Buckingham Pals; or, Notting Hillgrimage

One of the greatest things about living here in Egham is the proximity to London; in fact, it was one of the reasons I chose this place. On Sunday, I made my first (and definitely not last) journey into what I affectionately call the Greatest City In The World. The train station is not a far walk (about 40 minutes) from my dorm building, but due to a foot injury from walking too much in new shoes, I opted to walk only as far as the main campus and then take the shuttle from there. The train ride is just under an hour and cost eight pounds on Sunday (eleven for my second journey yesterday). I went with a girl I met on Thursday - or maybe Friday? - at my French departmental induction. Her name is Alice and she's from Switzerland! Anyway, on Sunday, we decided to go to Buckingham Palace, because tours of the staterooms closed in just a few days and we wouldn't have had an opportunity otherwise. Yes, it's touristy. Yes, it's overpriced. And yes, I loved it. We arrived at Waterloo Station and then walked from there through St. James's Park, which was very beautiful in the sunlight that we were lucky enough to have that day. In Buckingham Palace, we stayed for a few hours and went through the whole thing. It was nice to have the audio guide to go with it. The Picture Gallery was an amazing, long room full of paintings by bigwig painters - though interestingly enough, Alice pointed out to me, not one of the painters was British. Most were Dutch or French! In one room later on, there was a sculpture on a table that I knew before listening to the audio guide was Canadian - an soapstone sculpture of a polar bear and Inuit. According to the audio guide, it was a gift to the Queen on her most recent visit to Canada.


On Tuesday, Alice and I made a second pilgrimage (well, second for me - it was the seventh for her) back to the Promised Land. We arrived again at Waterloo Station, and then took the Tube over to Holland Park Station, with a quick stop at Leicester Square to buy theatre tickets for the evening. The Tube is a wonder in itself. I had taken it before, on my trip to London two years ago, but never had to figure anything out for myself. However, since London has one of the best subway systems in the world, it's hardly difficult to get from one place to another. Almost every station has more than one line running through it, and in two directions, and sometimes the lines split meaning there are multiple destinations for each direction, but everything is so clearly marked that even a complete novice like me can make a trip halfway across the city without a hitch. (Public transportation is my forte, but put me on my own feet at ground level and I'm lost after about two blocks.) We walked from Holland Park Station to what instantly became one of my favourite places in the world: Notting Hill. Yes, that's right. Notting Hill...or more specifically, Portobello Road. It's a charming street lined with quirky shops selling everything from health dog biscuits to antique suitcases, and produce stalls spilling into the road. The market runs every day (although it is livelier on the weekends) and I think I'll find myself there several more times during my stay in England. I bought a great print of a photo taken by a photographer whose shop is on Portobello Road. The photo is a close-up of a wrought-iron gate on the street, that just says "Portobello" in gold lettering, with an intensely green wall behind it. I love it. As we continued down the street, we stumbled upon a grill and café on the uppermost floor of a building. We sat on the patio, which has a wrought-iron fence laced with ivy and lined with flowerboxes, and Alice sipped a cappuccino while I had a pot of lemon ginger tea, and quietly looked down on the market below. Our waiter even brought us a pot of mint tea on the house. We still don't totally know why, but it was very tasty with a robust flavour nonetheless.


After our afternoon tea, we made our way over to what might be one of the best-known locations in Notting Hill: The Travel Bookshop. And yes, it existed before the film Notting Hill came out and was really where they filmed the portions of the film set there. I bought a travel book about London (now that I think about it, I probably couldn't have done a more touristy thing if I'd tried) - but it's a book about the random and quirky things to see and do in London, like London's first drinking fountain and an Anglo-Saxon cemetary, rather than things like the Tower of London and the Changing of the Guard. I've already flagged a few places I hope to visit in the coming months. Then, of course, to cap off my cheesy touristy moment, Alice took a photo of me reading my book on the bench outside the shop.


Purchases in hand, we then made our way back in the direction of Holland Park, which is a gorgeous and supremely serene park. There were a few peacocks roaming about, and squirrels that were so tame that Alice actually petted one and it didn't run away (personally, I have this phobia of petting rodents, so I refrained, but I have to admit that it was pretty cute). As we sat near a very flower-adorned pond of sorts, it occurred to us that we were a Canadian and a Swiss sitting in Kyoto Garden of Holland Park in London. Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. But truly, it was very beautiful.


After leaving the park, we made our way back to the West End, where we saw Chicago. Alice hadn't seen either the musical or the film before, so over supper I explained the gist of the story so it would be easier to keep up (English is not her first language and it's difficult to understand plot when it's sung). We got to the theatre, and, of course, having bought the cheapest tickets available were directed up, up, and up to the third row from the back. Luckily, because the show was far from sold out, a few minutes before curtain, an usher relocated us to a much closer row, so we could see a lot better. Having seen the film already, I knew the music, and I was definitely not disappointed. The performance was similar to the film in lots of ways, but different enough that I wasn't bored. It was funny to hear the whole thing performed in an American accent, though - the accents were so thick and overstated! It was a truly fabulous evening, though, and we both had a really good time. At long last, we made our way back home, arriving a little before midnight.

Even though it's only been a week, a great deal has happened since my last post. I'm still enchanted with England, though the reality that I won't be back home for quite some time has started to sink in and the monster of homesickness has made its bed next to mine. Having experienced such a thing before, though, I know it will be only a few days until I'm back in the full swing of things and I send Mr. Homesickness Monster packing!

Also, I am completely and utterly unapologetic about the terrible puns in the title of this particular post.

Pneumonia, Insomnia, Telephonia

Since I woke up my first morning in England, I've been having pain in my chest, localised to my left lung. Now, this is problematic because breathing is painful, but since you really can't just decide to stop breathing, I'd been in pain for three days. So after yet another long night of not being able to sleep despite being exhausted, I decided that enough was enough, and paid my first visit to the Health Centre at Royal Holloway. Over the course of the day, I saw two nurses and a doctor, and had my temperature taken (I was running a fever of 38.5), my breathing listened to, my blood pressure taken, and finally, my blood taken. The doctor said she thought it might be a clot from flying on Saturday, which actually would make sense, but she seemed awfully unconcerned about it. Anyway, I got the results today, and I do not have a pulmonary embolism. That's very good. However, since the pain actually got even worse last night, the nurse prescribed me some antibiotics, so now I'm on those for the next week. However, I've only taken two doses so far, out of twenty-one in total, and I already feel better. And what's even more awesome is that the prescription only cost me 7.20 GBP. (I have to write GBP instead of the normal pound sterling symbol because my keyboard doesn't have it.) And that's without any insurance or anything. Yay for the National Health Service!

In other news, last night a few of my flatmates decided that the activity of the night should be to knock on my door and call my name incessantly for six hours. Now, I wasn't aware of most of this, but Stephanie, a girl who lives next door to me (also Canadian!) said they started at about 3:00 in the morning and went every half hour or so. The first time I heard it was at about 6:00, but having had a terrible sleep, I was still quite fuzzy in the head and thought it was something I was imagining. But no...sure enough, there were knocks and shouting galore until I left for the main campus at about 8:30. If I'd had a phone, I would have called security to get rid of them somehow, but I didn't have one yet, and my lung was bothering me so much that any change in body position was painful, so I didn't want to get out of bed and go down to the reception office. Mostly, I'm just baffled by the whole scenario. I can understand how an eight-year-old might get a laugh out of Nikki Nikki Nine Doors once or twice...but all night? And a group of freshers at uni? All I have to say can be summed up by this video. I hope they have scary nightmares tonight.

Today I went on a nice long walk down to Egham High Street, which is a quaint little road with a bunch of teeny shops. It was such a warm and sunny day, and so lovely. Alice, a girl I met today at my French Departmental Induction meeting, was with me, and we had a great chat and nice time. I was finally able to get a mobile phone. My account is still empty, but tomorrow I'll add some money to it so I can finally start calling people! That way, if The Great Nikki Nikki Nine Doors Fiasco is repeated, I can call security from my cozy cozy bed. Wouldn't that be satisfying?

Alcoholloway; or, Royally Pissed

I see fit to warn you all that this entry includes allusion to a fair amount of alcohol consumption. At least, a fair amount by my standards, which are neither as generous nor as flexible as those of most other university students. Also, I should warn that at this point, I am still a little bit jet-lagged and all-in-all messed up, and can offer only that as an excuse for any nonsensical ramblings that follow. With those two cautions, onward!

My plane landed on Saturday at about 11:15 in the morning. The flight was long, but nothing compared to my 36-hour voyage to India earlier this summer. Of course, the facts that my seat's headphone socket didn't work quite right (I could only get sound through one ear, and even then I had to hold the plug-in just right) and that I had a rather large carry-on suitcase at my feet, preventing me from stretching out my legs, made for a not altogether comfortable flight. It wasn't awful, but I was glad to get off the plane at the end of it all. On the plus side, I managed to put up with the headphone trouble long enough to watch Iron Man 2 (good old Robert Downey, Jr...a feast for the eyes, really) and a great National Film Board documentary about philosophy. (If you're interested, it's called "Examined Life" and can be found on the National Film Board's website. We'll also ignore that they incorrectly attributed the quotation from which the title is drawn to Plato rather than Socrates.) Also, the sunset that happened during my flight was one of the most beautiful I've ever seen.

I moved into my room on Saturday as well. It's plenty large enough for one - I have tons of desk space (which is fabulous, because I tend to use every square inch of desk space at my disposal), a single (very comfy!) bed with storage inside the base of it (that's where my empty suitcases are at the moment), a closet with two shelves and a rail, and my own bathroom. It's quite a squishy bathroom - it kind of reminds me of an airplane bathroom but with a tiny shower added - but again...I'm just one person. I wasn't exactly expecting 300 square feet and granite countertops. It's plenty for one person. My shower doesn't drain quite right, but I'm determined to fix it myself. For now, I can't run it longer than about a minute, or else the whole bathroom floods. What this means practically is that I have to step in straightaway (luckily it heats very quickly) and get wet, shut off the water, then use my shampoo, soap, and facewash while the water drains, and then turn it back on in order to rinse. On the plus side, this has done wonders to cut down on my water usage (and production of steam, which sets off the smoke detector). My room is on the first floor (in the UK, that means one above ground floor) and the rear side of the building, and when I look out my window all I can see is a wall of foliage because there's virtually a forest right behind me. I get lots of light in the morning, which has been wonderful because I don't yet have a phone, and hence, no alarm to wake me up in the morning. The sun does it for me. (Maybe I'll just stick to this all year and never bother with an alarm.) Also, what I thought would be a downside has turned out to be one of my favourite things about here: our proximity to Heathrow Airport means that I can hear every takeoff and landing that happens, and since Heathrow is such a major airport, those are very frequent.

And then the drinking began.

Unlike Augustana, not only is alcohol permitted on campus, there's a college-run bar not 100 metres from my building. In the dining halls, they even serve red and white wine with dinner, which is very strange to me. Anyway, of course the bar is where I've met virtually all of my friends so far. But let me tell you, the pints have been flowing. Regrettably, the bar is out of my personal favourite beer (Heineken, of course) at the moment, so I've just been trying lots of other beers. And also asking Ben, the bartender who appears to be permanently affixed to the bar, to come up with new mixed drinks (he seems to have fun doing it). Yesterday he made up some sort of lemonade concoction (the contents of which are still a mystery to me, but I'm pretty sure I saw at least rum go into it) that was kind of sour, but really good. After hanging out at the bar (which I might as well tell you now, because I'm sure it will come up many times in the future, is called 8Bar9), I went with about five other people on a pub crawl...sort of. We were behind the rest of the group by one pub, but we still had a great time, just chatting and drinking. (Side note: tequila shots are much better with lime than with lemon.) We decided after the third pub just to go back to 8Bar9 and hang out there until they closed, and then the six of us decided to head up to someone's room and chill, which lasted until about two in the morning. Another thing that's different between Royal Holloway and the University of Alberta is that here, if you order a drink at the bar, you can carry it outside and drink it on the lawn if you want to. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you can't do that at the U of A. Or anywhere in Alberta, come to think of it.

The Students' Union seems to be very active at Royal Holloway, and plans TONS of events. You should see the event calendar they gave us on our first day here. There's something almost every day. They also organised a poster sale, so today I bought two posters. One is an oversized nighttime time-lapse photo of London's Piccadilly Circus in 1967, and the other is a very pretty black-and-white photo of a man and woman kissing on a cobblestone street. It says "the kiss" in French in the corner. As soon as I buy some sticky tack, I know exactly where they're going.

Tomorrow's mission is to track down a mobile phone and a bedsheet.