Blog here, blog there

Everywhere a blog, blog.

So my blog looks a bit different… I thought I’d try something new for the new year. I love the blackboard style of it, so fitting for a teacher’s blog, but the font might drive me to change again in the near future.

As you can guess by the steady stream of blogging, I haven’t started work yet. Calls are starting to come in for different schools though so I don’t think it will be long. I’ll keep you posted. For now, a post about another London weekend done on the cheap. Well mostly.

Friday night I got to finally have a girls night and catch up with my good friend and future roommate. She also introduced me to two girls I hadn’t met before. One woman from Romania who works in a corporate setting, the nature of which I couldn’t quite gather, and another woman from Italian, doing one of her doctoral residency years abroad in England. Very interesting girls! We went to this awesome sushi place where the tables were very low. We hung out in Camden for the evening and chatted for hours.

Saturday, my future roomie Katrina and I went to the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Hindu temple in North London at Neasden station. So epic and something I’d completely missed last year. She has the photos we took so I’ll add them into this post when I get them from her. It was incredibly beautiful. The main temple is all white marble and every surface is carved with beautiful patterns or figures. The evening was spent cuddled on her bed watching hilarious clips of things and eating terrible, cheap, and delicious London take away.

Sunday I spent with Dan. We walked from London Bridge to Waterloo station enjoying the festival of the Thames, though there wasn’t much to see. I do always love walking along the Thames and they even unlocked the gates so you could walk down where the tide normally covers.

After that we went to the museum of London, ANOTHER thing I had never done last year. Honestly it didn’t sound like much but it is a beautiful museum. Very well put together and I learned so much about the city. It covers the whole history of the city right from the Roman beginnings and what it would have looked like before them. Very cool. And there special exhibition was all about bikes…. We saw a professional bmx cyclist doing some amazing tricks outside the museum.

Finally, we saw a life sized Dalek, nothing gets much cooler than that.

Sunday night we watched “Jonathan Creek”, and old murder mystery Dan is trying to get me into…. I’ll keep you posted on that too.

These blue trees are also something we saw walking around this weekend. They are to raise awareness about the importance of trees in the city. Very cool looking, so vibrant even on a cloudy day.

The things I forgot

There are definitely something’s I forgot about living in London. There are some great things and some annoying things. So here are my top 5 treasure and troubles of living in London which escaped my memory.

Treasures

5. When the sun is out, the parks are flooded with happy people. They really know how to enjoy the sunshine.
4. There is chocolate everywhere, so hard to resist.
3. Public transport is pretty darn good.
2. So many free museums
1. Cell phone bills are like 20$ a month and have unlimited data.

Troubles

5. It’s insanely expensive, twice as much as the rest of the country
4. Crowds, people everywhere… Can’t breath, so many people
3. Many places oddly have two taps in the bathroom, one for hot and one for cold on opposite sides of the sink, so you have to turn them both on and sort of go back and forth between scalding and freezing your hands
2. The prevalent paranoia surrounding friendly people and their possible motives (I gotta stop thinking this way, so uncanadian)
1. Tourists, if the crowds weren’t annoying enough, the hordes of tourists will drive you mad.

Back to London

Well I’m back in London for another year of torture… I mean teaching… Damn that auto correct. Due to the demand of certain friends and family I’m going to start blogging again to keep everyone up to date on what’s happening and what I’m up to.

For the accommodation update, I’m still staying with a friend until the 21st of September and then I get my apartment with two friends, another Canadian teacher and an Australian accountant. Further updates on that to come 🙂

The teaching plan for the year is, spend one term (until Christmas) teaching in one school, probably starting around October, and another school for the remanding two terms. We will see what happens though. For now, I’ll just be supply teaching, and waiting for a really good opportunity to come along. I’m not going to settle this year and end up somewhere as bad as last year (hopefully).

As for my first weekend back, it was very fun, though done on the cheap side and with severe jet lag. On Saturday we went and explored Greenwich market, my old stomping ground, and then took the tube to what will be my new stomping ground. I didn’t get to see inside my new apartment yet but we checked out the neighbourhood and walked from there to whitechapel. It was nice out and so great to see my new area. It put me and my friend Dan at ease to see that it’s a pretty nice area.

After that we went back to Greenwich to go up to the observatory to see the prime meridian. Even though I lived so close to it last year we never ended up going. We made the time this weekend though, it was fun. We saw the prime meridian (or the most widely accepted 0 degrees longitude- though some people use other ones). We learned a lot about how difficult it was to tell time on ships and how so much money and effort was put into developing an accurate way to tell time aboard ships. We even got to see a planetarium show, one of my favourite things! Finally, we went to covent garden and leicester square just to walk around and see what was on. After that, it was quickly home and in bed… I fell asleep so early each night this weekend.

Sunday was great too. After walking around Greenwich just a bit, we wondered to Hyde park. We walked through the park to the little man made lake and got on paddle boats. That was also very fun, though the water is not as clean or pretty as in Canada, that’s for sure. After exploring all of the park we could from the water, we grabbed lunch and went and ate by a fountain where we saw baby ducks up really close. After that we went to my favourite museum, the museum of natural history, and discovered a part I had never been to. I probably missed it a few times because its about geology and other earth sciences, but it was actually fascinating and so well put together. Since we went for the spirit collection tour, and they were done those for the day, we decided to see the butterfly exhibit which would be leaving soon instead. It was very pretty, though small. I believe after that we came back home, and I think I fell asleep at 9pm!

This week has been a lot of getting things together for work, meetings and signing things etc. I did a lot of walking to get around, even if it was more than an hour away, just because I wanted to enjoy London in the unexpected heat (It’s been so hot!).

Here for your viewing pleasure are a few pictures of my Sunday out. I’m excited to see what this year brings.

Weekend fun

Last weekend we got all dressed up in “fancy dress” for St. Patty’s. of course it wasn’t fancy, but gaudy green, orange and white , flashing, and sequined garb. Sadly, we actually had people asking us why were were dressed that way, and even for a Sunday afternoon and evening, the pubs were fairly empty. We should have gone to the parade. We had a fun housemates day out though, minus the green beer I’m so used to.

This weekend was a step up as we went out for my birthday. We dressed up very nicely and went to a bar called paramount. It was a very swanky bar and in one of the tallest buildings in London. The 360 view was incredible, and, compared to the expensive price tag of going up the shard, we saved, even paying a little extra for our drinks.

We sipped our drinks, a G&T for me of course, and lounged on the black leather sofa with a view spread out before us. I could barely keep still though and loved walking around to see the view (and show off my pretty dress).

It was just what I wanted in a party; 11 people from 4 different countries, all dressed to kill, chilling in the candle light of a very cool LondonNot bad for a new life I’ve only been building for 5.5 months.

What a great memory to have for my 25th birthday! (Though I’m choosing to forget, quickly, the night bus home).

Teacher heartbreak

What a sad development.

Unexpectedly, my school has to make room for a new English teacher to fulfill contractual obligations. This fills the job I’ve been covering since January.

I’m not ready to say goodbye to these kids; I’ve poured so much into them to make them feel worthwhile again after being abandoned by two English teachers already this year. The new teacher will be great but I really hope I can make them understand that I didn’t want to go.

I wish I could have seen them until the end of this year. 4 more days and then on to the next thing.

Lazy weekend

I had such a miserable week I was too tired to do anything extravagant this weekend. So I thought I’d post about last weekend.

Friday night I went out for sushi at this really fancy hotel near London Bridge. It was cool because you could watch the chef preparing it. It was also the nicest sushi I’ve had, not hurt by the fact that I was enjoying it with a bottle of champagne. It was pretty awesome. After that I went to a bar in Brixton which is a pretty good weekend spot. I had one of my new favorite drinks. G&T… They are sweet though so I usually switch to gin and soda after one or two. It’s such a British drink 🙂

Saturday I was productive in the morning, I went to the gym and spent the morning marking. In the evening we had a housemates night and went bar hopping in Covent garden. I still don’t completely understand how to distinguish a bar from pub here though… I think we went to both.

Sunday morning I found myself back at the gym with my housemate Jenn. We are a good influence on each other except since we started going to the gym she has lost 4 pounds and I have a pesky extra 4 pounds that just keeps hanging around. (Not that I’ve changed my diet from chocolate and coffee that much). After the gym I met my other housemate Dan around Leicester square. We got lunch at a French bakery (trying to relive Paris) and we sat outside on a curb in Covent garden eating it. It was so sunny it was amazing.

So we didn’t waste the sun, we decided to spend the remainder of our afternoon wandering through Hyde park. Or is it high park. I always get confused about which one is here and which is in Toronto.

When I got home I skyped a friend and then watched my new fav program- Top Gear. I’m not a car person at all but that show is awesome.

All in all a great weekend. This weekend I’m fighting off a cold or something so I didn’t feel like going out too much. I saw the film Oz with my housemates and that was fun but other than that I’ve just been marking and at the gym. Boring but a well needed rest.

It’s been a homesick kind of week. I think I’m ready to come home soon. It’s just so hard to leave a few people behind and start over back in Canada.

Oh one other fun thing, the two empty rooms in my house got filled today. My house now consists of two Canadian girls (myself included), one british guy (Dan) and two Australians. Full house again! Let’s see how this goes.

It’s not easy to say goodbye

So after spending most of half term painfully homesick… And really trying to analyze why… I’ve come to the conclusion that nothing in my life feels terribly concrete right now.

I honestly feel like I’m living one good bye to the next. You’d think I’d cherish the time I do get to be reunited with friends but perhaps I’m not so positive as that. As soon as I go home for a visit, I’m thinking about having to say good bye again. It’s even worse in England because I have absolutely no intention of staying here permanently, or even that long, so all my relationships feel false. I’m scared to let people in, because I don’t want to be hurt by good byes.

I’m scared to go home too. I’m worried relationships and people will have changed. I know I’ve changed. Will my old friends still want me? Will they get annoyed when I say, “Let’s go to the cinema” the way some British people do when I say theatre? These things are not really big, life altering problems, but they are still uncomfortable.

I think that is where I’m at. Trying to shape my life when there is little directing it. Just measuring the time from one goodbye to the next, because what else is there really? The next goodbye is actually ages away, but even still, I can’t help being reminded every time I’m with my friends here… That it won’t last.

Anyway, Paris and now being very busy back at work has almost completely cured my immediate and aching homesickness (though I’ll always miss Canada a little). I’m going through a post homesickness episode phase though that I like to call ‘pride in the moment’. It’s when you listen to a lot of music that celebrates living recklessly in the moment, or sacrifices and goodbyes being worth it… and then also live like that.

Currently on repeat is “Save Tonight” by Eagle-eye cherry. Check it out- 90’s classic and something that describes a lot of moments I’ve had in the last year.

Other good ones:

Atlas hands- Benjamin Francis Leftwich
Against the grain – city and colour (Canadian)
Fake Empire- the national
Reminder – Mumford and Sons
Pelican – the Maccabees

I’ll stop there but there are tons. -Celebrating how I’m living my life… Something I’m going to start doing more of.

Paris pictures 2

Paris pictures

Stolen from my friend Dan.

Au revoir

We didn’t do quite as much on Sunday. Not very many things worth talking about. More pastries (I had two for breakfast today), lots of sights (famous bridges and statues) and the burial place of Napoleon.

To be honest we were knackered, cold, and ready to go home. Well I think Dan was ready to go to Paris Disneyland but we didn’t quite have time for that. We decided to walk to the train station, Gare du Nord to kill the time we had left. An endeavor to say the least since it was quite far and we were so tired and cold.

It ended up being a lovely walk after a bitter start. The wind couldn’t get us after we got off the big wide streets and into the winding, small streets. We saw some things along the way and arrived at the station with just enough time for one last Parisian meal.

I almost ordered Andouille- which is intestines. Well I wanted to try something new, but the look the waitress gave me made me chicken out and go for le poulet instead. Mussels are what came so I guess it didn’t matter what I ordered. We ate, dessert included, because my friend is a bad influence on me, and headed off for our train.

Thank you British border control, your ridiculous questions nearly made me miss my train. There is something romantic about running to catch a train in Paris though… Perhaps everything is just a little more romantic in Paris.

Some interesting things I noticed about Paris.
Their subway is incredibly cold. Even holding onto the hand rails inside the train was uncomfortable or impossible without gloves.
A lot of things are closed on Sunday.
If you ask someone if they speak English they will always say, “un petit peu” (a little bit) but then speak it very well, much better than my “petit peu de français”.
Their pastries are better, the best, just so far superior to… Everything else.
Things are more expensive than London (I barely believe it myself but I think it’s true!)
They have cute, tiny balconies in every window sill.
That’s all I can think of at the moment.

Pictures to follow if I ever get to it :). We actually took some pictures with cameras other than our iPhones, but not very many. We were just enjoying the moment.