England again

Well, I should be asleep now, but I'm strangely wide awake, so I thought I'd drop a line. Tomorrow morning I leave for England. I'll be in London for another five days, doing fun things like meeting up with my friend Stephen, and then I'll be back to Germany, but in Hamburg. I've heard lots of good things about Hamburg, so I'm looking forward to seeing it for myself.

The Fasching party with the students went very well. For those who don't know, Fasching is like the German Mardi Gras; everyone gets dressed up in silly costumes (like Halloween) and drinks copious amounts of alcohol (like every day). As you may remember, I was enlisted to sing a bit for the evening's program, so I'd been practicing with the student playing the guitar. I had no classes the day of the party, so I had the whole morning and most of the afternoon to sit around trembling and being nervous.

Turns out, the whole thing went pretty well. I messed up a couple times, but just little warbles--I didn't forget the words or start singing at the wrong time, thank goodness. And since then lots of people, teachers and students, have said that they enjoyed it. So, altogether, I'm pleased.

After the program, there was of course drinking and dancing; I didn't do too much of either. There was beer spilled all over the dance floor, and in combination with the polished stone tiles and my near-treadless Converse, it was a broken femur waiting to happen. About midnight I decided to head home, and got stuck outside the door talking to the smokers huddling together in the cold. This, it turns out, is where I should have headed in the first place, since there was enough quiet to hear and enough good spirits to have lively conversations--if not quite enough fresh air to breathe! It was another hour and a half before I finally made it back to go to sleep.

Now all the students are gone and the whole building--the whole town, really--is deathly quiet. I'll be glad to get on a plane tomorrow and find myself again in a big city. I can't really explain what it is that attracts me so strongly to London. When I'm there, I feel small and lost, but there's still something beautiful and awe-inspiring about the city itself. I don't know, I can't explain it, and it's probably just romantic notions from watching too much BBC programming. But anyway, I'm looking forward to being in the land of the Angles again.

Oh, and I didn't hear back about the Top Gear tickets, which means I didn't get them. Oh well--I've already put myself on the reserve list for this summer. Fingers crossed!