{"id":3482,"date":"2010-09-19T17:53:50","date_gmt":"2010-09-19T21:53:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/?p=3482"},"modified":"2010-09-19T17:54:18","modified_gmt":"2010-09-19T21:54:18","slug":"3482","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/2010\/09\/3482\/","title":{"rendered":"Peace is Beautiful"},"content":{"rendered":"

I think that one of my favorite things about London is its parks.\u00a0 I have mentioned before in some of my other posts that I don\u2019t think I could ever live in a big city \u2013 the crowds and the hurry and the size just stress me out too much.\u00a0 I\u2019ve found that parks are one of the few places where you can have space to walk down a path in a straight line without having to dodge and weave and bump into people and say \u201csorry.\u201d\u00a0 I\u2019ve found that parks are also a place where you are pretty much guaranteed a place to sit, and you don\u2019t necessarily have to be within ten feet of another person either. \u00a0It\u2019s lovely that London thought to create places where there is enough space for large amounts of people to be, unlike on the tube or on the streets, where there just simply isn\u2019t.\u00a0 The peace is more beautiful to me than all the trees and flowers and landscaping, although that is pretty too, and a nice break from the architectural chaos of London.\u00a0 I think you really could lose yourself and forget about the city for awhile in parks if you wanted to.\u00a0 When I visited Hyde Park*, I took the following two pictures of the lake:<\/p>\n

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Oh right, the city.\u00a0 There it is.\u00a0 These two pictures seem a bit incongruous; you could probably lie, and tell people that they are different lakes in different places, and they might believe you.<\/p>\n

It seems that parks have several different uses for people in London.\u00a0 The first park I visited was St. James Park, and there I joined many other people picnicking on their lunch break.\u00a0 This seems much more enjoyable than inhaling a sandwich on the tube, and if I ever were to work in London, I would want a job where I could eat lunch in the park.\u00a0 The other side of the bridge at St. James however, toward Buckingham Palace, is much more touristy.\u00a0 I was alerted to this by the presence of an ice cream stand, and chairs that you could pay to sit in.\u00a0 I don\u2019t see this as a problem though, as tourists, I am sure, also need a break from the city.\u00a0 Other uses I have seen for parks include<\/p>\n

dog walking<\/p>\n

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dates<\/p>\n

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studying<\/p>\n

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or just being alone and doing whatever you want.<\/p>\n

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A last really important use for parks, I think, is creating a safe space for children.\u00a0 Professor Qualls brought up this point on the Bloomsbury walking tour, when he took us past the Coram playground, and explained that it was fenced off because you were not allowed in unless you had a child.\u00a0 I saw this again at the Princess Diana Memorial Playground in Hyde Park.\u00a0 It was fenced, plus there was a guard at the door checking people.\u00a0 I witnessed a man come up to the guard and ask if he could see if his wife was in there with his son.\u00a0 The guard told him he could not go in.\u00a0 While this man probably was the father of a child, it is also possible that he could have been a child snatcher, and I personally am a fan of this playground rule that protects children against them.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think we have this in America, or at least I\u2019ve never seen it.\u00a0 At the playground near my house, high school kids smoke pot after school.<\/p>\n

While I am excited to move to Norwich and escape the city more or less permanently, when I do return to London, parks will be on my list of places to revisit.<\/p>\n

*Note: I am not exactly sure where Kensington Gardens ends and Hyde Park begins.\u00a0 This lake could very well technically be in Kensington Gardens.\u00a0 My apologies to Kensington Gardens if this is the case.<\/p>\n

**Note also: all photos in this post are mine.\u00a0 Sorry if you think I’m creepy for taking pictures of random people.\u00a0 It was all in the spirit of academia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think that one of my favorite things about London is its parks.\u00a0 I have mentioned before in some of my other posts that I don\u2019t think I could ever live in a big city \u2013 the crowds and the hurry and the size just stress me out too much.\u00a0 I\u2019ve found that parks are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":444,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6679],"tags":[15159,1042,1244,15160,858],"class_list":["post-3482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2010-kaitlin","tag-coram-playground","tag-hyde-park","tag-kensington-gardens","tag-princess-diana-memorial-playground","tag-st-james-park"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/444"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3482\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}