Hi! As you may have heard, the Queen's Jubilee was last week. We dutifully tramped down to the river to see the boat parade. The weather wasn't very nice, so we didn't leave as early as we perhaps should have. We ended up about thirty feet away from the edge of the Thames with absolutely no view, but we watched a bit on big screens they had set up all along the route. Here is a photo of a screen while the Queen was up! You can see Parliament in the background.
The Queen and the Prince on their boat, surveying the Thames.
Lots of little boats!
It started to rain harder, so we beat a retreat. I would say a hasty retreat, but it was in fact, the slowest retreat you can imagine because of the hordes of people. We had gotten into the viewing area before they closed it off, and there were thousands of people pressing up against the dividers, milling around. We couldn't see a way out. We asked a security guard working the event and she said that we were pretty much trapped, because we couldn't head back the way we had came (it was so crowded there that it had taken us nearly ten minutes to extricate ourselves from the mobs), we couldn't go to the west because it was closed off there as well, the pedestrian bridge was closed behind us, and the way in front was where the dividers were. We finally managed to slip out and into the ridiculous crowd, so after another ten minutes spent digging our way out (imagine trout jumping vainly against a waterfall), we were free! That was enough royalist celebration for our taste, and we went home just as it started to rain buckets!
Oreo Truffles are way more fun than watching the Queen on a digital screen in the rain.
The next day, Pep, Serene, and I decided to go for a picnic in the Kensington Gardens, attached to Hyde Park. We discovered goats only about ten minutes from our house! Who would have thought? This woman was feeding them, although the photo makes it look like she was alarmed.
Uh oh.
We walked through Regents Canal on our way. We got kind of off course by following the canal, but fortunately Serene's smartphone acted as our tour guide.
The canal led us to Little Venice! It looked very pretty. I am sure that during nicer weather there are a lot of boat parties and events on the canal.
Kensington Gardens! There was some sort of a movie being filmed while we were there. We ate our lunch and then, true to form, London started to threaten rain on us again. I swear, it has rained every day for the past two weeks, and the forecast shows more of the same in our future. The autumn and winter were so nice and eternally sunny that I thought London's reputation was overblown, but now I see that spring and summer are practically monsoon season!
They've turned off the heat in our dorms although it still gets down to 45ish at night. I have a little space heater (illegally) that I run occasionally to keep the temperature up for the sake of my rental cello. This means that I get a lot of visitors to my room seeking the warmth, haha. That seems to include bees as well! Every time I leave my window open I end up with several dead bees on my desk. : ( Poor little guys. I don't know what they are doing flying in a third story window, but I can only imagine it has become an elephant graveyard type destination for them.
I think I may have a summer job opportunity in my future babysitting a few hours each day for a family near Belsize Park. Mariana has been working for a family all last term, but now she is leaving to spend the summer in Mexico, so it looks like there is an opening and she has recommended me. I'll keep you posted, but it sounds like it would be a good job so I'm hoping they call me!
I went to a ballet at the Royal Opera Hall last week. We found £6 tickets and were sad to find when we showed up that they were standing tickets way, way up in the high wings of the hall. It was a gorgeous hall, by the way. Very opera-house looking with little individual cubbies for the rich-folk and high wings for everyone else. During the two breaks, we scavenged around for empty chairs and ended up at least with seats, although we still couldn't see very much of the stage from where we ended up. I'd say I could see 1/3 of the action, so that was kind of annoying, because sometimes something important happened in the blindspot! Ah well. It was "Prince of the Pagodas." I'd never heard of it before and I should have read about it, because we didn't get a programme and I wasn't really able to pull out the plotline from the dancers. Seems like somebody got turned into a lizard. That's about as much as I know.
I'm learning Chinese (Mandarin) from Serene and teaching her Spanish in return. I feel a little bad though, because she keeps parroting phrases to the Mexicans / Ecuadorians / Spaniards in the house and they all correct her with their own particular regional preferences. I started teaching her Castilian Spanish, like the type spoken in Spain, but then she was told that was the wrong type of Spanish by the Americans, so then she tried her new, corrected phrases on Pep who told her it was wrong because it is not like Spanish from Spain....so she is getting a little confused, I think. She seems to be doing fine with swear words, because she's learning the best from both regions, so at least she is prepared to cuss somebody out in Spanish, should she ever need that skill. I haven't gotten to learn any Chinese swear words, but I can say simple things like that I'm hungry, I want something, etc. It is a lot easier to learn than I figured it would be, because the verb never conjugates differently, unlike, say, Spanish / French / German, etc, so it's simple to memorize things.
Well, I guess I'd better get back to researching! I would go outside but, surprise, it's raining.
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