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

Cheers from Chester

I am in an Anglophone country. Whoa.

Yesterday I flew from Paris to Liverpool and then took a train to Chester to meet my friend Sarah Glady. Right now I'm in the kitchen of her student apartment (whose bathroom is bigger than my dorm room, I'm pretty sure) while she's in class. Sarah is about the best host I could ask for. She gave me a walking tour of the city yesterday, and we were stopping every ten steps so she could explain the historical significance of this or that tower or church or field. Considering the fact that before yesterday I knew maybe three things about Chester, it seems like it holds quite a bit of historical significance, from Roman times all the way through World War II. It's a beautiful little town, too, with an interesting combination of Roman, Medieval, Elizabethan, and Victorian architecture.

It really is something to be somewhere where everyone speaks English and almost no one speaks French. An airport employeee wanted to tell me something yesterday and I replied, "Oui?" Just as silly, I found myself saying "pardon" (French "pardon," that is) as Sarah and I passed people on our walk around town. What makes my confusion especially confusing is that I don't know the English that English people use. I'd sound silly saying "pardon" in French, but I think I'd sound just as silly saying "excuse me," as we Americans tend to say, instead of "sorry," as the British tend to say. With language as well as little cultural details, I find myself here in Chester in a bizarre state of familiarity and displacement. Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, in many ways I'd feel much more at home in France right now than I feel in England.

To back-track a bit, I should add that the rest of my time in Paris was fantastic. This third time in Paris was my best ever, largely because I didn't have much of an agenda and because I knew a bunch of people who were there at least for the weekend. I ended up seeing Ashley Warner, a friend from high school; Aleksandra and Aneta, my Polish friends from Montpellier who I traveled to Barcelona with; Maoyu, my friend from church in Montpellier; and Katrina Wheeler and the Whitworth study group traveling through France this whole semester. I went up the towers of Notre Dame, visited much of the Louvre (my second time there), attended a birthday party in a rented-out bar, drank wine with masses of people on a bridge next to Pont Neuf, saw several cathedrals I hadn't previously visited, and spent lots of time in great convsersation with my friends. Oh yeah, and the Korean food at my hostel was incredible.

In every way my trip is off to a great start. God has blessed me immensely every day, from being able to see friends to catching buses or trains at the very last minute to simply being kept safe. However excited I am to travel through Europe, I am just as thankful to be able to do so.

-Your man in Chester