girl guides

my freshman dormmate, katie arrived at my doorstep on tuesday morning! she and her good friend megs are en route to studying in barcelona and travelling europe in the meantime with london being the first stop. determined to fill every moment, we packed more into three days than i think i've done in the past three months.

their flight touched down at the obscene hour of 6:20 am and although i was hoping to greet them at the gate, when my alarm went of at 4 am, i just couldn't be bothered with going all the way there as i knew i'd lose steam halfway through the day. fortunately, i had sent incredibly detailed directions on how to get to my flat from heathrow via public transit and the ladies turned up at 8:30. this part of my life is so separate from everything else i've known that i couldn't imagine my past and present crossing paths, so seeing katie out in the frost with her giant suitcase was definitely surreal. we came up to my flat where i had made a cuppa tea for everyone and began our ambitious list of what katie hoped to see while she was here.

an hour later we were riding the overland train towards waterloo station with my flatmate rob (on his way back to manchester for christmas) who sat in awe at the california banter and constant parroting of the announcer, "mind the gap," or my personal favourite, "beggars occasionally board the trains, please ignore them and alert a member of staff. thank you!" how polite. at the station we parted ways with rob and headed towards south bank and went into the first pub we could find. fish and chips. check. pints of stella. check. we were making progress on the list. next we took the tube to westminster where we wandered around parliament, big ben, westminster abbey area then headed down horse guard road towards buckingham palace. i had never been to st. paul's park but it was fantastic. so picturesque with a little pond in the middle full of ducks, geese, and pelicans. wha? yes, enormous pelicans (a couple of them were pink) perched on rocks showing off their wingspans. at one point we were passed by the prime minister, gordon ramsey, er..brown (long story, basically i continue to get the crass celebrity chef and head of state mixed up, silly american girl) in his shiny black jag surrounded by motorcycle p.c.'s. after the palace we wandered a bit more but the feet were getting tired and the girls were starting to feel their jetlag. we popped into a pub for a glass of warm, mulled wine then caught a double decker bus *check* back to the train station. day one was jam packed and by the time we got home we had a little dinner, realised the original list was nearly conquered and started planning for the next day.

ben!

westminster abbey

parliament

the next morning we let ourselves have a bit of a lay-in then headed to notting hill to find a cafe for tea and crumpets. the lazy daisy cafe was just what we were looking for. set back off the road it was multi-levelled with a mixture of lovingly worn furniture. i noticed a lot of the wooden chairs had bible holders on their backs and we used our detective skills to figure out that the place was an old converted church. adjacent to a nursery school, the cafe had lots of grammas and mums with little ones enjoying a midday snack. we enjoyed our delicious and fresh brunches, quiche, salad, porridge..then headed to portobello road to windowshop the antique stores.

lazy daisy

enjoying a cuppa

portobello road

i picked up a used copy of fitzgerald's this side of paradise, since i'll have some time to myself at alice's house and i've finished all the non-academic books that i brought with me. from notting hill gate, we went to the tower of london and circled the big castle over to the tower bridge. beautiful and spooky place. another one of those places where you stand there in awe thinking about how many people have been in that spot over that past hundreds and hundreds of years. from here we went to the incredibly packed shopping areas, regent, oxford, picadilly and carnaby streets to see the bright lights of the big city while avoiding getting trampled.

tower of london

once we got back we rested, recharge and got dressed for a night out in kingston, unfortunately most of the uni kids have gone home for the holidays, or 'hols' as they love to shorten everything, but that didn't stop us. first we headed to the pub across the road for a pint of the infamous fruli strawberry beer and a fluke game of pool where i chanelled a pool shark and cleared the table. barman sam was working and suggested we head to eivissa for their student night, so i rounded up the few people i could find that are still in town and we headed over for a vodka-redbull fuelled night of london dancing.

heidi, sam and me at eivissa.

day three, we woke up at 8:30 to beeline to buckingham palace in time for the changing of the guards only to find that this time of year it only happens every other day. not including that particular day. not to worry as we were in time to see the mounted horse guards proceed down the mall along st. james park. this city is obsessively clean as a street cleaner follows directly after the procession to clean up any mess the horses may leave behind.



st. james pond frozen over with birds sliding on the surface

we next wandered down fleet street towards st. paul's cathedral. mike, a friend from sf, had told me about a pub called ye old cheshire cheese that he knew from when he studied in london, so we had to stop in. this pub was rebuilt in the 1660s, meaning it was around even before that. the floors are all about wonky and the ceilings change height as you go about through all the different rooms. we didn't stay for a drink but it felt like we travelled through a portal when we went in and out of the front door. our last tourist stop was abbey road, were we took a minute to warm up in the beatles cafe then proceed to block traffic to photograph the crossing. it had to be done.

i realised that i feel really at home here, despite everything and everyone that i miss..i was able to find my way around and ramble my random factoids (probably more than they wanted to hear!) all over the city. they'll be in spain in mid january and i'm booking my ticket to go see them in the warmth before uni starts again. x

in this part of the world, the time change does not just mean that it gets dark earlier, but that there’s generally just less light. at home, moving the clocks back means an earlier evening but also a push to get up and moving in the morning. right now it starts to get light around nine and the sun sets about 4 with it completely dark out by 6. i’m thinking this is about when the s.a.d. that everyone warned me about kicks in..i have no concept of time and it’s hideous outside!

right now is incredibly hectic at school with projects and exams in every module, but that all ends in two weeks when we begin christmas vacation. alice has kindly invited me to her home in the english countryside, a village called sheet right by petersfield. it sounds like it’s going to be really big with her whole family, including so many cousins that she’s renamed it ‘cuz-mas.,’ i get to be an honorary cuz, aw. so that’ll be something to look forward to while i’m on lockdown getting through my classes the next couple of weeks. on the 27th she and i will fly up to edinburgh where cara and catherine live, until new years. i heard that there’s a haunted underground city where they locked people who had the plague and left them for dead, scary, but i want to see it.

and now a couple photos of interesting moments in kingston…

this was on the bus heading into central that stopped for a herd of children on ponies to cross the road in front of us, when they were done the guard flipped his sign over for us to see the ‘thank you!’



and this is bushy park from my window…do you see that speck near the center? that is one man pushing a suburban backyard sized lawnmower. he’s out there quite a lot keeping the grass looking so pristine..in the states that would definitely be replaced by an ear-muff wearing dude riding around on some massive gas guzzling mower for a lawn a tenth the size. oh england.

fakesgiving in the uk!

thanksgiving..such a strange holiday to try to explain. we always just think of it as a time to indulge and hang out with all our favourite people. this year, in another country, it was bound to be a bit different. on thanksgiving day the international office hosted a dinner for us all where they made turkey and potatoes and we were responsible for everything else. lila made pumpkin pie and came over to mine where we drank gin and lemonade and starting imagining our incredible thanksgiving dinner. wait, we're in england, incredible food? exactly. we showed up to the dinner with our lovingly prepared stuffing and pumpkin pie only to find that our dishes were the absolute highlight. one end had 3 kids from hong kong who brought a frozen pizza and dessert covered in whipped cream and some sort of glazed red berry on top. the other end of the table had a couple americans who brought their english friends and the thanksgiving classic: baked beans with potatoes and cheese. no. unacceptable.

unsatisfied with thursdays events, the following sunday alice and i headed into town and cleaned out sainsbury's and waitrose, returning to kbh with a mission of making the best feast we could. i made stuffing (my absolute favourite part of any big meal) and alice peeled potatoes for hours while describing her famous roasted rosemary potatoes. the lovely scottish girls, cara and catherine, came to join in our domesticity..

...and catherine brought a haggis, her scottish contribution to the meal.

none of us really knew how to cook a chicken, so alice had to call her mum to talk us through it. fortunately ben showed up just in time to do the actual stuffing as we were all a little too squeamish. i think he may have enjoyed himself a little too much..


i have no idea why we thought two chickens were necessary, but we did and ended up having to "whack one in" hanna's oven down the hall. a few hours later the whole floor smelled of garlic and herbs and people started flooding into our flat.


our efforts paid off and we managed to put together a great meal with our friends. alice kept saying that she was the 'native english' person teaching me how to make a roast, trying to translate thanksgiving into uk terms.

i saw this today while i walked through town to penrhyn road and couldn't resist taking a picture as it reminded me of my first breakfast here with rob:
i sat at the kitchen table sipping my lavazza coffee brewed in my beloved moka pot that i brought here in my suitcase (that is now gathering dust since i've fallen in love with english tea..). rob came in and after putting the super-fast electric kettle on boiled a perfect egg and toasted, buttered and cut a piece of bread into little strips, or "soldiers." the egg was nestled into a little faded, plastic cup shaped like a pair of trousers bringing humpty-dumpty to breakfast for a a brief moment until rob sliced the top off the egg to expose the warm, liquidy yolk that the soldiers would be dipped into. i'm pretty sure i just sat there staring and thinking, "wow, i really am in england," since nowhere in the states would a hungover 19 year old be capable of anything more than pouring milk over his lucky charms. i'm still waiting for him to make me one...

well, it's been a good month or so now, and i'm definitely feeling settled. perhaps even a bit too settled. i'm taking a british life and culture class which is great because we take all kinds of organized trips to historical and beautiful places that i doubt i would have gotten to on my own. our first trip was to brighton which is a really artsy town down on the beach. it reminded me a lot of santa cruz; loads of vintage shops, tattoo and piercing places, rock n roll kids...it's where the mods and rockers had their wars back in the 60s. i also realized that an old graham greene novel that's been on my shelf for ages, brighton rock, takes place there. shows how far i got in that book. i really enjoyed that trip and have since made some friends from there and am planning a trip back to stay for longer.

next was stonehenge, and it was as epic as could be expected. we went on a misty morning and our professor, philip woods, told us all about its pagan history on our drive there so we were excited when we got there. we took a quick lap around, went to the gift shop (of course, lila and i had to fulfill our desire to purchase stationary at every possible stop) then hopped back on the coach to head to the city of bath.

bath was incredible. it is one of the only sites of naturally occurring hotsprings in the uk, so royalty often visited a long time ago and it became quite a fancy spot. all of the buildings have limestone faces because they wanted to make sure the city had a uniform appearance. bath now is home to the world's highest rated spa and it looked magnificent. very modern, glass building, but still retains some limestone elements so that it's not breaking the rules. we saw huge old monasteries and walked on cobblestones and through ancient roman baths. all of a sudden i felt like i really am in europe. there is so much history in just that one small town that is older than the whole of the united states.

I'm here. Look right. Don't tip. (Don't tip?!) Quid. Bollocks. Wanker. Pint. Cheers. Knob. Cheeky. Brilliant. Lit-rally. Just a brief summary of what I've learned so far. What has proved true? Yes, this place is ridiculously expensive. No matter how many people told me that and how many times I said, "I know!" it's true. Four pounds for a latte. Two pounds for the bus! And that does not include any kind of transfer. (For those not up for quick mental math, lets says 8 dollars for the latte and 4 for the bus.) Also everything is to the left. Not only do we drive on the left, we take escalators on the left and walk on the left. Crazy. I've already almost knocked heads with a number of other pedestrians.

Kingston upon Thames is a beautiful town right on the river. I learned today that it gets its name from "king's town" because it was once the place where the kings would come to be crowned. I live in an area called Hampton Wick in the Kingston Bridge House, which is situated right next to the river and is absolutely gorgeous. From my window I look out onto Bushy Park with a royal cricket field, a skate park, tennis court and loads of trees, in fact, I can't see where the green ends. And, equally marvelous, if I look to the left I see the English equivalent to a San Francisco coffee shop, The Old Kings Head. This pub is open all day, has wireless internet as well as live music on weekends. Translation, I pretty much have moved in there. Oh and the cute bartenders, barkeeps..whatever..don't hurt either. Just on the other side of the bridge is the central town, much like Union Square. Four story shopping mall, the Bentall's Center surrounded by more shops. Everything is laid out on pretty windy cobblestone streets with lots of fountains and green areas and an open-air market in the center that balances out the commercial feel of it all. So far my pub experience has been fantastic, friendly bartenders, cheap pints and loud British boys who love me for being from SF and want to talk about hippie hill. Okay then..cheers to haight!

Today we had some orientation and registration work to do for school. Let me illustrate how the system here is a wee bit different than back home. We meet for our official enrolment at The Space, the Penrhyn Road on-campus pub. As the councilor walks around signing us in she hands us each two drink tickets. Redeemable for anything; suggestions from the bar? Double vodka tonic, or a snakebite and black (cider+lager+blackberry syrup=cough syrup that gets you drunk fast). Anyway, after the first pint they corralled us over to a building where we had to drunkenly fill out a bunch of important documents on computers and deal with passports, fantastic plan... We then all made our way back to the pub to redeem our leftover tickets and then drag ourselves home. I thought it would be a great idea to take a picture at this time and NO! dropped my camera. My new beautiful baby. It's just a beauty mark though, she'll be fine. Phew.

So that's it. Small town. British accents. Loads of swans and loads of beer, ales, lager.. I think I'll like it here, tomorrow is the big trip into central London which will be fantastic.

I miss you all terribly and am loving the emails..so keep them up.

where to begin

well, it's really happening. i'm moving to london. officially. my credit card will show that i have made the purchase and on september 9, 2007 will be on a flight with my new dear friend, lila, to heathrow. everything has been a little surreal and i feel like i've been experiencing the whole process in the third person, not like it's really happening to me...there's no way that i could actually be leaving the country, no..moving to one of the most fabulous cities in the world. oh wait, yes there is, and i am.

let's go back in time..i applied for the study abroad program back in november and then began the long process of waiting, freaking out, keeping up my grades and knocking on wood, lots of knocking on wood..no jinxing for this lady. skip forward to receiving my acceptance and being terrified at the reality of this decision. miraculously at our first meeting at school the other future kingston attendee (lila) and i found each other through the chaotic mess of inexperienced globe-trotters, exchanged information and the rest is history. lila's fantastic and a little crazy, like me, so i've avoided many a panic attack by having a new partner in crime and travel buddy through all this.

back to the ticket purchasing...such a simple act has motivated me to do things. now that it's real, there is an actual date, i need to live san francisco to it's fullest. go to the street fairs. bike across the bridge. have a picnic. or three. minimilize. that's my biggest goal, i want to leave feeling like i really am starting something new and not just taking a break from all my things that i will come right back to. this is the biggest change that has happened in these first 20 years and i'm going to do it right.

i'm going to keep this thing as up to date as possible, so all of you that are interested can experience every detail (okay, maybe not every detail) as well as pictures, stories and all-around good stuff. use it as a way to keep me up to date as well. the scariest part of this is going to be leaving all of you for a whole year, so every morsel of your lives that you feel inclined to tell me about, please do.

anyhow, i've got a good 3 months left so lets make them good..

cheers darling,
valerie