiasts might point out at this stage that we met two people for the UK, and two for Canada, but on both occasions the pairing was male-female so if you count the individuals in these pairings as half-people (no offence, George and Iris, and Tara and Chris) the distribution of genders is still the same. I can't help thinking that there's a clearer way to express the sentiment in that last sentence.

Half Way!

2007-06-20T22:48:00.000Z

Owen Powell - 20th June 2007

We're half way through the project!

In fact, we're over half way! Tonight I met our 96th and 97th people, Loreto from Chile and Marija from Serbia. (Their full interview will follow, probably some time in 2008 at my current rate of writing up meetings. Sorry for the delay, everyone who's waiting...)

Also to come, possibly at some point tomorrow, some fabulous 'Half Way Statistics'. Want to know how many men and women we've found? Which continents have proved hardest and easiest? Whether people live north or south of the river? Tune in soon.

Also, we'll shortly be announcing details of our half-way celebration, 'The World In One Picnic'. Everyone in the project so far will get an email invitation in the next few days, anyone else interested in coming along, drop us an email to the usual address.

Thanks so much to everyone so far who's taken part - we hope you've enjoyed it as much as we have!