Week 4 – Walks, Museums and Luck!

This week started with a London walk with Ingrid on Monday night.  Spiced up my Monday doldrums for sure!  London walks (walks.com) are these entertaining 2-hour walks all over the city led by really experienced guides that take you to well-known and seldom heard of places and tell you stories about each site.  One destination was an old dark alley-way where this theatre-master was stabbed to death. The story goes that he appears to people in his theatre-attire and vanishes through the back walls of the building.  I’m pretty sure everyone in the group had at least a moment of terror in their hearts when there were three single deliberate knocks that came from the other side of the iron door, pre-arranged by our guide of course :)

Our theatrical guide and the group on our "Apparitions, Alleyways and Arbours" tour of the west end - not the scary alley story location though.

This week I continued half-heartedly applying for university jobs - in other words, I finished my mom’s favourite book called A Fine Balance.  I won’t go into it here, but if you’re looking for a good book to read, and don’t mind having your heart broken by the sadness faced by amazing characters who you grow to love throughout the book, I highly recommend it.

This weekend was the Bloomsbury Festival.  Bloomsbury is the neighbourhood we live in that's famous for all the literary figures who lived here like Virginia Woolf and Charles Dickens.  We pretty much took advantage of all of this festival’s goodies.  We went on 3 guided walks.  The first was through our neighbourhood cemetery, St. George’s Gardens, the oldest burial ground outside of a church plot in London (holding 50,000 corpses).  We went on another walk that was guided by an ESL student who promised that there would be free cake at one of the stops and…there wasn’t.  Enough said there.  The third walk was on Sunday.  It was called “Secrets of Bloomsbury” but what it was essentially, was this guy who looked like the Severus Snape character from Harry Potter but with fluffy hair and lots of piercing holes, leading us around, sharing stories of black magic and stuff at all these sites.  And I swear the guy was into it himself.  I genuinely felt some fear in listening to some of it.  At one point while he was talking (about teleporting or something), his cell phone rang and although it was muffled in his pocket, I could detect the ring tune sounded like a sorcery song!  I really regret not taking his picture.  We also visited a few museums including the Charles Dickens museum (Charlie would have been our neighbour down the road a hundred years ago!), the Cartoon Museum, and the Foundling Museum.  Awesome weekend!

From the cartoon museum.  This was my favourite.

Charles Dickens Museum

Dickens back yard!

A Christmas Carol

Heading upstairs at Charles Dickens' house - so many floors!

Pondering thoughtfully by the fire

Just peering outside in Dickens' reading room - not posing at all!

Foundling (Children's Hospital/Orphanage) Museum - girls hair ribbon exhibit

Ten-year olds handwriting practice in a notebook!

Really sad poem left by a mother dropping her son off at the orphanage.  They also had this exhibit with little trinkets like coins and stones and things left by children's parents, hoping they would give their children something to remember them by.  Children's pasts were completely erased upon admission and they were even given new names.

Free cake here...psych!

St. George's Gardens (Burial Grounds)

Our guide looked like he was right out of the 1700s!

Bloomsbury Festival lights and lanterns at Russell Square

Now, yesterday was altogether a day of LUCK.  And not the “opportunity meets preparation” kind of luck as Oprah would say.  Mostly just plain old luck.

Yesterday, I had an interview at King’s College Department of Palliative Care, Policy and Rehabilitation for a research administrator job.  I knew the first half of the interview was going to be a surprise task for 30 minutes and the second half a panel interview.  I was preparing for the surprise task to be something on SPSS so I spent the last couple evenings doing tutorials (trying and failing to understand statistical theories) and reading old notes and stuff.  When it came to doing the surprise task on interview day, a secretary lead me to an office (in silence) and told me, “Everything you need to know is in that brown envelope on the desk.”  “I will come and warn you when you're down to your last few minutes”.  I asked if I should sit down at the computer and she said “Yes” as though she had given me too much information.  And the whole task was written in the brown envelope (task was to read about the research project in a booklet and answer some questions about it).  Anyways, when I got home I received a call offering me the job!  It's supposed to start this Monday. 

Now, that’s not the only luck.  Pheroze won more concert tickets! We’ll be going to see these guys on Thursday night!  The show is called "Le Tango".  Listen to a sample here!  Reminds me of The Adams Family:  http://www.amorquintet.com/

As if that wasn’t enough luck, I got a surprise pair of shoes in the mail yesterday as well.  I signed up for this awesome groupon right before I first got here for a pair of those foldable shoes for 8 pounds.  What a sucker for gimmicks I am!  But I think they're pretty great.  (http://www.redfootrevolution.co.uk/index.php/womens).  They sent me the wrong size initially, and so they sent me a second free pair in another style to compensate for their mistake.  Anyways, that’s luck for ya!

Last night my Aunt Betty who is visiting from Calgary treated us and Ingrid and Mike to a delish dinner at a great pub called The Narrow – yum yum!  Gorgeous location right on the Thames too.  http://www.gordonramsay.com/thenarrow/  We participated in quiz night which a lot of pubs in the UK have - very popular!  A quizmaster asks general knowledge questions (heavily weighted towards British trivia) and teams try and answer correctly as many as possible.  Our team of geniuses placed somewhere in the middle – that’s how hard it is!  One of the question was something like 'what's the highest rank of angel?'.  Most people wrote archangel (duh!), but somehow Mike new the answer was seraphim. Wow? Very fun night!

Now, it's my last week of being a tourist (sort of) before I start work next week!  What to do?!

Week 3 - A Masterpiece!

Another fun week! Aside from the week’s worth of exhausting online applications I completed…hopefully I’ll find something soon!

Last year, Pheroze won comedy night tickets and three sets of tickets to opening night movies at Tinseltown by entering online contests.  Well, he brought his online luck with him to London I think!  He won tickets to “Romance by Candlelight” piano concert at St. Martin in the Fields (the old church with the crypt in the basement) through some online contest.  We absolutely went!  We arrived early so we could check out Trafalgar Square which we had both seen before years ago but not at night.  It was gorgeous!  And the piano concert was fantastic as well.  Candles adorned all of the church’s pillars and window sills and the lights on the chandeliers  were dimmed during the performance for a very calming ambience.  Really, really beautiful.  We hope we go to another concert there some day.

Here are some of the pics we took in Trafalgar Square before the concert.

National Gallery in the background

St Martin in the Fields behind me (where the piano concert was)

Pheroze mesmerized by the water and lights haha

Below: here's a couple pics from the intermission at the piano concert.  Me again!

The rest of our week was actually pretty busy. We went to yoga together for the first time on Thursday.  I’m not gonna lie – it was very challenging for me as I seem to have very poor balance (or the strength that it requires to retain the balance I guess).   And it didn’t help assuming the front and centre position in the room! It made me feel better when I heard a loud thud behind me and the instructor went, "oops!".  the experience overall was enjoyable for sure and there were lots of other beginners so I’ll be back again this week.

We also have this cinema of sorts in our residence which shows movies once or twice a week in the evening.  We saw The Pursuit of Happyness this week which we had seen before…but is definitely re-watchable material!  My favourite line:  “You’re a good papa” (awww!). 

This tiny picture is all that came up when I googled the line.  Makes me wanna cry just looking at it.

One night this week we went to a Moroccan dinner for post-grads.  Which again, was very fun.  It was 5 pounds for a three course meal and a glass of wine.  Every sort of package deal here seems to come with booze.  Which we think is a great idea.  Not really sure why that is though.  In this case, maybe to make up for the nasty maraschino cherry rice pudding they served for dessert??  Nobody was too sure it constituted a “course” as most of these bowls were left untouched at the end of the night.  After trying the pudding, it actually felt a little like being on that wonderful show, Just for Laughs Gags, looking around at others bringing their dessert back to their tables, excitedly dipping in and then the resultant dismayed expressions haha.

We headed west on Friday night to meet up with Brandon & Laura at a cozy little wine bar and east on Saturday night to meet up with Ingrid, Mike and my half/second cousin (not exactly sure what the relationship is called) Tim and Alysha for a belated super duper Thanksgiving dinner which was so delicious and very entertaining as well!  And Sunday we took it easy in the morning and headed over to the National Gallery for the afternoon and covered a few rooms of paintings…we’ll definitely be back for more another day.  The thing I love most about this gallery is that is has so many masterpieces from this board game my family had when I was growing up called “Masterpiece”.  It’s an auction game that I didn’t learn how to play – I just looked at the auction pictures.  Anyways, I really enjoyed pointing out the “masterpieces” to Pheroze.  There must be at least 10 masterpieces at the gallery from that game.  Pretty nifty?  I also really enjoyed deciding what painting was our favourite painting before leaving each room.  I don’t think we ever agreed.

And here is a picture of the game I found on the internet.  Looks like an exciting game?

Now, if only I could be as lucky at finding jobs this week as Pheroze is at winning online contests!

Week 2 Update

Another update and two weeks already!  Wowzers!

So I mentioned before that I got the TB vaccine.  Which is going to leave a big ugly scar on my shoulder FOREVER and apparently takes months to blister up and eventually turn into a scar.  I was considering  including a picture of my scar each time I posted an update here so we can all view/be very fascinated with the progression of its getting worse and then healing process but good sense got the better of me haha.  Anyways, it’s update time!

This weekend I put the pedal to metal applying for random jobs.  And by random I’m talking about positions that require very unrelated skills to my masters degree I’ve just painstakingly completed.  My mom warned me just not to show up at some job thinking it’s one thing and then getting tricked into doing porn.  Wow?

We went to the opera on Saturday night at the London Coliseum.  We saw Faust which is apparently a really famous one but I had never heard of it.  We got ridiculously cheap seats using some promotion code Pheroze found online.  It was over 3 hours long but it was actually in English and a fairly straightforward story about a man selling his soul to the devil to win the affections of some woman named Marguerita (which would make one think the opera was actually Spanish).  We really enjoyed it .  The one downside was that Pheroze got really hot in the middle of the show and I was quite warm myself but he shared with me during that show that he was taking off his shoes and later confided to me that he also took off one of his socks as well.  How classy!

This week we explored some more around the city as usual.  Checked out Regent’s Park and the Egyptian section of the British Museum and walked down to the South Bank to pay a personal visit to the HPC which didn’t make a difference to my place in  the queue, as expected.  There was a free wine and nibblies (love the cute English slang!) at our building we went to that – amazing how truly international the place we’re living really is.  We’ve also been making tons of new food we haven’t tried before, maybe because it’s been so long since we’ve had our own kitchen and we’re starved of cooking or something, but from my list here we’ve made pesto (not a new recipe, just an oldie - love it!), sweet potato and chard stew, Bombay roti wraps, butternut squash and sage pasta, ginger and cilantro rice, eggplant marinara flatbread, rice pudding. Mmmmm.

Here are some pictures I finally downloaded.  What a process downloading one at a time through this blog.  

We don't use this map anymore now that we have London A-Z book from Ingrid and Mike...amazing book!

 Beach party time!

 Waterloo Bridge

 North side of Waterloo Bridge

 Garbage on the streets everywhere, every day for collection.  Very nasty.

 Every day at SOAS there's this bald Hare Krischna guy who bikes over with this giant trailer of food to provide free lunch to all the students.  It has something to do with promoting vegetarianism as part of their beliefs.  The line every day is massive!  We went once and it kind of felt like being in line for a soup kitchen or something but it was crazy the amount of food he piles on plates!

These places are as populous as Timmy's in PG or Starbucks in Vancouver.  

 This is our local tube station, Russell Square

 These are the bikes you can rent and they have these points all over the city. At rush hour in the morning all of these bikes are gone.  The idea of depending on one of these bikes to make it to work on time stresses me out!

 This is our building!

Hampstead Heath...gorgeous!

 I was taken by all of the perfect little benches to sit and enjoy things.

 This guy had everything!

 This church was actually part of a private primary school with all these little kids in uniforms running around outside it while I was taking this picture.  What a creep I am!

 Camden Market area had some weird stuff.

UK dollar stores are called 99p store!