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.