The Best City in the World

I really, really like London. Have you noticed yet?

But then, today was a good day. Not a spectacular day, just a good one, and you will find out why momentarily.

Yesterday was a walking day. I decided to go on the walking tour of London, which I've never done before, and since the meeting point was at Wellington Arch, just on the other side of Hyde Park, I decided to start my day with a nice stroll. I mean, how far can it be?

Hint: Hyde Park is REALLY BIG.

Because I was clever and left lots of time, though, I actually did have time to go slowly and enjoy the walk, although the pleasure was somewhat curtailed by the fact that it was really bloody cold. I smiled at swans, chuckled at coots, giggled at geese, and bought a map. (A pocket London A-Z, for any Sherlockians. Also, it said £3.99 on the back, but the guy gave me 30% off with no explanation whatsoever. Must be my feminine wiles.)

At the Arch, I met up with the gaggle of my fellow tourists and we all set off in a herd together to hear about London. Pretty much everywhere we went I'd already been--two or three times--but I learned a couple new things anyway. I learned, for instance, that some German guys once camped in the back garden of Buckingham Palace because they thought it was Hyde Park, and that a drunk Irishman (insert your own witticism here) once broke into the palace, thinking it was a hotel, and had a conversation with the Queen. (If you want to LOL a bit at the security guards, here's the Wikipedia page.) Also, it takes a crapton of money to get into and maintain membership in the Athenaeum Club on Pall Mall--if I remember correctly, there's something like a 15-year waiting list to get in, and you have to be recommended to get on the list and pay to stay there (something like £3,000 a year); it's like £15,000 to get in and then £5,000 a year in dues. Damn.

Our route took us to Trafalgar Square, with the leaping fountains sparkling in the sunlight (insert your own joke about sunshine in London here), past a whole bunch of English Civil War reenactors in plate armor with pikes (no joke), and to the Houses of Parliament, where the Clock Tower looked splendid in glittering gold as our guide explained to us, in careful detail, exactly what "hung, drawn, and quartered" means. Lovely.

A group of us then continued on after the official end of the tour to our guide's recommended restaurant for a late lunch. I ate my sausages, mash, and Yorkshire pudding quickly and headed into the wilds of Leicester Square to find a movie theater playing The King's Speech, which took some doing, but I managed it. I had some time until the showing, so I wandered a bit, said hello to Covent Garden, and bought dinner at M&S before returning to the movie theater cinema.

I'd heard good things about The King's Speech and I wasn't disappointed. It tells the story of King George VI, the current Queen's father, who was thrust suddenly into the kingship after his older brother abdicated to marry a twice-divorced American woman. (Those Americans, my goodness...) Poor King George had a stutter, though, a terror of public speaking (unsurprising), and no real desire to be king, if you can believe the movies. (Advice: don't.) Doctor after doctor had tried to help him to little or no effect, until his despairing wife finds an unconventional doctor who finally manages to do the King some good.

I realize that a movie about speech therapy probably doesn't sound like the best thing in the world, but it isn't really about speech therapy. It's about the lines that are drawn between royalty and commoner, even in the modern world, purely by virtue of birth. It's about the destiny that the then-future King George felt was inescapable, a role he didn't want but accepted anyway, even at the brink of war. It's about the personal courage of the King, a real person with real fears and real problems, and how he learns to make a friend.

Anyway, I'm sure much of it is dramatized, romanticized, and exaggerated, and not being a historian, I can't tell you how much. I can just tell you that if it's at all true, King George's personal courage was amazing, and watching him try to speak around his paralyzing stammer makes you writhe in sympathetic agony. If you get the chance to see it, I recommend it.

After that I went home, ate my dinner and went to bed, which brings us to today!

It took me longer than anticipated to get to the British Library today, because I was determined to take the bus and the bus was late. I did make it, finally, and got to see one of the things I'd been looking forward to this trip: the Evolving English exhibition, about English over the years. There were copies of Chaucer, and clips from My Fair Lady, and sound bytes from all over Britain, and a bookmark from oh-so-long-ago inscribed in Old English runes. It was lovely, and I spent far too much time there--just like last time. I'd been planning to go to the British Museum afterwards, but I was very hungry and rather museum'd out at that point, so I bought a book about British history and curled up in a Starbucks with a nice latte for a while. (No eye-rolling now; this is my first Starbucks since August!)

I bought a Big Issue and asked the seller for directions, and so took another bus to Waterloo Bridge. Walking on the South Bank is something of a tradition at this point, and the clear sky and setting sun made it all so lovely despite the cold. I even, after admiring Ben and the Eye for a while, went back to my Egyptian perch and sat between the Sphinx's paws until it got too cold to not be moving, at which point I came back here to have dinner and relax and watch Top Gear.

Now I've been typing for far too long and it's time for bed. Tomorrow I have to get up early-ish to take a shower and go get in line in the hopes of getting tickets for a musical, then Stephen arrives! Yay!

Recent Things That Have Happened To Me

So, last time I totally forgot to wish y'all a happy new year. I was a bit angry at the time, sorry. So: Happy new year! There.

Well, let's see. I started writing a summary of my holidays, so you could have an idea of what I did for Christmas and everything, mostly because it was all fun and cultural-y and stuff, and I want to remember it. That got stalled, so it's still the half-finished-draft stage, along with Sevilla and Tarifa and Morocco and stuff. Sorry about that.

Anyway, the last week or so has been a bit rough. Not because anything in particular has gone wrong, I've just been feeling down--a bit homesick, a bit listless. I think this is partly because I either have already passed, or am about to pass, my personal record for Longest Time Away From Home. Last time was, of course, Marburg, but that was only from mid-September to the beginning of March, so...six and half months-ish. I arrived in London on the 25th of June last year, which puts me at seven months on next Tuesday. And there's still a long way to go. I don't have any idea when I'll be home again, or, for that matter, where home is.

Anyway. I'm listening right now to a song "borrowed" from YouTube because the students have convinced me to sing some songs at their Fasching celebration next week. I don't actually know the music that my guitar accompaniment can play, so I'm learning it now! In fact, I need to go catch the bus to get back to the station to get back to Stadtroda so I can practice this stuff. I'll be back.

Hi, I'm back. I missed the bus and the train each by about 30 seconds, so I had to watch my train drive off into the darkness and then wait another hour until the next one, at 21:22. I hadn't eaten any dinner, either, so I was not a hppy camper. Oh well.

There are assorting things to tell you...let's see.

Last week was the full-year students' last, which was very sad because they're my favorites. On Thursday last week, we went out to Japanese food and then went to see a movie in Gera. We were going to see Narnia, but ended up in Green Hornet instead. Personally, I didn't like Green Hornet at all, partly because Seth Rogen is, by all accounts, an obnoxious jackass, and because there was an awful lot of shouting and slang in German that I didn't understand. My brain almost exploded.

On Friday they moved out, leaving behind addresses and promises to write. I haven't heard from any of them yet.

Last weekend was somewhat better. On Saturday evening, Bethany and I traveled to Ilmenau and went to see Rapunzel for the second time with Victoria. This is absolutely a brilliant movie. It is sweet and adorable and sarcastic and I love it. It is especially amusing in German, which once again makes me lift my fists to the heavens and curse regional DVD coding that means I will never be able to buy a German-language copy that will work with my computer!

On the following Sunday, a bunch of the other Thüringen TAs came to visit Ilmenau, and we all went for a hike together. Luckily, it was a sunny day, if a bit crisp--but hey, y'know, it's January. We hiked up to the Kickelhahn, a huge tower thing with lovely views down to red-roofed Ilmenau and the rolling, mist-covered hills of the Thuringer Wald. The first part of the hike wasn't very difficult, but about halfway up, we hit all the unmelted snow, and it was quite a slog from there. In some places, the trail was barely discernible, and we were clambering over fallen trees and wending through soundless forests. Being the warmhearted team player that I am, I pushed on ahead and made it to the top 17 minutes before the next people before me and felt quite pleased with myself. At the top, we tried to have a picnic but mostly shivered in the cold wind, at which point we opted to go into the restaurant up there for warm drinks before taking an easier way down.

Oops, it's Sunday now. I keep getting distracted! I've just been working on correcting some practice papers from one of my classes. They're working on giving directions, so I asked them to write some directions using a map I gave them so I could correct them and see how they're doing. Some highlights:

"The pub is on the left-hand side. I go inside trink a beer and go out. I turn right..."

"At the end of the street I'll find the hotel. My next station is the Hot Dog Stand because I am hungry and the eat from the Hotel is bad. So I go out of the Hotel..."

I also got to work with dem Wöhlbierchen (my mentor teacher's daughter) with more Japanese today. Have I mentioned that we're doing Japanese together? Well, we are. The sweet girl is a big anime/manga fan and wants to go to Japan someday, so we meet once a week to learn hiragana and other fun stuff. It's quite fun and good for both of us; she gets to learn some Japanese, and I get to talk about grammar, drink coffee, and practice speaking German. She's a friendly girl and a quick learner, so it's great fun to work with her--when I can remember enough of my atrophied Japanese to teach her something useful!

One hilarious event that I forgot to relate: I've been meeting with a student to practice our songs for Fasching (which is this Wednesday...augh, I get nervous just thinking about it!). I'd just come in and still had my coat on; his roommate was just leaving to go drink some beer in the TV room. This student, the guitar guy, is a very friendly guy who often speaks to me in English while we work on the music. Anyway, just as I'm getting settled and his roommate is leaving, he glances at me and says, "You can take your clothes off."

It took me a split second to go through surprise, bewilderment, and then realization (he meant, of course, "coat" and simply grabbed the wrong word). This would've been a nonissue if his roommate, who speaks fairly good English, had not heard him and burst out laughing. I started laughing too, at which point the poor guy realized what he'd said and bolted for the door to shout "THAT'S NOT WHAT I MEANT TO SAY!!!!" down the hallway after his cackling roommate. I later related the incident to Frau Wöhlbier, who then hinted about it to him in class. Facepalm. Although it still makes me giggle, thinking about it. Of all the times to mix up those two words...

Well, anyway, the job search goes on. Turns out that it's a serious disadvantage--more serious than I'd anticipated--to not be an EU national during a search for an English teaching job in Europe. I can't figure out if this is a legal visa/work permit thing, or just a euphemistic way of informing everyone that they don't want any non-British-dialect speakers intruding in their schools. Either way, it's irritating. I found one job posting that was exactly what I'd like to do--except it's run by Cambridge schools, and non-EU national need not apply.

Option B is grad school. I looked through the Edinburgh application today and discovered that I'd need to write a research proposal. Now, this is not going to happen anytime soon, because I'll have to do quite a bit more research into the areas that I'm interested in to figure out what kind of project I'd want to work on. Library, here I come. On the good side, there are no real application deadlines, so I can apply whenever I figure out what the hell I want to do for the next few years of my life.

Finally, I discovered this song on my iPod today. I have several CDs loaded on there that I've never listened to all the way through, and I found this one while walking home. It seems to encapsulate a lot of how I've been feeling recently.