On the road with Charlie

In just one week Charlie and I managed to put 1100 miles on his volkswagon. As a very willing passenger, I was able to watch the UK zoom by on our way from beautiful place to beautiful place. Besides the fortune of great company and yummy food (tons of it!), I also had the chance to visit my third love: the salty and chilly, wavy and windy ocean. We walked to it, along it, to see it, to sit by it, to watch the sun go down over it, to walk in it, surf and float in it, and it reminded me of home in Deep Cove and after awhile, it started to feel like home, and how lucky is that for me!

Speaking of Mysteries...

London

Five days, five teachers, forty-five students. Nuf said! Phew!

London

Let me say something about London that I haven't said before. This time, because I was there for work again, I had to stay around my hotel room in London proper. Which means, for me, shopping. As I wandered around Oxford Circus, swirling in and out of shops, I thought of all the nice things I had bought: shoes, a new book, lunch, a shirt, a pair of capris and a snow globe of the London Bridge. Did I splurge and buy too much? I asked myself. No... was my answer. Think of all the things that I didn't buy today. Now that is a lot of stuff.

Am I where I should be? What really is happiness? How does that Kraft Dinner commercial go again? ... and other musings from Hyde Park

I wandered back and forth through Hyde Park a few times over the course of these three days, thinking about nothing and everything at the same time, and even thinking about 'thinking in Hyde Park' long enough to decide to write about it here. It seems that this considerable time spent in a foggy park ironically cleared my head and, I discovered, that remarkable thought patterns trickle through a clear head. To fill the space and time, I seemed in this pattern of unconsciously asking myself a huge, unanswerable question to ponder for awhile. This was followed by little to no success at even grasping the magnitude of the question. This would lead back to thinking about nothing for another moment again before I'd find myself mindlessly humming a show tune or commerical jingle. The wisdom from this is that maybe, in the middle of these high and low level thoughts, those breakthrough-life-direction-changing epiphanies have their opportunity to appear. I didn't necessarily have any life changing epiphanies, even though Hyde Park is very big... and I'll take that as something in itself.

Flight Home

I had taken seven flights already this vacation and was beginning to wonder why I hadn't met any flight 'neighours' to talk to and pass the hours. Just bad luck I figured: half empty planes, not English speakers, walkman wearers. On my BA flight back to China, however, I met a tipsy, 55 year old French man rather spontaneously when he cupped my ears with his hands and kissed me on my cheeks as we crossed paths at the plane bathroom. Later, when he popped up over the top of his seat and tapped my sleeping face, I realized he was in row 33 and me in row 32; which made him officially my neighbour. I would discover he too, was just the kind of neighbour to make up for my recent neighbour scarcity. He spoke French... fast and when I told him I didn't speak French, he would apologise, speak one sentence in indecipherable English, get excited, and switch back to French again without appearing to notice. It wasn't until 10 minutes of understanding only the words "peepee" and "je" that I suggested German and this was a tremendous communication barrier breakthrough for us and the only hope of our neighbourly relations improving. Then he talked even faster. Turns out, he had been telling me he was going to Beijing to 'peepee' off the Great Wall because he had nothing else to do; a retired professor of Cinema in Paris he was. He would be there for three days. A few months before, he had gone to Machu Picchu to smoke a cigarette at the top. He said a police woman told him by law he wasn't allowed to smoke at 4000 ft. He never mentioned if he had complied but he seemed like the kind of guy that probably would have pulled out his pack and proposed they enjoy the moment together. I never told him anything about myself, actually I never really spoke, but for the purposes of an airplane neighbour, he had enough to say for the both of us. It was a win win.

Oxford Street Hotel - I love it!

I felt like Alice in Wonderland in my little old brick apartment building off Oxford Street. A church arcoss the street, picketers on the corner and a Thai resaurant on the other. The floors creeky and the stairs not level as they turned direction. I fell in love with my hotel room again and again each time I noticed a resemblance to grandma's house!