Sweatpants Sundays

I have a love/hate relationship with Sundays. Back at school, Sundays usually involve 12 hours in the library and, man, I wish that was an exaggeration. I always have a ton to do and Sundays can be very stressful. But there is something about the lazy pace of a Sunday that I love. I love that you can sleep in, go to/make brunch before the day gets started. Sundays for me have always been personal days. Time to take care of business and have some alone time. I have a commitment to not wearing makeup on Sundays and spend most of the day in sweats, hence the title of this blog. So what about today? What am I up to on a random Sunday in London? Well, let’s see… Got up rather early and went to brunch at the Troubadour. The Troubadour is a pretty famous pub/bar about a 5 min walk from me that Bob Dylan used to frequent and allegedly the princes (yay) grab a pint at every once in a while. Anna and I met up with Rohan, a friend of a friend….long story, who is a New Zealander that lives in London. We had a big English breakfast and got to catch up with Rohan. Then Anna and I hightailed it to the Tube in order to make it to St. Pancreas for Anna to catch her train back to Sheffield. We literally ran through the train station to her platform and we made it right on time. Hug goodbye and I headed back to Earl’s Court. I dropped off my laundry at Suds (It’s a pound more for someone to do my laundry for me; time is money so I love just dropping it off and picking it up only a few hours later). Then it was off to Tesco for a pretty epic grocery trip. I didn’t actually get much but what I did get was massively heavy. Damn my addiction to Diet Coke!


For the rest of the afternoon I’m going to do a bunch of reading for school and generally take it easy. My Sunday of errands is not all that exciting so I’ll move on to what has happened since I last blogged.

Thursday night I went to see a production of Dunsinane, which like I said before, is an entirely new play. It was really really good. It was about the English invading Scotland to “rescue it from a tyrant” and the conflict that ensued. The whole thing is a metaphor for the war in Iraq so dissecting the layers of the play was pretty cool. A lot of the theater that I’ve seen is a bit political and it is so interesting to look at the world through the British perspective. The actors and plot were great. There was stage combat and a love story. How could you go wrong? Anyway, a very satisfactory night at the theater.

Friday I had back-to-back class in the classroom. Final projects for our classes in London were assigned and I will have plenty of work to do in my final month in London. My professor Sarah brought the cutest pug ever to class with her. I’m not normally a big dog person but this thing was adorable. He even took a nap at my feet. Class ended and I rushed off to the train station to pick up Anna who came for the weekend.

Cousins reunited. :) It was soo lovely to see her. (A note on the word lovely: It has come to my attention that I use this word a lot, although I was unaware of it. So I got to thinking about why that is exactly. I don’t think I use it very much at home. I guess I feel it’s appropriate because it’s a softer word than beautiful or wonderful or whatever. And I guess I feel that works because I think the Brits are generally a softer, calmer, quieter people. Call me crazy but that’s my psychoanalysis of my word choice.) Anyways…After giving Anna a tour of 270 I took her to Bourough Market. It’s this really neat food market and we got the best grilled cheese ever. We explored the market, walked over Millennium Bridge. It was freezing so we headed home. Once we got home a couple of girls were headed to High Street Kensington to do a bit of shopping so we joined them. I bought a red shirt with frilly sleeves and Anna found some major steals. We headed back and got ready to go out for the night.

The night, for most of my fellow 270ers, turned out to be rather disastrous. People couldn’t go out cuz someone got so sick from drinking too much, others were just like beyond drunken idiots, and somebody else decided to smash things and create general chaos. Anna and I, on the other hand, had a very good night. We went to this club called Koko which is a giant theater space that was made into a club. We saw two different bands, danced, and had a blast. We even figured out the bus system for the first time in order to get home.

On Saturday I bought so croissants for breakfast, finished writing a paper, and talked to mom and Aunt Kathy for a bit. Then it was off to Portobello Market in Notting Hill which has a bunch of cheap clothes and antiques. Normally getting there is super easy, only two stops away. But it turned into debacle due to construction on a large number of tube lines. After a tube and bus ride we finally made it there. After that Anna and I headed to the British Museum. THIS PLACE IS INCREDIBLE! It’s MASSIVE! Absolutely unreal. We saw mummies and statues and paintings. I have a ton of photos to post. It was exhausting. I will most definitely need to go back before my time in London is through. After the museum we grabbed dinner at a local pub by me, O’Neill’s. Delicious. Then we went out as a massive group to Aragon which was really fun. We called it a night kind of early and made it back on the last tube ride. This brings us back to Sunday and I’ve already babbled on about that.

It was soo great to see Anna. I’m headed to Sheffield this coming weekend and we are going to be traveling during my spring break together. We are thinking of going to Belgium and then maybe the south of France. I don’t know, we’ll see. But we must book soon, so hopefully by next weekend we will have our planes figured out.

Since I’ve now been here a month I’m starting to miss a few comforts of home. For example:

• I miss Chipotle. I haven’t had good fake Mexican food in a month and I’ve been craving it. I even googled it to see if there are any outside of the U.S. and found out that one is being built in London…in April…FAIL

• I miss grape jelly. I’ve only been able to find strawberry and it just doesn’t do it for me. Given that a large part of my diet is pb and j, this is a bigger deal than it sounds.

• I miss driving and singing at the top of my lungs.

• I miss privacy. Living with so many people right on top of one another is fun to a point, but I need some space.

• I miss American breakfast. The Brits don’t really do pancakes. I miss pancakes and syrup that doesn’t cost 5 pounds.

• I miss reliable internet. That would probably be my biggest complaint about living here right now. The damn internet service is atrocious.

• I miss my millions of pillows on my bed. One pillow simply ain’t that comfy.

• And I miss my friends and family. The people who know me best and make me laugh the hardest. Skype is good, but it drives me nuts not being able to really talk to those who don’t have it.

Yes, I know all of these things will be there waiting for me when I get home. And when I get home I know I’ll be lamenting the things I miss about Europe, like how fresh the food is here, even the frozen food. But alas, there it is. I’m really having a truly wonderful and lovely time here so I hope my list doesn’t sound ungrateful. Not intended that way by any means.

I head to Stratford-upon-Avon tomorrow with my class. For those non-English nerds, that’s where Shakespeare lived. We’re staying the night at a B &B and going to see King Lear. We’ll get to tour a bunch of historical landmarks regarding Will Shakespeare. I am sooo excited.

Until next time, air hug.