In London

So I'm still in an Anglophone country -- the same one as before, in fact -- but it's starting to feel a bit more normal. The southern accent is, of course, quite a bit easier to understand than the midlands or northern accents. One interesting discovery is that I'm still functioning on a sort of bilingual level. Naturally (well, not always so naturally -- I do have to remind myself that strangers here speak English), I speak English to people, but I still think a good deal in French, or sometimes in a fluid combination of French and English. That's encouraging. It makes me think that perhaps I'll still be able to speak French when I return to Montpellier next Friday. A few months after being in the states, though, that could be a different story...

London is enormous. It's much larger than Paris. I realized last weekend that you can walk most of central and historical Paris in a single day. Not so with London. I arrived yesterday in the afternoon and started my tourist excursion at kind of an odd time -- around 4:30, not long before many museums close and well before the night life begins. So I saw a lot of things from the outside: the Royal Observatory, the Queen's House, the Eye, Big Ben, the Tower and Tower Bridge, Parliament Square, Westminster Abbey, and lots and lots and lots of buses. Today I plan on actually entering a building or two, probably the British Museum, the National Gallery, and perhaps Pollock's Toy Museum and/or the Charles Dickens Museum.

I can tell already it's a great city, but a city can only be so great if you don't know anyone there. After spending a wonderful time in Paris and Chester with lots of friends, London can't compare. I'm hoping to meet up with Shawna McNally and Katie Goodell tomorrow, and perhaps my friend Parham on Sunday, and I think that will brigthen up my time in this incredible city. Today is already bright, though; it's sunny and clear, an unusual blessing in England. It's been great weather my whole trip, in fact. Paris was beautiful, and Sarah said that Chester was clearer and warmer when I was visiting than it has been all semester. Sarah and I went to the Lake District on Wednesday, which was not only beautiful but markedly peaceful. "The fairest place on earth," Wordsworth called it. Well I may not be in the fairest place on earth right now, but there are a lot of great things to see, so I best be going. Peace and blessings!

-Your chap in London