I’m already running behind on my blogs! I’ll try to be better about that. I don’t suppose there is a ton of new info. I did my laundry on Monday after putting it off for as long as I could. I know, I know, the concept of me doing laundry is astonishing, but I did it. And it was perfectly fine. Although a bit expensive—2 pounds for washing and 1 for drying! That’s rubbish, innit? Aside from that, things have been going well. Classes seem fairly easy—just a lot of reading, but I’m more than prepared for that! It’s a bit difficult making myself do homework, though. Ah well.
What else have I done? Hmm. Last Wednesday I went on a trip to St. Alban’s, a little town about 15 minutes away by bus. St. Alban’s seems much more like the traditional British experience than Hatfield, which is a very modern town. St. Alban’s has cute little shop-lined streets, an old church, a town square, markets every Wednesday and Saturday. I went with Grayson and an Australian exchange student named Emily. We browsed through the market, then wandered over to the church and graveyard and snapped some shots of it. We met up with Andrea, Zhen, Tyler, and Tyler’s English flatmate Elliott, a really cool guy who recommended a little restaurant that sells piping-hot Cornish pasties. I’d never had a Cornish pasty but it was delicious. They’re basically a golden-brown pastry case filled with steak, onions, potato, etc. Definitely good on a freezing cold February day. After that we went back to a dessert stand in the market and got brownies.
We had some trouble figuring out what we wanted to do next, but the extreme cold led everyone to the consensus of “let’s find someplace warm to sit down.” Emily, who’d been before, led us to a pub called O’Neill’s where we ended up spending the next several hours. It was empty except for an old man sitting by himself, so it was nice having the place almost to ourselves as we had a few beers and sat and talked. It was really fun! Emily tried to teach me how to say things in an Australian accent (I failed abysmally), Grayson and Elliott discussed Billy Joel and American vs. British candy, and I explained the merits of the T-Pain microphone I’d gotten for Christmas. We ended up ordering dinner at the pub. Then a drunk guy from the next table started chatting with us. He and the two Irish girls he was with tried to convince us to come to a place called Lloyd’s, which was just down the street and “a good laugh.” We followed them to see if it was anything interesting, but it turned out to be pretty much completely empty, so we didn’t stay too long. The nice thing was that the guy who had started talking to us bought us the cab ride back to Hatfield, so that was really cool.
We went to London last Saturday—again—and had a great time—again. I really never get tired of that place. It seems like we’ve been visiting a lot of markets, because again that was the first thing we did when we got there. This one is called Borough Market, which unlike Camden Market only sells food. If you ever go, just make sure you’re hungry. They had everything: fresh-baked bread, Greek honey, all sorts of raw seafood, steaming vats of soups and stews, fish and chips, all sorts of baked goods, sandwiches and burgers… Mike got a loaf of olive-filled bread and we all split it, then we roved around for free samples. I swear I’m going to become known in London as “The Grazer.” I finally got a chicken sandwich and we sat down next to an Australian woman and a French man, who were both here on work. They were really friendly and we talked to them for a good while. After the market we went to Tower Bridge, took a million pictures, and then toured the Tower of London. The Tower’s different from what I thought—I was thinking it was just one building, but it’s more like a fortress filled with a bunch of different buildings that you can explore. It’s worth doing once for sure, but it’s kind of expensive. Still, I got to stand very close to the spot where Anne Boleyn got her head chopped off so there’s something to be said for that. One of the funniest things about touring is that there are usually a lot of little kids running around, and English accents in little kid voices are adorable. I guess Tyler overheard some little kid going past with his dad say (very defiantly), “At least I’m happy!” so saying that in an English accent kind of became the motto for the day.
After the Tower we just wanted to be somewhere warm again, so we went to a nearby restaurant for dinner. I have an intense soda addiction so I had to get a Pepsi while I was there. Mike had split up from us before we went to the Tower to meet up with his brother’s friend, so we waited around to hear from him before taking the tube to Piccadilly. By the time we left the pub it was snowing steadily. Andrea wasn’t thrilled by the snow—she’s from Canada so I guess it must seem old hat—but I thought it was really beautiful. Tower Bridge and Piccadilly in the snow were amazing. Of course, my camera battery died right then so I didn’t get more than a few pictures, but oh well.
Piccadilly was very cool. Parts of it are a little like Times Square with all the flashing billboards. We spent a while tramping through the snow with everyone’s shoes getting steadily more soaked, trying to find a good pub that wasn’t ridiculously crowded. We finally found a place called the White Horse, where we sat and defrosted before meeting up with Mike and his friend, who has lived in London for a long time and knew the area. He bought us a round, which was really nice, and then took us to a hotel bar that was much less crowded. We sat and talked before finally realizing we ought to be leaving to catch the last train back to Hatfield. There followed an epic adventure…epic when you look back on it, a bit frightening at the time…in which we discovered that the Underground was closed and we were very far from King’s Cross, and we had a very short amount of time to get there. I honestly don’t know how long it took to walk all that way. All I know is that we sprinted through what had become just short of a snowstorm to get to King’s Cross on time. Andrea shouted, “Run! Run!” a lot and we all struggled to move as fast as we could while sticking together. My shoes had no traction and I slipped and fell in the snow once or twice, but hey, at least it was a soft landing. The entire time I was thinking, We’re going to be stuck here, we’re going to freeze to death under a bridge, but at last, drenched, snow-covered, and gasping for breath, we arrived at King’s Cross to discover all the trains were delayed an hour so we hadn’t needed to rush after all. So we got on the train to wait and let ourselves recover. It left around 2 a.m., but because it was going so slowly through the bad weather we didn’t make it back into Hatfield until 3. The best part of this was that everyone was still in a good mood—it would’ve been miserable if everyone had been cranky. So once we got to the station we just joked around and played in the snow until the taxi came. It was a pretty epic night.
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