Happy Thanksgiving to our Canadian friends and families! I hope your weekends were spent with good food and good company. We were going to make a Thanksgiving dinner and share a meal with our roommates, but we quickly re-thought that idea once we remembered that a) we don’t have a kitchen table at which we can all eat together b) we don’t have any space in the fridges to store anything c) neither of us know how to cook a turkey d) we don’t have enough nor the right cookery. So we settled on going to a movie (The Fifth Estate) and picking up take-out. When in Rome.
Life here in London is pretty settled. Chris started a job as a server today at a restaurant beside St. Paul’s Cathedral. The job hunt will continue but we’re both glad and relieved he’s found something for the time being. The rest is pretty well old news at this point: my first week of classes went really well, we’re checking out the sights whenever possible, our flat still has all the same roommates (until the end of this week when two of them move out – they’re great and we’ll miss them). The only thing we still struggle with is grocery stores. Can’t quite master the layout, and because they’re so small they often don’t seem to carry things we’d consider staples back home (like bagels and popcorn and ground coffee and bleach).
We are trying to plan a trip or two for before Christmastime. I am going to Paris for a school trip in the middle of my reading week in November, so we’re trying to plan a little trip around that, possibly with our friend Adam who’s studying in Barcelona right now. Also, our friend Chelsey is coming to visit us in November and we are SO excited and counting down the days!
The weather has turned quite cold here. The rain stayed away for about two weeks which was glorious, but it’s been back for the past couple days and it brought cold with it. Neither of us brought winter coats with us (luggage reasons, and I didn’t think I’d need my parka in the land of the rain), so those are creeping towards the top of our to-find lists. (EDIT: I’m wrong. Chris brought his winter coat because he’s so smart.)
Saturday night we went to a housewarming party for a friend of Chris’ who went to Glendon but whom I miraculously escaped encountering. She is a teacher here in London, and the party was filled with other Canadian teachers and some Australian folks who’ve also come over to live for awhile. It was nice being in the company of others in the same boat as us. One of the girls we chatted with is headed back to Canada in November after two years teaching here, because her visa is expiring. Her next move is to Asia, she said. (EDIT: This seems like an odd story to tell. All that was to say, there are a lot of Canadians here which is nice feeling, and it’s really too bad none of the teachers can find work back in Canada.)
Every day I’m reminded of how small the world we live in is. We went to the movies with two of my classmates and one of them also brought along her significant other. Turns out, he’s from Macau but he did his undergrad at UofT at the same time we were at Glendon and living across the street from UofT’s St. George campus. He’s in London at Imperial in medical school now.
Tomorrow we are going to see Canada’s soccer (“football”) team take on Australia’s. They’re playing at Fulham Stadium, close to our flat. We’re headed with most of our roommates, and it should be a great time. We’re both really looking forward to it.
Apologies for the lack of exciting things in this post. Just a few little updates. Who knows, maybe Chris will grace you all with a lengthier, more insightful piece of writing soon. For now, see below for some pictures!
-Meg
Nearby Bishop’s Park:
Two ballerinas in the window of a perfume shop on Oxford St.:
London is filled with these little, pretty pedestrian footpaths that don’t show up on Google Maps. A lot of them are much narrower than this one:
Fake tree decorating a construction site:
Leicester Square at night:
These, and the waffles that accompany them, just seem wrong:
And fiiiinally, some photos of the inside of our flat. Just the kitchen/TV area for now. (P.S. It’s in an almost-perpetual state of messiness because so many of us live here. Thank goodness for the hour or so after the cleaning lady comes on Thursdays that the place is actually tidy):
(That’s our door on the left!)
Bags of Milk 