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Started this one during my final week in England but never finished and posted it! Figured I still would (:
Update from England!
Last Monday was the annual Carol Service the university puts on at the Canterbury Cathedral. This was quite the production!! It reminded me A LOT of the Christmas programs from back in my Saint Andrew days. It even started with the “Once in Royal David’s City”! What was strange though is some of the carols were to different tunes than the ones we sing them to in the states! Like “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem” was a very odd melody. Plus they say “Beth-LEE-hem”. Apart from trying to awkwardly follow along with the tune (you go up when they go down or vise-versa… awko-taco), it was a really nice service! We even got to play with fire and got little candle door prizes ;) After the service, we all went out for dessert at a place that had a mini Manneken Pis statue (<- Cool to say I’ve seen the real one!). Lovely evening for sure!
Tuesday noteworthy thing… Ya know how I made that post a while back about finding someone with the voice of Dillon Green?? Well there I was just sitting in a café (my new favorite… first of all excellent wraps, second of all, excellent music. The Smiths, Arctic Monkeys, The Cure, Tegan and Sara, Pheonix, Tokyo Police Club… all in a matter of half an hour!) attempting to write an essay. As if the music playing wasn’t enough to distract me, all of a sudden these enticing sound waves weasel through the crack in the window and entrap my attention and totally captivate my soul. Okay, okay that was dramatic. Buuuut really. This. Guy’s. Voice. Dillon Green is incomparable but this guy came pretty dang close. I was doing okay through his phenomenal cover of “Landslide” (honestly one of the best covers I’ve ever heard next to that guy in Cambridge’s “Somebody That I Used to Know”) till he started to play his next song. “Do you want to go to the seaside?...” That was it. I gave up, saved my whopping two sentences that I had managed to write in the last ten minutes, and walked outside to discover the source of this mesmerizing music. I went outside, walked up the street, and, when I turned the corner, I was met by a beautiful boy about my age just strumming away on his acoustic guitar. “…I fell in love on the seaside…” I mean I’m sure what the Kooks really meant was “I fell in love on the streets of Canterbury.” After he finished the song, I walked up to him and told him way to be for playing The Kooks. We talked music for a little bit and then he thanked me for my kind words that ‘warmed him up on a cold day’. I was going to offer to buy him a tea to actually warm him up buuuut then I would have deprived the town of his enchanting voice… plus then my essay realllyyyy would not have gotten very far… Anyway, yes that was Tuesday. Check him out. ‘Like’ his page. He’s fabulous.
https://www.facebook.com/GeorgeOgilvieMusic/timeline?ref=page_internal
Wednesday was a ‘hump-day’ essay-writing break! Ellie, Leah, and Georgia were going to see a play that night in London (The Mysterious Case of the Dog in the Nightime’ for those of you interested) so Krista and I decided to tag along and we made a whole day of it.
We started off walking down Oxford Street and looking at all the very extravagantly decorated store windows and Christmas decorations. There were some crazy ones for sure! After this we made our way to Hyde Park to go to the big “Winter Wonderland”. Basically, this is a huge winter carnival complete with rides, Christmas shops, ridiculously priced mulled wine, ice skating, and of course, lots of people. We splurged and bought some hot chocolate and walked around to look at everything. It was a lot of fun! We didn’t go on any of the rides just because tickets were kind of pricey but it was a good time just hanging out with the girls and being in such a fun Christmas-y environment.
When it started getting closer to the girls’ show, we made our way out of the carnival and set out for our next mission. For those of you who don’t know, there is a Mary-Kate and Ashley movie called “Winning London” and it’s just the greatest. I watched it about ten times to get even more stoked for coming. One of the places they go in the movie is to a statue of Peter Pan. Of all of the landmarks and sights in London, this was one thing we were really animate about seeing. Turns out the statue is conveniently in the park right next to the one the carnival was in! It also turns out though, that the gates leading to the statue were not-so-conveniently locked! We were way bummed that we were so close but wouldn’t get to see it ): Guess you can’t see it all… now I just have an excuse to come back (:
The girls split off at this point to go to their show and Krista and I decided what we wanted to do for the rest of the night, One of the things Krista wanted to be sure to do while she was here was to go to Harrods. Ahh thee infamous Harrods. Alright. Well. I had never been to one before or even really heard about one. Safe to say I’m kind of happy I hadn’t… I was very uh… shocked by this store. Okay, being honest, I was actually quite disgusted by this store. We walked by the handbags debating on how expensive they probably were. I decided to just ask the man working behind the counter. Boy were we way off… £800 pounds for the bag on display. Apparently it was made of very rare ostrich skin, so rest assured, that was apparenty a good price. He told me that a lot of people did indeed buy these bags. I mean okay, it’s your money, spend it how you like buuuut all I’m saying is if I had that kinda money just laying around, a $1,300 ostrich-skin bag isn’t exactly how I would spend it.
After the crazy store, we got some dinner at an awesome Italian place with real legit Italian waiters (<- ha I know, I know…). I guess for every good thing we did, it had to be balanced by a disappointing thing. Krista and I both wanted to go ice skating that night but turns out, at ice rinks in London, you have to book a time slot in advance… so we were bummed we didn’t get to do this either. We reminded ourselves though of the fact we were in London so probably shouldn’t complain :P That being said, we decided the next best thing to do was go to the heart of the city and walk around Parliament Square. I didn’t realize that Krista hadn’t seen Big Ben yet! So this turned out to be the best ending for our last outing in London.
On our way back to meet the girls at the coach station, we passed by a man on the street. This man looked like he was probably homeless (not being judgmental, just from his pack and appearance we got that impression). On the ground next to him were dozens of colored envelops surrounded by a few lanterns. Each envelope had a unique title on it. I looked at Krista and we approached the man and his out-of-the-ordinary display. “Hi, what do you have here?” “I’m a poet. These are my poems. Would you like to hear one?” Our eyes scanned through the rows of envelops. “Ooh…how bout ‘Butterfly Rapsody’?” The man proceeded to recite this ‘Butterfly Rapsody’ poem to us, very animatedly, very passionately. I’d like to share it wih you all (:
After the man finished his poem, he opened his eyes and smiled at us, awaiting our response. “Wow. That was really good!” He told us a little more about his poetry and told us it was just something he liked to do. We told him to definitely keep doing it. He laughed at that, “Ya know. The problem with the world today is that no one continues doing what they like doing. If they hit a little speed bump and something goes wrong, they give up and forget. They don’t try anymore. Ya know. The world would be a much better place if people did what they loved and stayed with it. Forget what others think. If you love something, follow it. Don’t give up.”
We introduced ourselves and learned this wise poet’s name was Joseph. We thanked Joseph for his lovely words, to which he gave us each poems to keep. After giving him a donation, we wished him well and set off for Victoria Station.
Looks like I only got through Wednesday in this started blog! Basically the rest of my time in England consisted of scrambling to finish my essays, going to Christmas dinner parties, going to last classes at the gym, hanging out with people for the last time, and packing.
I can’t believe how fast that last 2 weeks went… heck the last 3 months!! So crazy…
Guess time really does fly when you are having adventures (and when you’re in a different time zone…)
Keep Calm and Keep Trying.
I’ll finish up my reflection blog I started on the plane and get that posted too! Thanks for reading!
Cheers!
(: Elyse