Drinks…and more drinks

More mud

The rains started early today and continued quite heavily throughout the morning commute. At breakfast, I dreaded the mud that awaited us, but was surprised to see that there was actually very little. Deo explained that the mud is only bad when it has rained and then when many people have passed afterwards. The fact that it was still raining had kept many people off the roads and so we got to the bus stop fairly cleanly.

On the morning walk to the bus station, we usually pass a number of primary school children on their way to school. There are uniforms here even at the primary level. The boys wear tan pants and the girls blue skirts, and then both have white shirts and a royal blue sweater. They also both wear socks with thick black and white horizontal stripes, like the Wicked Witch of the West. These days nearly all the students seem to be wearing their sweaters despite the fact that it’s about 20C in the early morning with something like 90% humidity. I’m in a short-sleeve shirt and sweat it up on the way to the bus stop, but for these kids, we’re in the cold months.

Today, because of the rains, the bus driver drove farther up the main paved road, so we only had to walk a road crossing the coffee plantations to get to the school. It was a slow, slow walk though, as we had to choose our steps carefully to avoid slipping. In the end, it took us over an hour to get to school and we arrived shortly after the start time of 8am. None of the other teachers were there, however, though Deo told me this is a common occurrence when it is raining during the commute. One would think that if it were raining, the teachers would know that they have to leave home earlier to make it to work on time, but apparently it doesn’t work that way here, or with these teachers. In any case, the first two periods were virtually thrown out the window and the kids left to their own devices – which meant they did nothing. For more details on the school day, check the teaching blog.

I had been hoping to observe some English classes today, but instead got to observe a math class before Deo and I left for town. He wanted to take me to the regional education office to introduce me to the regional education officer. Just getting into town took us about 90 minutes between the muddy walk down the school road and the jammed bus ride.

We had a brief visit with the education officer and other than his somewhat stern word that the government should have been informed of the internship prior to my arrival, he was all smiles and asked me to encourage others to come to Tanzania to volunteer. Deo and I then went to a café to wait for a teacher to bring exams that he had to submit to the education office for verification. The teachers hadn’t gotten them finished before we’d left earlier in the day.

At café’s and restaurants, the seating is usually plastic (a la patio furniture), though the service is generally good. There’s usually a barrel of water with a tap set up somewhere for you to wash your hands and if not, like at lunch yesterday, a server will come over with a jug and hold a basin under your hands as he pours water over them. Not bad for table service, but with nothing to wipe your hands with, it leaves you a little wet.

I had a Coke, but Deo likes his beer. He had a couple as we sat there waiting for the other teacher to bring the papers. This took an incredible amount of time but he eventually arrived. The papers were incomplete and so Deo couldn’t submit them to the office. While we’d been waiting, though, we had run into Mr. Kimolo, the second master at Mawella SS, and so Deo led me to a different café to sit and wait for Mr. Kimolo to hand his papers in so that we could have a drink with him. I thought I had already reached my two soda limit, but it was hot, so I ordered another one. Deo, of course, had his beer. We had a couple before Mr. Kimolo arrived and then one more with him. Already I’m having trouble doing the math. Deo told me he makes $140 a month and yet he doesn’t think twice about having a couple of beers in town (at $1 a piece) before heading home. Today, it was about 4 and along with the transit fares we paid, that’s already over $5, which if I can divide correctly, is more than what he makes in a day. For someone who is concerned about quality of life, doing distance university courses in the fall, and has a laptop and a motorbike on his wish list for the end of the year, he sure spends his money freely. His wife is a nurse, so they’re doing well with a double income in comparison to others, but I would still have thought he’d be more prudent with his money.

So we spent a great deal of time at cafes today. Sometimes it’s nice, but when it gets excessive, it sure seems like a waste of time. Then again, here there isn’t much to do when you get home, so perhaps that’s why so much time is spent at cafes.

We had dinner later in the evening and then settled in to watch the Chelsea-Liverpool match. Soccer, of course, is very popular here, and there is a big following for the UK’s Premier League and UEFA’s league of Champions. Tonight was a semi-final for the latter. Tomorrow is May Day, or Worker’s Day, so there is no school. A sleep-in will be nice.

A Full (of mud) day

Better get used to it. It's the last half of rainy season.

Getting up at 6:00am was not as hard as I expected it to be, perhaps because hadn’t slept all that well. The mosquito net was too tight to the bed and thus confining, so I will have to look for a larger one in town. Having a brief rinse-down in the bath tub freshened me up a bit and I went to have breakfast with Deo (the headmaster).

Breakfast in Tanzania is usually nothing more than tea and bread, and that’s exactly what we had this morning. The water for the tea had been boiled, so I wasn’t too worried about it, but the “Golden Pagoda mixed fruit jam,” a cheap Chinese import (like many things here) seems like nothing more than sugar and red dye food colourings that are probably banned in Canada. A little worrisome, but the alternative is just dry bread.

Our commute, I discovered, is quite an ordeal, especially if it has recently rained, which was the case this morning. We began with a walk through a few of the muddy side streets of the neighbourhood which were difficult and slippery to navigate and before long our shoes were caked with mud and our pants stained a reddish-brown. After about a kilometre we cut across a bean field, emerging on another road, where we walked a further 5 minutes to a “bus” stop.

There is no public transit here as we know it. Public transit, meaning that it’s the public that takes it, consists of privately own minibuses that ply certain regular routes. They are invariably decades old Toyota wagons with 4 rows of benches in the back, beaten to death and stripped of any interior niceties. The buses wait around at a stop until they are sufficiently packed to be profitable to the driver and his assistant. “Packed” means just that. A vehicle like this would comfortably hold perhaps 12 people in North America, but 25 is the normal sardine-like situation here. The assistant’s job is to hang his head out the sliding door’s window looking for customers, opening and closing the door, and coaxing potential customer into the vehicle. Surprisingly, there are actual bus stop areas in all this confusion, and the drivers risk fines if they pick up outside these areas, but that rarely stops them.

So we rode a packed bus for a kilometre or more on the main, paved road but because of the rains, it could not navigate the muddy offshoots and so we had to disembark and continue on foot. We walked for another kilometre or so. By this time we were well into the countryside. All around us was lush greenery, mostly banana trees and coffee plantations (some of the best coffee in the world comes from the Kilimanjaro region). At a certain point, we cut off the main road into a dirt path running through a coffee plantation. In the distance, I could see the aluminium roofs of the school but between that and us was a muddy field which we navigated carefully.

As we arrived at the school, the students were all abuzz about the new foreigner and two students came to collect the headmaster’s bag and mine and take them ahead of us to the staffroom. The entire commute had taken us just about an hour.
I’ll give a brief summary of the school day here, but the rest can be read in more detail by following the link to “Chris’ Teaching in Tanzania” on the right.

The school is called Chief Sabas Secondary School (or Mangi Sabasi in Swahili). It is just a year old and was opened last February after the government ordered all wards to build one new school to accommodate the growing number of students. Despite this fine idea, the government contributes only 50% of the construction and operating costs, the rest of which must come from the community and the school fees that the students must pay (about $60/year). This means that schools are often constructed slowly and in stages as available monies permit. This style of progress is well illustrated in Chief Sabas SS and its neighbour (literally, at about 100m away) Mawella SS.

Mawella SS was built in 2000 and, as the only secondary school in the area for 8 years, received all money from the local community to add to its government subsidy. It has also had the benefit of help from aid organizations and development projects by the Canadian and American embassies.

Contrasting with this, Chief Sabas SS has just 4 raw brick buildings, each divided in to two classrooms, where just simple desks and a chalkboard are found. The roofs are sheet aluminum and there are no lights (the school doesn’t have electricity). What will one day be the principal’s office now functions as the staffroom as the other staff building is still in the early stages of (stalled) construction (I am told that it will be completed in July/August). The teachers work at a couple of tables and the rest use student desks brought into the room. There are no shelves, drawers or anything else of the sort, and the extent of their resources are the one textbook for their subject, a pen, and some paper to write on. This is teaching at its most basic. Lessons must all be put on the board and the students must copy them into their books before doing any exercises.

The headmaster called all the students together for the morning assembly in the schoolyard between the two rows of buildings and took the opportunity to introduce me to the students. I said a few words of greeting and then the headmaster gave me a tour of the school. Afterwards, we went to visit Mawella SS and then we continued on to see the second mistress of the school, who is currently on maternity leave. She will be due back at school in 3 weeks as entitled maternity leave in Tanzania is just 84 days, after which mothers must work half-days until noon for 6 months before returning full time.

Everywhere we went we had to walk on muddy roads, which consumed incredible amounts of time. After visiting with the second mistress, we caught a bus into town. We were looking for an ATM, and finally found one that didn’t have 30 people lined up at it. It’s the end of the month and salary time, so it’s not uncommon for people to line up for hours to use the ATM to withdraw money.

I had to pick up a few other things as well, including a bigger mosquito net, a new bath towel, and some body wash. This last item I had deemed a necessity since soap residue is extremely hard and time consuming to rinse off when you don’t have a constant shower stream and one hand has to hold the bucket pouring the water. I found the body wash, at a shocking 6500sh, about $6, and as girly as it might sound, now all I need is a loofah. No such luck on today’s trip.

We finished by grabbing lunch at a local place. I ordered roast chicken, and it came on a partitioned tray complete with a kind of meat soup, baked beans (mixed with coconut milk?), vegetables, and a big dollop of ugali in the middle. Ugali is a staple of the Tanzanian diet and looks like a big plop of mashed potatoes, only it is much stiffer (cuttable with a knife) and made from maize flour. It is bland and tasteless unless dipped in a sauce or soup, which most people do. Then it’s not bad at all. “Vegetables” here, as far as I’ve seen, always consist of shredded Chinese cabbage and shredded carrots boiled together of which you usually get a decent helping. To drink, I had a passion fruit Fanta.

Despite leaving the school mid-morning, we didn’t arrive home until almost 5 pm. At six, you need to close the windows so the mosquitoes don’t come in the house. We had dinner and spent the rest of the evening at home, as the Manchester United game was on TV. More to come on the town and other stuff when I have more time, as this entry has become long enough already.

Finally here

Pretty decent lodgings for the next month, all things considered.

The bus trip from Nairobi to Moshi by bus went off without a hitch, which is a first for anything on this trip. After a short stop in Arusha to change shuttle buses, I arrived in Moshi with all my gear around 3pm in the afternoon. The driver kindly called the headmaster of the school who came promptly to pick me up.

As the headmaster has no car, we went by taxi to his house. As we headed out of town, he explained to me that he lived in the Shantytown area of Moshi. Uhh…..shit. However, he continued to explain that that was just the name of the area, that it wasn’t actually a shanty town. In fact, Shanty town is the nicest part of Moshi, sitting just on the outskirts where thing become nice and green, the streets are tree-lined and many of the Europeans who live in Moshi can be found (there is also the international school nearby). True to his word, his home is safely behind a big gate and wall on a quiet dirt road off the main paved road. The large yard is almost entirely taken up with growing maize (similar to corn), with a few orange and lemon trees in the grassy area.

The house is a bungalow with a large main living/dining area. It is filled with 3 separate sofa and chair sets, two of which are rarely used, and a dining table. A hallway leads to 3 bedrooms and a bathroom, and there is also a large kitchen. The surfaces are all painted stone, apart from the floor which is varnished cement. Lighting is naked bulbs hanging from the ceiling or else screwed into simple sockets high on the wall.

Prior to arriving, I had no idea what to expect and so was pleasantly surprised with the very liveable accommodations and even more so when he lead me to a spacious, airy room complete with an ensuite bath. The bedroom has nothing more than a double bed, low table and a mini-fridge, but it is enough for me for my five weeks. The ensuite bath has a nice, modern toilet and a simple sink, but the bathtub in the corner is just that, with no showerhead whatsoever, so my “showers” will consist of sitting on an overturned bucket in the bath tub and pouring water from another bucket over myself before and after soaping up. So far, this hasn’t been a problem since the air temperature is comfortably warm. It just takes a little getting used to.

The headmaster and his wife actually sleep in a smaller building on the property but use the house for everything else. In the house, one bedroom is occupied by his father and another by their “housegirl” (their word, not mine). She seems to be in her mid-teens (though I could be mistaken) and takes care of the cleaning, washing, and helps with the cooking and whatever else they need. I don’t know the entire story there.

Lunch had been prepared and afterwards we walked to a small store around the corner where we had a drink and I bought a sim card for my phone. Amazingly, it cost me just 1000 Tanzanian shillings (about 85 cents)! A steal compared to the $50 I paid for my Fido sim card in Toronto. Texting is also cheap here, with international texts costing just 10 cents and local texts about half that. It will be good to be able to have easy contact with home via text messages!

In the evening, I went with him, his wife, his father, and his younger brother to a local outdoor bar to have a few drinks. Beer costs about $1 a bottle (500mL), and as in most developing nations, the old glass bottles of Coca-Cola and Fanta are ubiquitous and cost about 40 cents. Without the option of clean water-based drinks, I think I’ll be drinking a lot of pop this month.By the time we got home I was exhausted after a long day, but happy to finally be here, safe and sound, with all my baggage. I set up my mosquito net (too small) and am all ready for bed. It’s going to be an early rise tomorrow as we have to leave the house at 7:00am for the commute to school. That means getting up at 6:00am to get ready. Fortunately, without internet or numerous TV options, it looks like I’ll be able to get to bed a lot earlier.

It's not Tanzania, but it sure is nice!

It was nice while it lasted...

For the second night on the ground in a row, I find myself in a hotel and not in Tanzania. At least I’ve moved up a notch. I’m in room 230 at the 5-star Intercontinental Nairobi. You know, the place where Bush stays when he comes to Kenya. I must have deep pockets…or just bad luck.

Everything was going to plan. I killed an interminable afternoon in London at the hotel and the shopping gallery at Heathrow before boarding my flight to Nairobi. Shortly after I sat down, a loud Englishman got on, circling the plane looking for his seat. He found it, eventually – right next to me, of course – and proceeded to talk my ear off for the next 45 minutes. He’d had 9 pints at the airport waiting for the flight, and his incessant babble was a mixture was somewhere between entertaining and annoying.

The flight was virtually empty. Clearly Virgin was taking a big loss on this flight but the passengers were happy as many got to stretch out across four seats for the overnight flight. I parted with Noel under the guise of being in a noisy section of the plane, which was not entirely untrue. The flight passed, quiet and uneventful.

I retook my seat next to Noel for the landing as the flight attendant said they needed two guys in the emergency exit row. We were sat facing the flight attendant during the descent, and the back and forth conversation between her and Noel kept us all unaware of what was going on outside.

We seemed just about to touch down and felt a good jolt as we bumped the runway, but Noel and I could see nothing but cloud outside of the window and then the pilot hit the gas and we took off again. A few white knuckles all around, but when we levelled off again, the co-pilot came on to say that we had had to abort the landing as they had lost visual contact with the runway. We circled for a half hour but the weather was so bad that we had to divert to Mombasa, almost an hour away. No one on the plane was happy. Noel would miss his cab and likely the barbeque in his honour waiting at his mother’s house, and I would miss my connecting bus to Tanzania – for the second day in a row.

We touched down in sunny Mombasa just after the sun rose. It was 7:00am on a Sunday morning, and this airport, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, was dead. Two planes sat on the tarmac, and there was no movement anywhere.

You’d have thought it would be simple: fuel up, wait for the word that the weather had improved in Nairobi and then high tail it back there. The only thing was that Virgin doesn’t fly to Mombasa and as such had no staff, no ground crew, and no contracts for any services there, not to mention that we were showing up virtually unannounced on a Sunday morning. So the pilot was forced to negotiate all of these things with the airport staff. Kind of like pulling your wheels up to a gas station in the middle of nowhere with no price listed. Only you need 20,000 litres.

In the time it took to negotiate the fuel, the pilots ran over their legal flying hours and so that was the end of that. We weren’t going anywhere. This posed a bigger problem, since we would then have to disembark and our luggage would have to be offloaded. As mentioned though, Virgin had no contract for ground crew here and there were no immigration services at the time since we were arriving unscheduled. After over an hour on the plane, it was decided that they would let us into the terminal, so we were guided (and guarded) as we were led to a sectioned off area. The Virgin office in London was negotiating for services and immigration. We spent a good two hours in the airport before they managed to work things out. We then found out that the plane had been slightly damaged in our aborted landing in Nairobi and that there were no aircraft technicians for A340s at Mombasa so one would have to come in from Nairobi. They announced that Virgin would put us up in a hotel for the night and that a Virgin manager was on his way in from Nairobi.

So we loaded into a convoy of buses and headed off to an unknown hotel. People were tired and unhappy but smiles started to emerge when we arrived at the hotel, a luxury resort on a white sand beach. Pools, cabanas, canopy beds and balconies with ocean views. This was going to go a long way to soothing our pain. I, for one, was going to make the best of this unexpected turn of events and quickly changed into a bathing suit and sandals and met up with a girl from the flight to have lunch at the buffet. We were enjoying our leisurely lunch as a nice breeze blew and the band played and had just finished up when a hotel staff member approached us and told us that Virgin had charted a plane and we would have to check out within the half hour. Talk about dangling a carrot. And a luxury carrot at that! Now I really was pissed! But we had no choice and so in a pool of sweat, I repacked my massive bags and we re-boarded the buses for the airport only 2 hours after arriving.

Things were handled quickly at the airport, and they needed to be. The runway lights had failed that day at Mombasa and so we were in a race against the sun to take off. I boarded the rankest, sweatiest plane I’ve ever flown and we took off with about 20 minutes to spare before sunset. Upon arrival in Nairobi, a Virgin agent approached me to tell me that they had a reservation at the Intercontinental waiting. The girl from the plane had offered to let me stay with her at the hotel she had originally had booked there, but in the end we cancelled that to save her the money and so we are both staying here at the Intercontinental on Virgin’s tab. It’s just too bad we haven’t been able to take advantage of the hotel more. After a nice dinner and a drink at the bar, we we’re exhausted and it’s bed time.

It’s not Tanzania, but at least it’ll be a 5-star bed tonight. And the bus company is honouring my reservation from two days ago, so maybe, just maybe, I’ll find myself in Tanzania tomorrow!

Stuck in London

The Park Inn. Nothing fancy, but the swim in the pool was nice.

It’s Friday night and I am supposed to be on a plane to Nairobi, but I find myself here in a room at the Park Inn, a stone’s throw away from Heathrow. It’s been an exhausting day.

It started innocently enough. I got up at 8am to see Gail and Colin off to work and to say our goodbyes. After a leisurely breakfast, I began the final stages of my packing and the rearranging of the luggage so I could get everything I had into my bags. It was a formidable task. I had some 28 dictionaries and other books destined for the school I will be teaching at as well as almost a hundred wall posters rolled up, some in tubes and some not. Things moved along steadily but at some point I realized that two bags were just not going to do it, so I switched to the 3-bag choice. The difference at the airport would only be $20…nothing major.

Things were slowly getting down to my target departure time of 2:30pm. I wanted to arrive extra early for my 7pm flight as I had extra luggage to check in and didn’t want to be shut out if there were lots of people ahead of me with extra luggage as well. I ran a quick errand around 1:30pm and got back in time with about 30 minutes to spare before the taxi was to arrive. I popped in the shower, emerging with just 10 minutes left, and pretty much all set to go. And calm.

As the taxi was just about to pull up, I put on my jacket, pocketed my phone and my wallet and my…..passport. Shit. Where’s my passport?!? I frantically gave myself a pat-down any cop would have been proud of. Nothing. Gave a quick check through my carry-on knapsack. Nothing. Rifled through the bags. Nothing.

Panic.

I looked out the window. No cab. So I searched the bedroom, emptying bags, looking under beds, going through the closet. Did the cleaning lady find it and put it somewhere? Dumped out a bag of garbage and went through it, then put it back. Emptied out my knapsack and came up empty. Real panic was setting in.

I called Gail, got her answering service and left a crazy message. Checked the window again. No cab. Went through all the bags, my jacket, my knapsack, the bag of garbage, and everything else again. Nothing. Impossible!

Finally got a call from Gail. I told her I thought maybe the cleaning lady might have done something with it; she told me that perhaps it had been nicked in the tube. We hung up and she went to call the cleaning lady. No dice. So she called and left a message on the Canadian consulate’s emergency line. I called the cab company to cancel the cab…my passport was just nowhere to be found.

No way, couldn’t be happening. Not something as important as this! Not at the last second! I never misplace my passport! Checked everything again and for some reason this time checked the inside pocket on my travelling backpack….and it was there.

I was covered in sweat. I phoned the cab company back, hoping that the cab hadn’t left yet. Turns out he had been sitting across the street in an unmarked minivan and was still there, about to head home. I hung up, rushed all the bags downstairs. Called Gail and took off. I had lost an hour.

After the tense drive to the airport I arrived with just 2 hours to spare before the flight. Walking in the door with all my bags, a Virgin Atlantic agent greeted me, asking where I was headed. “Nairobi.”

“Sorry, Sir. Your flight has been cancelled. Please head to that counter to discuss arrangements.”
Incredulous. So here I am, still in London. I am now on tomorrow night’s flight since taking a BA flight in the morning and arriving at 9pm in Nairobi would do me no good. Better to just shift everything one day. The hotel isn’t swank, but the food is really good. Too bad I’ll have the whole day to kill tomorrow before the 7pm flight.

A mini JET reunion

It took 3 requests and some photoshopping to get this right!

It was a JET reunion for 2 today as Helen took the bus in from Wales to meet me and do the tourist thing in London. I spent 3 years in Japan with Helen on the JET program from 2003-2006. Our villages were about 15km apart, and we were part of a group of northern Hida JETs that became pretty close, so it was good to see her again after almost 2 years.

As with anything involving Helen, though, you know there has to be drama, and today was no different. I was just about to leave the flat this morning to meet her at Victoria station when she texted to say that her coach had been involved in an accident on the highway. They had been rammed from behind by a truck. Everyone was okay, but they ended up being stranded for 3 hours and didn't get in to the station until 1pm. So our day was cut a little short, but we made the most of it.

After a quick bite we headed to Notting Hill to check out the quaint neighbourhood. I can't say for sure that I found the exact spots that were shown in the movie, and it rained on us for the first 20 minutes or so, but afterwards, when the sun came out, it made for a really nice walk around this picturesque neighbourhood.

After that, it was just a mix of shopping on the Strand and a nice walk along the Thames. The sun was shining brightly and we were just chatting it up, snapping touristy shots every now and then. Didn't really accomplish much, but it didn't really matter - we were just having a good time.

All too soon it was time to get Helen back off to the coach station for her ride home. A short day, but lots of fun nonetheless. I finished it off at the local pub with Gail, Colin, and their friend Neelay, where I had the typical fish and chips with mushy peas. Note that in the UK, they leave the skin on the fish when they deep fry it. Odd for sure, but it doesn't really carry a taste or a texture, so aside from the visual, there's really nothing different. And in the end, I didn't actually eat the mushy peas. Not because I didn't want to eat the mushy peas, but because I didn't know that they were on my plate. I hadn't asked what the green sauce was during the entire meal (it had come in the same kind of tiny bowl the tartar sauce was in), but I guess I should have. Turns out they were the mushy peas...just a bit more mushed than I had expected!

Exactly 1:00pm GMT (Gravel Mean Time)

Straddling the second most important imaginary line in the world.

Standing on imaginary lines rarely gets more exciting than this. Today when I woke up, I could see immediately that the weather was too nice to finish up the paper that's still due. With London weather a crap shoot every day, you've got to take the good ones when they come, so that's exactly what I did. I hopped the tube out to Canary Wharf and then switched to the DLR to get to Cutty Sark station.

Cutty Sark is the name of the last great clipper ship of the era of clipper ships, when they continued to outpace steamships as long as they had their sails billowing. Launched in 1869, the Cutty Sark's record stood (unsurpassed at the time) at 362 miles (564km) in 24 hours. Unfortunately for me, though it is now in permanent dry dock at the Greenwich pier, it is currently under hoardings for restoration.

I walked through the grounds of the Naval Academy and then up the expansive grassy hill leading up to the Royal Observatory. Like everyone else, my destination was the exact demarcation of the prime meridian, the Earth's second most important imaginary line. It was back in 1884 that a good chunk of the world officially recognized this arbitrary line as the line of 0 longitude, and we've never looked back. I can't say that standing on it was exactly a thrill, but that accompanied by the huge parklands and quaint High Street area made for a nice outing on a sunny afternoon.

This evening I met up with a Canadian friend of mine teaching here in London. We emerged from the underground in the area of St. Christopher's House, where the after-work crowd was enjoying the nice weather by milling around and chatting outside of the bars, pubs and restaurants - apparently a very London thing to do. We continued on down to Marylebone High Street before veering off and finding a good yet deserted Indian restaurant for dinner. Being the only people in the place, service was impeccable, and the food was pretty good, too.

Heading home, I opted for a nice 30 minute walk instead of using the tube. While I do have an Oyster card and it has been convenient, I still seem to be spending a shocking amount on public transit... something like $12 a day. Londoners don't seem to think twice about taking the tube for just one stop or two (at $3 a ride), so I made an effort to reverse that trend tonight.

Jazzin' it up with Dave, Hannah, and Ben

A jazzy night with Ben in London Town

The new week sent Gail and Colin back to work and brought a vast improvement in the weather. Nevertheless, I took it easy all morning and worked on an unfinished school paper until mid-afternoon. By that time, the sun was making its way through the clouds so I decided to head out on what would turn out to be an entirely useless mission.

I only had two simple tasks: drop by the post office to get a package that had arrived for Gail (probably more of my books), and pick up a few grocery items. Upon arriving at the post office, I found them to have closed at 1:00pm, after just four hours of morning service. So I continued on to the St. John's Wood High Street (main street) for the groceries. High streets are quaint. Every neighbourhood has one and they're like a mini-downtown for each neighbourhood - but just one street. I wandered around the little Tesco Express, comparing prices with stuff back home. More or less, it's pretty simple: the numbers are all pretty much the same, only instead of the dollar symbol, you've got the pound sign. And at 2 dollars to the pound, you don't need to be Einstein to figure out that most stuff costs double. Alright, that might be a slight exaggeration, but not much. Anyway, I picked up bananas, cereal, milk and orange juice.

In the evening I met up with Dave and his wife, Hannah. I spent a school year with Dave in Fontainebleau, France back in 2001-2002, when we were both language assistants there. It had been 6 years since I had last seen him, but he hadn't changed much. We had a great dinner at a nearby tapas bar, and then he surprised me with tickets to a jazz concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall down by the river.

On the way, we passed by the Coin Street Community Centre and market. A piece of prime riverside real estate, the neighbourhood was slated for demolition to make way for hotels and office towers, but the locals managed to pull together, lobby heavily, and somehow got the area saved. Not only that, but they managed to get the government to re-invest in the area and today many of the buildings have been restored, the Coin Street market has turned into a minor tourist attraction, and some popular shopping buildings have blended themselves into the area. All in all, a feel-good story.

After the concert, we walked all along the Thames, right under the London Eye and over the bridge to the parliament buildings. Both banks of the river were lit up, and the contrast was interesting. On one side were all the buildings of traditional, elegant London architecture while on the other side were the more modern installments of Southbank. It was all picture perfect, except for the front corner of the parliament buildings, which was left unlit...just to spite visiting photographers!!

Arriving home just after 11:00pm, I was greeted with Gail's laughter. Turns out that she and Colin had gone grocery shopping on their way home from work. You can guess what they had bought: bananas, cereal, milk, and orange juice.

Making the most of mixed weather

Late afternoon in The Regent's Park

Gail's and Colin's flat is located in St. John's Wood, a quiet, upscale residential neighbourhood of north London. It sits on the corner where their street meets Abbey Road. Yes, that is the same Abbey Road of Beatles fame, and in fact the famous crosswalk on the album cover (and the recording studio in front of which it's found) is not more than 100m from the door of their building. More than anything else, it's an annoyance local residents as tourists from all over insist on making fools of themselves taking pictures in the middle of the crosswalk, disrupting traffic while doing so.

This morning we set off to Canary Wharf for dim sum. The area, indeed once a real wharf, is now a thriving business and shopping district crammed with the tall glass towers of big banks, law firms, and corporations that rivals the city's traditional financial centre. Bombed to smithereens during the war, the docks area lay derelict until a massive revitalization project began in the early 1980s. However, a delay in the extension of the Jubilee (tube) line and the property market collapse of the early '90s threw the project off track and bankrupted the company financing the project. Things got back on track in the mid-90s with a new international consortium known as the Canary Wharf Group. Since the group was chaired by Canadian Paul Reichmann and the underground network of tunnels and shopping connecting the towers was based on Toronto's PATH system, the Canary Wharf area now has many places with names such as "Canada Square" and "Canada Place".

Gail tells me that there are surprisingly few Chinese in London (compared to Toronto, that is), and as a result, finding good Chinese cuisine can be difficult. The restaurant we went to was one that they had discovered and found to be up to par, and indeed the dim-sum was good. Afterwards, I got a tour of their plush offices nearby.

We then did more shopping before finishing up with a walk through The Regent's Park. One of London's largest parks, it was fairly busy depite the less than ideal weather conditions. Beautiful trees and flowers were in bloom and the array of waterfowl, including cranes and herons, was quite impressive. Lucky for us, it was all within a short walk of Gail's flat, where we finished off the evening with a nice home-cooked meal.

Tattie scones and streaky bacon

St. Paul's Cathedral on a grey London day

It's been almost 11 years but I am back in London again. My first day started off with Gail, Colin and a few of their colleagues and clients at brunch at a fancy place called Roast, in Borough Market. Opened in 2005 in an historic building with tall glass windows offering a good view over the market, it's not a budget destination, so I was happy that it was all being expensed. The £12 "Full Bourough", consisting of smoked streaky bacon, Cumberland sausage, fried toast (?!?), black pudding (congealed blood in sausage format), grilled tomatoes, field mushrooms and a egg, seemed too artery-clogging even for me, so I opted for the "Tattie scone with with streaky bacon, field mushrooms and a fried egg" (£8.50=$17), orange juice (£3=$6) and a cappuccino (£2.50=$5).

If you need a dictionary to understand what it was I actually ate, you're not alone. With other menu offerings including "cottage loaf", "Orkney kippers", and "egg butty", I was glad to have some Brits at the table to translate. My "tattie scone" was essentially two square potato latkes and the "streaky bacon" is what we would call just plain old "bacon". However, this last term is just not enough here since, as our view over the market attested, there are myriad types of bacon available for sale. Breakfast here just insn't as simple as we would like it to be.

My first meal in London was also my first experience in British service. My scone came out sans fried egg, Gail's orange juice was missing the cranberry juice she had requested to be mixed in, and another girl's hot chocolate appeared in the form of a cappuccino. And this is an upscale place! As Gail and other expats would later tell me, the service, or lack thereof, is one of the exasperating points of living in London and it spans everything from restaurants to plumbers to couriers. The upside is that taxes are included in the price you see and tipping is generally not necessary. At $28 for my breakfast, I should hope not.

The bad is measured with the good, though, and there is enough of the latter here to outweigh the former. We headed off to the Tate Modern Museum, which has free entry, as do all state museums in London. Afterwards, we crossed the Millenium Bridge and walked around a few different areas including Piccadilly Circus, Covent Garden, Soho, and Oxford Street. London has some ridiculously good shopping as long as you know where to look, and Gail and Colin have all the places figured out.

While we had used the underground to get into town, we decided to take the bus to head home. Apparently, while in principle the system is good and extensive, there is no such thing as transfers, so riders must repay the fare every time they switch lines or switch between methods of transport. In addition, it's not uncommon for buses to break down (we passed two for the same route 200m apart), forcing all the passengers to find another way home, without any compensation for their lost ride. The silver lining, if you can call it that, is that getting on and off is rather quick since nearly all riders use the Oyster transit card. It makes sense to do so: with a single adult non-card fare set at £4 ($8), riding with the Oyster card costs significantly less (£1.50 for the tube and 80p for the bus).

And that was the first day. We spent the rest of the evening relaxing at home.