From KK: Ello Ol' Chap!

Playing London Bridges Falling Down on London Bridge

and doing a pretty good job of embarrassing Doug

We are getting good practice for our whirl-wind trip in April where we will be hitting 18 cities in 21 days. Like Paris, we got to London late Friday afternoon and left early Sunday morning. My Christmas present from Doug was this trip and tickets to see Wicked!

Friday night we took the bus into London and were dropped off at Baker Street. We walked from there through Oxford Circus, Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery, Leicester Square and made our way down to Waterloo Station, where we were to meet Matt Kidd. Matt swam with Doug at Auburn and we were able to stay with him in Kingston on the Tames in Surrey for the weekend. It was a great little town and we really enjoyed being out of the city and being able to walk through the market Saturday morning. 

We made it back to Matt's with just enough time to drop off our stuff and head to Wicked. We almost missed the show because Doug swore he knew where we were going. He lied. After we got directions and had to run back to the tube and find our way to another part of town, the theatre was hard to miss because it was bright green. The show was just as amazing as I had hoped. Doug has been subjected to listening the soundtrack since we met, so he was familiar with it, which made it even more fun.  

I haven't read the book and our library has it, so I am trying to read it in Spanish. It is not easy and will take me about three years to finish it.  

On the way home, we stopped in a dive bar and got fish-and-chips to go and ate them on the train home. Our apologies to everyone else on the train. 

Saturday we woke up at the crack of 11 and had a lot to squeeze in to not a lot of time. We started out at Borough Market, which was definitely my favorite thing I have ever done in all my trips to London. There were about 50 stalls with all different kinds of prepared Greek, Indian, Chinese, German, Italian foods and cheeses and olives and pates and mulled wine and fresh market meats and veggies. The markets are my favorite thing about Europe that aren't as common or near as cheap in the U.S. Even though the food was cheap, we just bought a loaf of bread from the market and ate the chorizo and cheese we brought from home to save money. At least we got to sample all of the good stuff first.  

With Rick Steves' Tour of London podcats to lead the way, from there we did the London Bridge, the Tower of London, the Tower Bridge, the Tate Modern, the London Eye, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, St. Paul's Cathedral, Big Ben and Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park, Soho, China Town, the British Museum to see the Rosetta Stone, and finally to a long-awaited pub for a pint.  

Chinatown

There we met a Canadian girl, Jill, and an Australian guy, Dan, who met traveling in Guyana. We had fun listening to them talk about all of their crazy travels, which made our Eurotrip seem so tamed.  

My only request for London was that we get some Indian food, which sure beats the heck out of mushy peas and some meaty pie, and the best Indian food I have ever eaten has always been in London. We ate with our new friends, then headed back to Surrey for a few hours of sleep. 

The most exhausting thing to me about traveling is the traveling part. Since we fly the budget airline, Ryanair, the airports and about an hour and a half outside of the cities. So we took a train from Kingston to Waterloo, the tube from Waterloo to Marlyebone, the bus to London-Stansted airport, flew from Stansted to Reus, the bus from Reus to Barcelona, and the metro from Estacio Sants to Barceloneta. Needless to say, I slept an 12 hours last night and still needed an espresso when I woke up.  

Good thing Zoe and I have been practicing my British English, because as Oscar Wilde said, "The English have everything in common with the Americans- except, of course, language."For example a courgette is a zucchini, mince is ground beef, serviette is a napkin, pants are...underpants not trousers, homely means lovely (not ugly), drunk is wellied or bevvied, an ironmonger's is a hardware store, a boot is the trunk of a car, and the list goes on. We are having to practice her American English too because she thinks I am a yankee, which is certainly not OK with me.  

The weather wasn't typical English weather for January, as it was sunny and pretty mild, which was an improvement from -9°C last week in London. 

We are back in Spain hoping it stays sunny so we can do laundry. I don't have any classes on Mondays or Fridays, so I still have it pretty easy. I am getting pretty busy with my classes though, and have much more respect for my teachers than ever before. The most difficult thing to me is that I have all different levels and ages to prepare for.  

My 40-year-old-ish student, Nuria, only likes practicing grammar and can conjugate any verb thrown her way, but doesn't speak well. So, I try to have conversation time with her too, but she just wants to do grammar worksheets. 

I have three 8-year-old girls I call the Irenes, because that's two of the three girls' names. We play memory or go fish with different vocabulary, or learn stuff like what sounds animals make in English. You'd be surprised how different they are. In Spanish a rooster says kikiriki. My biggest mistake with them was the first lesson we played bingo, I brought a chupachup, or sucker, for each of them whenever they won a round and now they just want candy.  

I have a new lesson with Pau, 11, and Mar, 8, which is my hardest class because they are on such different levels, but the parents want them to share the class. My other challenging class is Constantin, 14, because he hates school, reading, homework and, most of all, English. I usually just ask him questions about the latest Barça fúbol game, write down his mistakes in grammar or pronunciation and then practice them, but his mom wants me to give him dictation tests for 30 minutes a class. He is a typical 14-year-old and now has decided he hates me and his mom. Just when I thought the Irenes were catching on to converstational English I said "When. does. school. fi. nish. for. the. ho. li. day?" and Irene 2 said "Oh yes, you can keep it in plastic bag." No, I have no idea what she could have been thinking I said or what in the world that means, but it looks like we have a long way to go.

The Tower Bridge