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?!