The World In One City

One of the major reasons that I love living in London is that it is such a cosmopolitan and multicultural city. Some of our closest neighbours are Irish, Indian, Pakistani, Polish and Lebanese. Some of our closest friends are Chinese. My newsagent is Sri Lankan, my doctor is Indian, my hairdresser is Kosovan, and my dentist is Iranian.
Last night, my wife Vee (half Welsh, half Czech) and I (half English, half Italian) went out for dinner with our good friends Eric (American) and Noemi (French) and their son Yonatan (Israeli) to the Italian restaurant Zizzi where we were served by people from Poland, Slovakia and Moldova.
I thought of the evening as I read in today’s “Observer” newspaper an article about a blog called “The World In One City”. This describes a project by Alex Horne and Owen Powell to interview for their blog someone living in London from each of the 192 countries in the world. As of today, they’ve managed 112 profiles.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 15th, 2007 at 11:28 am and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

3 Comments

  • Eric Lee
    July 20th, 2007 at 3:30 pm

    In the immortal words of Hercule Poirot, “Not French, Belgian!”

  • Owen Powell
    July 20th, 2007 at 11:58 pm

    Hello Roger!
    We’d love to know where Zizzi is, as we haven’t found anyone from Moldova yet…
    Best wishes
    Owen (and Alex)

  • Roger Darlington
    July 21st, 2007 at 11:41 am

    Hi, Owen.
    The “Zizzi” restaurant in question was this one: 202-208 Regents Park Road, London N3 3HP – Te: 0208 371 6777.
    We went there on a Saturday evening which might help you to track down the young woman. She may even remember me – tall, bespectacled, late 50s – because I surprised her by being able to say “Good evening” in Romanian, the first language of most young Moldovans.
    If you manage to interview her, be sure to post an up-date here!