Time She's 'A Movin....

Oh, so much is going on in London that Captain Ruter's days seem shorter and shorter (not that the sun hasn't also begun to show fewer and fewer hours of each day as the calendar moves into fall). Activities everywhere.

First, there's homework to keep up with. Between reading, museum visits, personal budgeting, and theater performances, the captain keeps himself quite busy.

Second, there's regular life with his mates...at each turn, someone's celebrating a birthday. "We're all a needin' ta do our warshin', we are, and these blimey warshers rnt like the ones at home, noooo. Some a them, they warsh and dry in the SAME machine, they do!" So agreeing who's turn is it to wash or whose dishes remain in the sink or who had longer than whom in the bathroom presents those lovely challenges of daily living the Captain had grown accustomed to managing on his own when living alone aboard his ship.

Third, he continues to go on field trips (a clever approach to teaching and learning that his teachers assure him is advancing what he's learning while abroad). In an effort to demonstrate the embeddedness of business and commerce into society over centuries of time, the teachers arranged a walking tour through sections of London. Students saw where the tea and coffee trade of the world emerged. They heard stories like the British obtaining Hong Kong in 1842 after 3 years of opium wars over the tea trade. As the story goes, tea was a British staple and silk quite valuable. The East India Company had a monopoly on the Asian market where tea and silk came from. But China began wanting more money than the market would bear or the company could pay....and so the East India company became quite entrepreneurial and smuggled opium into China from Bengal in order to generate enough cash to pay for tea, silk and other goods. In 1839 the Chinese confiscated all of the opium in British warehouses. The British saw this confiscation as theft and declared war -- The captain rather appreciated that audacious spirit! Later, around 1864, the Hong Kong Bank was founded in order to facilitate trade among regions, enhancing the political and financial empire of London and the Eastern empire abroad.

The students also walked by the site of Jonathan's coffee house in Exchange ally. This, their guide explained, was the general market for stock jobbers in 1694. By 1685, Edward Lloyd had opened a coffee house for sea farers on Tower Street. It quickly became the place for news (Lloyds News) and soon, Lloyd saw an opportunity to underwrite ships and cargo. The area has been in the center of insurance ever since.

The captain has acquired a new affinity for coffee and a renewed love of tea --- and he thinks about the American's Boston tea party with new eyes now.

Then there was a trip to a brewery. In addition to tea and coffee, beer is a cultural focal point in England. With tiny houses, there's hardly a living room to enjoy. And so the English walk down the street to a local pub and enjoy friends and laughter and stories and playing darts and watching "football" (really, the captain knows they mean "soccer", but he's trying to fit in). The local pub has a cultural as well as a commercial purpose. Indeed it helped the captain in class too. When back in the classroom discussing corporate finance and characteristics of money, he understood "durability" of goods when he remembered the tour guide explaining the shift to the beer industry with the discovery of hops as a form of natural preservative; a keg of beer suddenly had a significantly longer shelf life making it easier for an inn keeper or pub master to buy beer in a keg and sell it to customers over weeks instead of only over days.

And now, the captain and his mates are off to the great lands of the north. Today, they leave for Scotland! (The captain hopes to meet his long lost relative Captain Rhubarb...only time will tell.)

The lot are off again to the bonnie hills of Edinburgh with more adventures to report next week.