Good Morning From A Paradoxical Paradise

After a good night’s sleep, I’m rested and ready to take on the day! Currently, I’m enjoying some coffee (because, well, tea isn’t really my cup of tea) and taking in the view of the city. I feel entirely comfortable and at home and yet distinctly foreign and unfamiliar.

One of the main things I’ve noted since arriving in the city is that overarching idea of contradictions: everything from the dialects used in print versus in the streets, to the official and unofficial rules of the road, it seems as though two very different takes on London coexist harmoniously. Even the buildings themselves are a pleasant hodgepodge of sleek, modern high-rises and squat, historic brick churches or cottages.

On the drive from Heathrow to our housing, it became very clear that, similar to California, drivers here pay little to no attention to the many, many street signs (another odd juxtaposition). Our cab driver took a creative route through town that involved several u-turns and short-cuts through alleys to avoid traffic, and during that ride we passed by everything from Buckingham Palace to Alfred Hitchcock’s house to Westminster Abbey. While we (that is, Katie, Hayden and I, who had flights that arrived around the same time yesterday) ogled at the sights, to our driver, it was no big deal to pass a palace on a daily commute!

We all went out to dinner last night to Nando’s, and this was our first mass-exposure to British accents, which vary extremely in understandability, yet all share a heavy use of slang, idioms and a casual tone. Afterwards, we walked to a nearby grocery store, Sainsbury’s, where I noticed that the labelling of nutrition facts was far more polite than both how locals speak and how our food is labeled in the States. It’s very odd seeing the prices of things labelled in pound sterling/pounds/quid, because everything looks cheap!

Yesterday was full of excitement, so I was ready to get to sleep when I got back last night, which was roughly the same time as when I would normally go to bed back home; in other words, the adjustment to London time was way easier than I’d expected! Hurrah!

I’ll update this post with a few more pictures later this evening, as we’re going to visit our classroom and take a barge along the Thames this afternoon!

Update:

Our barge was actually through the canals of Little Venice, which was

beautiful! Some of the highlights of our boat excursion were seeing the second largest garden in London (in the yard of a sultan, whose property acreage was just slightly less than that of the Queen’s at Buckingham Palace), getting to know each other post-jetlag, and, of course, people-watching as walkers and runners passed by on the shore. After our tour, we took the tube to Paddington Station, which is the

closest stop to our classroom. Although we couldn’t get into the building since it’s closed on Sunday, we located our college campus and were then set loose to roam the city. I went with several friends who also wanted to explore this area of town, and together we found a cute marketplace to try fish and chips for the first time (yum!). A

famous double decker red bus was our ride home this evening, which was really fun!