I’ve been away from Canada for less than a week, and I’ve got to say the transition has been super easy and more than a little fun. Classes haven’t started yet, and I won’t move into my dorm for two more weeks, so really I’ve been on a glorified vacation that starts to end today. In the next hour I’ll be attending a registration for my intro to Welsh course, which will be meeting two mornings a week for who knows how long. Following that I’m going to hit the pavement and look for a part time job in Swansea...the more mundane and simple the better. Although I waited tables for 5 years, and worked retail for a short while after high school my years in post secondary support have cast a rose-coloured veil over the reality of such jobs and I currently have a romantic idea of working in a coffee shop or boutique. We’ll see how I feel about that if and when it happens!
Prior to arriving in Wales yesterday I spent three fantastic days in London doing a bunch of stuff that I’ve wanted to do but never had the chance on any of my previous trips. I arrived on Thursday and settled into my hostel after a mandatory trip to Marks and Spencers to stock up on salads. After a short nap I dusted myself off and headed out to meet my expat friends Jess and Heather in Shoreditch. It was Heather’s birthday and she arranged a gathering for her massive mob of friends at a neat little foosball bar. I’m sure I was far from articulate, and my foosball skills were atrocious, but I did manage to last until around 11pm before the feeling of being on a jet lag rollercoaster caught up to me and I headed home.
Friday I walked an epic 11 miles around London. I started near Regents Park and walked to Westminster Abbey (and refused to pay £15 to get in when going to a service is free), then crossed the Thames and walked the South Bank to Borough Market. OMG I heart Borough Market! It’s a food lover’s paradise. Local and imported meats, raw French cheeses, decadent baked goods, ready-made delicacies (such as the boiled potatoes topped with oozing freshly broiled cheese scraped directly off of a massive wheel of cheese, served with a side of gherkins) and stalls serving local beer and cider, and imported prosecco in takeaway cups. These lunchtime indulgences motivated me to keep walking, so I continued back across London Bridge towards St. Pauls. Again, refusing to pay to look around I carried on my way back up to Camden to enjoy the array of seedy and trendy shops and stalls at the Stables Market. I then met up with my local friends Philip and Juliana for a delicious Lebanese meal and a wonderful visit.
Saturday started with a nice sleep in an intense visit to the Imperial War Museum. I highly recommend this to everyone. I spent my time in two of the most powerful exhibits I have ever seen. The Holocaust exhibit alone is well worth the trip to Lambeth. It’s one of the most concise and extensive portrayals of the atrocities of WWII that I’ve ever seen. I spent 2 hours in it and made it about ¾ of the way through before overload set in and I had to leave. Outside the exhibit was the entrance to a 30 minute film about war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity...because the Holocaust apparently wasn’t enough I decided to give it a go. Wow. Disturbing, horrific and powerful. Well worth a view if you can handle the cold, harsh realities of what humans continually do to each other. I left the museum and thanked my lucky stars that I was born when and where I was. This day fittingly wrapped up with the highly acclaimed, and in my opinion overrated play Warhorse. The staging and puppetry were amazing, and made the show, but the story was a bit weak, most of the characters were one dimensional (save one German officer), some of the acting was surprisingly weak for a West End show, and it dragged on...sort of like this blog post!
My London adventures wrapped up on Sunday when I boarded the train at Paddington for Wales. Now the next leg of my journey begins.
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