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.