Brizzle

SANY0629
Originally uploaded by sarahkatina

Bristol was a very different kind of visit from my previous two. First, because Hayley and I had two years of our lives to catch up on. Second, because Hayley has been living in Bristol for a long time now. Third, because there aren't a lot of wondrous things in Bristol - I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. It reminded me of Buffalo in ways - it's a smaller city, lots of class divisions.

It was wonderful to see Hayley. I stepped off the bus exhausted, dirty, and surprisingly famished (my appetite disappeared entirely in Dublin and Barcelona - since Bristol, where I was force-fed delicious things at every moment, it has been raging), and she gave me a big hug and took me home, put me in the shower, lent me slippers, took me out to dinner, made me hot chocolate, made me go to bed early. We did a lot of walking and talking, as one might expect. More than that, even, a lot of sitting in our pajamas and talking. I sat in on one of her lectures (Thomas Wyatt, what what!), and bought a beautiful pair of dark teal boots. We ate toasted tea cakes and I drank more hot chocolate than I've ever had in a four day period, ever. And ultimately, because of all this, and because Hayley is so wonderful, I will forever associate Britain with comfort.

The tragedy of this trip was mainly that I lost all of my beautiful pictures of the cathedral and downtown Bristol with a mis-press of a button. I have never been inside a cathedral before, and Bristol's was built by Henry VIII. It's not the Sagrada Familia, but it made my jaw drop in its own very old, very traditional way. When we went to see the Sagrada, late in the night on my last night in Barcelona, Andrew said "Now this, THIS is for Jesus." Bristol Cathedral made me feel that way too. It's amazing, the things that people produce for God.

Despite the loss of those photos, I did manage to take a lot of surrealistic night vision shots in the clubs we went to - the first for the birthday of a friend of Hayley's, and the second to get some time to ourselves out of the house (and to dance). I am fascinated with the effect that my camera has in dark spaces - maybe this is just the hipster in me, liking the fact that I can make reality seem abstract. Ha. In any case, they were good nights. I discovered, to my great interest, that I can dance better than the majority of British people. Or at least, better than the majority of Bristol club-goers. In America I am just an OK dancer, but in Bristol I am queen of the dance floor.

The second night we went out to a club with a much older, much more mellow crowd, and had something approximating a dance-off and then a lesson with the most talented dancer in the club, who spotted Hayley and I moving with a little more rhythm than the majority and took us under his wing. I was excited and proud that he wanted to trade moves with us - it reminded me of Rize and other clips I've seen from the communal street dance life. (See Rize, if you haven't - it's incredible.) I love this stuff - dancing, certainly, absolutely, more and more the more that I do it and the better I get at it. Loud music, certainly. Blurry night vision shots, certainly. There is something about these temporary communities built around a love of music and an exploration of what bodies are capable of, alone and in concert with other bodies, that is so satisfying to me.

Another thing that I noticed was that there are a lot of people who look like me in Britain. I wonder why that would be? (That is a mock question - I know why. But still, it was really trippy to be amongst the people who could most closely be approximated as "my people" for a few days.)