Last night I played badminton for a second time at the Bethnal Green Technology College, open to the public in the evenings. It's a fairly new gym and pretty decent. As I was leaving, I couldn't help comparing and contrasting it with Clube Hebraica, one of only two badminton venues I found in Sao Paulo.
The latter is billed as being the largest Jewish community centre / club in the world. In reality, it is just another private bubble, an ugly concrete-clad edifice, badly finished and filled with furniture that seems stuck in a 1960s or 70s time-warp.
Yet it costs a fortune to join and in monthly membership dues. It also happened to be an impossibly expensive and gridlocked taxi journey across town, which is why I gave up going there (as a guest rather than member, I hasten to add).
In stunning contrast, BGTC is in one of London's notoriously poorer areas and my fellow badminton players, almost exclusively from the local Bengali Muslim population, were hardly the kind of demographic you would expect to see in one of Sao Paulo's "rich" areas. Yet here they were, enjoying the facilities of a building which seemed to have arrived from the future compared to the "rich" but dreadful Clube Hebraica.
Yes, London has its dodgy side and its occasional rioting, but a new building like this in a "poor" area shows that civil society is as deeply-rooted in the UK as it is a far-off fantasy in Brazil.
PS: Looks like the economic boom is over in Brazil. As I sensed when living there, the overstretched consumer in a consumer-unfriendly society has finally buckled.
The latter is billed as being the largest Jewish community centre / club in the world. In reality, it is just another private bubble, an ugly concrete-clad edifice, badly finished and filled with furniture that seems stuck in a 1960s or 70s time-warp.
Yet it costs a fortune to join and in monthly membership dues. It also happened to be an impossibly expensive and gridlocked taxi journey across town, which is why I gave up going there (as a guest rather than member, I hasten to add).
In stunning contrast, BGTC is in one of London's notoriously poorer areas and my fellow badminton players, almost exclusively from the local Bengali Muslim population, were hardly the kind of demographic you would expect to see in one of Sao Paulo's "rich" areas. Yet here they were, enjoying the facilities of a building which seemed to have arrived from the future compared to the "rich" but dreadful Clube Hebraica.
Yes, London has its dodgy side and its occasional rioting, but a new building like this in a "poor" area shows that civil society is as deeply-rooted in the UK as it is a far-off fantasy in Brazil.
PS: Looks like the economic boom is over in Brazil. As I sensed when living there, the overstretched consumer in a consumer-unfriendly society has finally buckled.
No comments:
Post a Comment