If At First You Don't Succeed, Skydiving's Not For You

If you can figure out what the meaning of this statement is, please let me know.

I saw it yesterday on the tube in a religious advertisement. Curious, very curious. It appears to be some sort of logical loophole and the more I think about it the more I keep going around in circles only to be brought back to one question: what does skydiving have to do with the Kabbalah?

I've recently become addicted to Kelly Clarkson's song "What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger" as a sort of motto for my time so far in London. Though I do LOVE striding to and fro the tube while listening to Kelly belt it out and patting myself on the back for how incredibly gutsy I am for moving from one English speaking, civilized first world metropolis to another, this is a statement with which I am going to have to respectfully disagree: some things DON'T make you stronger. Breaking your tailbone, chronic illness and low iron levels just to name a few.

It's obvious that Kelly is not really talking about the "physical" kind of strength (although people who have just broken their tailbones might feel differently) but the emotional or mental strength that enables one to "come back swinging". After you've had the chicken pox as a child, you've had it - been there, done that, and you're never supposed to get it again - this is what Ms. Clarkson is singing about. Once you've conquered something it can never beat you in the same way again. This is kind of how I feel (hope) my time is shaping up here in London. Now that I'm actually here doing it I feel buoyed by the sense that at least I've gotten this far, conquered most of the challenges up till now, and strangely, wonderfully enough, my footsteps ARE even lighter.

I'm really sorry for all the horrible analogies I used in this post. Also if I wrecked this song for someone who actually did like it, my most sincere apologies.

Wills & Kate - A Year of Wedded Bliss

Tomorrow is Will and Kate's One Year Anniversary! Yay for them! The gift in the UK for a one year anniversary is Paper...so maybe His Royal Highness will be buying Kate a novel to commemorate their year together. Or maybe a notepad of some sort...

It is so crazy that just one year and three apartments ago I was watching the Royal Wedding at 3:00 am in Vancouver, BC. Needless to say much has changed in the year since then. Pretty much everybody I know has had at least one birthday, Christmas has come and gone and I've moved continents! It's been a year of transitions and growing as I'm sure the next few years will be, until, that is I reach some form of being "settled"...whatever that may mean.

I've completed 4 weeks at the new job and although I still don't know everything about Accounting in England (and probably never will), it is going well. My initial feelings of shock and homesickness have faded (knock on wood) and I'm looking ahead to the many adventures this summer hopefully holds in store.

I've finally had a taste of "London" weather - it has rained pretty much consistently the past 2 weeks here. We had a false alarm fire drill at work where we stood outside in the parking lot in the pouring rain for about 20 minutes. My shoes had puddles in them and I had to wear socks over my stockings for the rest of the day but I guess now I have had a true London welcome. Hopefully the May flowers will more than make up for the extremely rainy April...only time will tell.

In other news my bank card finally arrived (victorious!) after a long 4-week saga with the Bank, I bought the above mug for my own personal enjoyment and am now limited to buying NO MORE MUGS in England (unless I run across one that is absolutely essential...I do have a slight addiction to beautiful and interesting mugs for my tea...) and I saw St. Paul's Cathedral (yes, this is where the bag lady in Mary Poppins sings Feed The Birds). I did not see anyone feeding the birds at this stage, but it was rather supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

All The World's A Stage...

Today was a very happy day for me.

It was Sonnet Sunday at the Shakespeare's Globe Theatre here in London. It was FREE to enter the Globe, walk around, get food and coffee and listen to sonnets. They were being performed in various languages in honour of the Olympics, and there will be a festival in which all of Shakespeare's plays are performed in 37 different languages as well. Needless to say I didn't understand a whole lot of what was being said but that is entirely beside the point. Just being there inside that theatre was enough for me.

The original Globe Theatre is long gone of course and the tourist attraction which now stands in London is a replica designed to imitate what it would have been like in Elizabethan days as closely as possible. It is such an amazing space and I can't wait to see my first show there, once the plays are being performed in English, that is. I would even like to try seeing a show from the yard - the standing seats right beneath the stage where you are up close to the performers the way it was in Shakespeare's day. The Globe is not kidding around - it's an impressive space that is made for theatre as a collective experience - you can see everyone else at all times because it's in a circle. It's one of the reasons I wanted to come to London and being there today was definitely something special for me.

I'm trying throughout this whole experience to focus on being here now and appreciating how lucky I am to be seeing and doing all of these things. It's definitely a challenge at times, but recently I seem to be settled in enough to find moments of happiness sneaking up on me! I was feeling fairly stuck in Vancouver and already I can feel that this change of place and situation is allowing things to start moving again. Which is good. 

A favorite from today, which I heard performed in Cree :

 SONNET 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Washing Your Hands Is Different In London

In honour of my 4 week anniversary of being arrived here in London (!), I submit the following list of things that I've noticed are different here in this great city.

1) Plumbing - European cleanliness as a whole sits at a way different level than Canadian or American standards. Back home, (and I do realize there are plenty of people in Canada and MANY other countries who do not enjoy the benefits of dependable plumbing, but to generalize) you would traditionally find a single tap that produces clean running water that you may adjust to the temperature of your pleasing. You then rinse your hands thoroughly with soap and dry them on the paper towel or super fast air drying machines that are nearby. In London you may find two taps, one for hot water and one for cold, and struggle with trying to fling the thin stream of hot water across over to the cold water so that your hands are neither scalding nor freezing while a glob of soap (if you are lucky and in a place where they care about things like soap....don't count on it) rests in your hands. Eventually you will give up on this and be content to wash your hands in the ice cold water and then dry them on your pants as there is either no paper towel or a super old air dryer that doesn't work or maybe just nothing at all. And this is not just in shabby places either. I've been to museums, coffee shops and office buildings where the bathrooms are like this. Maybe it is because so much of the plumbing in London is so old, and I'm sure the current water shortage here doesn't help either. Maybe it is because we are in Europe where things like germs and drinking before noon are just plain not as big of a deal. Bottom line: washing your hands is different in London.  

2) Street Signage - This one I noticed when I was looking for work/flats/places and wandering around London getting perpetually lost on my first few days here. We are privileged in Canada to have such clear, marked signs on our streets, which generally run either North/South or East/West and have the same name all the way along. I would often find myself walking along trying to figure out what street I was on and there would just be a huge number 50 on the side of a building....with seriously nothing else. 50 is great. I love knowing that I'm at number 50...just would it kill you to also put what street that would be? After a few weeks I'm getting better at it, and often the street signs are on the side of a wall or building or somewhere that you have to go looking for them. I'm getting lost a lot less now that I go to the same place every day for work. But don't even get me started on those roundabouts.

3) Elegant Vocabulary - I like hearing small children speak with very good diction and vocabulary. It amuses me and I find them so much more sophisticated than Canadian children. I also like the words I hear on the tube like "alight" and "mind the gap." I'm sure this will wear off soon...

4) Etiquette - I get called "Miss" here all the time. I was trying to think if we have a substitute for "Miss" in Canada, but I think we would usually just say "hey, you" instead...Also I think people are more polite here at times, what with their proper English manners and whatnot.

5) Food - I do not want to put something called Salad Cream on my salad. It is what it sounds like...and my first experience with mushy peas did not go well.

6) Slang - I used the word "bangs" three times before I realized that the person I was speaking to didn't understand what I was saying and that I ought to say "fringe" instead. They were remarking on how I cut my bangs/fringe myself...it was an adventure.

I will add to this list as time goes on and I find more things that are interesting or amusing about this fair city. So far we seem to be getting along just fine.

I attended a showing of Titanic 3D on the 100 year anniversary of its sinking this weekend. It was very intense, I remember being so terrified as a younger person that the ship actually sank and all those people died. This time I was able to appreciate the story a lot more so that was nice, and I did even shed a few tears over dear Leo. I have to say, though, if it had been me, I think I would have just stayed on that rescue boat. Seriously, Kate...

This week I am reading Jane Austen's Emma and attempting not to eat all of the Belgian chocolate I brought home from my trip in one sitting. Wish me luck!

Easter In Amsterdam



I spent some time this weekend seriously considering whether I could justify purchasing a pair of wooden clogs. They are just so cool and shiny and they come in so many different colours, but in the end my practicality won out and I did not in fact purchase a pair of wooden clogs, much as I would have liked to.

I did enjoy being a tourist for the weekend though. I went on a 4 day coach (that's European for "bus") tour. We stopped in Brussels on the way there and Bruges on the way back, spending all day Saturday and Sunday exploring the city of Amsterdam. I love seeing new places and it still blows my mind how close together everything is here in Europe. In Canada it costs hundreds of dollars to fly across the country and takes about 5 hours to drive to my grandmother's house in the same province of the  country. Over here you can literally buy a bus ticket for a few pounds (if you book really far in advance) and it took less than three hours to drive from Belgium to France. I'm definitely excited to enjoy all this proximity Europeans enjoy (so many of them are so well-travelled!) and to put this incredible Canadian passport to good use.

Amsterdam is one of a kind as a city, and some parts of it you have to see to believe. The first night we arrived we did a walking tour of the Red Light District, which was so surreal and a little overwhelming, honestly. There were girls in the windows right next to everyday people enjoying a nice meal in a restaurant, and then during the day there were families and tourists exploring all of the museums. I really enjoyed seeing the tulip gardens at Keukenhof, which reminded me of the Butchart Gardens in Victoria. It was a huge garden with walking paths, a cafe, and a windmill that you could climb up to get a good view of the whole thing. I even saw a real live Easter Bunny hopping around the greenery, which made my day.  

Some highlights include seeing the many cats that seem to roam the city, in and out of bars, cafes and restaurants (literally there was a cat sitting on a stool in a bar), the near freezing weather and crazy wind of the canal city and glimpsing one of the only male window workers in Amsterdam. I tasted a bunch of different kinds of cheese and ate waffles and chips pretty much every day. There were lots of other Canadian girls on my tour and I met some awesome Australians as well.

I was also able to visit the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and take a cruise through the canals of the city. Of course I picked up some chocolate in Bruges on our way back (gotta love those Belgians...) and now my Kit Kat Easter egg seems a little sad in comparison. In retrospect I should have bought a few hundred more grams of chocolate, just in case.All in all it was a great weekend, though I'm pretty exhausted as our coach was late getting back through UK immigration and we missed the ferry.  

So it's off to another few days of work at the new job, where things seem to be settling in quite nicely. I'm even making my own spreadsheets now (I know this is the thrilling sort of news people want to hear back at home) and learning more by the day. When I reconcile my first set of payments, I'll be sure to let everyone know asap :)



Assistant to the Accounts Department

I have always wondered what it would be like to work in an office. Taking the train in the morning with everyone else, all going to our respective offices on our respective floors in our respective buildings. And then 8 or 9 hours later taking the train home again. Wearing skirts during the day and filling endless spreadsheets for some inexplicable reason. Now it seems I am going to get my wish! At least it will be interesting to try it out...

My first few days as Accounts Assistant have mostly consisted of mind-numbing tasks that a monkey could do, and watching and asking questions, which is fine by me. It seems that I have quite a lot to learn, but nobody seems to expect me to learn it right away, and everyone I've met so far seems really kind and laidback. I am looking forward to my first Chocolate Friday which apparently is a big thing at the company....everyone eats chocolate because it's Friday??? And I also can't wait to put someone's stapler in Jello and hold an office Olympics. That is what goes on the majority of the time in an office, yes? That's what I've been led to believe anyway, we'll see if they do things differently in England.

I also attended my first yoga class of the UK. It may sound prententious/corny but one of the people I am going to miss from Vancouver is my yoga teacher. She was a great teacher and always made the class about so much more than just stretching your body but also allowing your mind (and yes, your soul) to gain a bit more flexibility as well. So that's something I'd like to do more of in my time here if I can find a decent class that's not horrendously expensive/too far away.

In the meantime I will try to wrap my brain around this so-called "workweek" and continue researching plans for my future travels and adventures, of which I'm sure there will be many.

It rained today for the first time since I arrived (2 week anniversary by the way!) and it made me feel like I was back at home in Vancouver for a brief moment or two. 

Lesson One: It is important to bring your umbrella to work.