lovely* london

(*except for the prices)

I'm here in my delightful Hammersmith flat, typing away on my laptop and using fantastically free (well, for the price of a cup of coffee) internet to connect to you. I was up at 6 am and ready to go. The jetlag from Delhi to London seemed extraordinarily painless compared to the barf inducing brain jolt that occurs when we fly to Toronto. Here, I've gotten up at the relatively sane hour of, well, after dawn at least every day. Mind you, dawn comes way to early. That's one thing that always throws me for a loop when I go to Northerner environs: I am used to banking on sunrise at about 6:00 am and sunset at about 6:00 pm. In Delhi we do sometimes get that extended to 7:00 o'clock if we're lucky. But here, and in Canada? It's crazy! Plumb nutty! Last night we went out to have a very tasty dinner at a local restaurant called the Olive Tree (I definitely recommend it) and we left at 10 and it was still very light and when I went to bed at 11:30 you could still see perfectly clearly into the back alley and all the nearby houses were completely visible. Weird!

Leaving Delhi was a bit of a rush for me. Ji and I finished school on the Thursday at lunch time and then we had to fly out late Friday evening. At school, I had a really bad last couple of days due to a massive yearbook fiasco. Uh, the kids loved the book and I didn't hear a single complaint. But the teachers? Well, let's just say I left a couple of them out. And, uh, the office manager as well. Who knew they'd even check? Oh man, it was BAD. I think mostly in my own mind, but it was bad and left a bitter taste at the end of the year after so much hard work. We caught two of the missing people in time to hastily create, print, and stick in colour stickers of them on the correct page (ie with about 2 hours to do that for 300 books) but one person I didn't hear about until the end of the day and by that time it was too late. I take the blame, but in my defence it was one of the first pages we did, I relied on the kids and didn't double check their list of names, and as you can see there's not much of a defence. I should've noticed. Onwards and upwards, though, and you can bet that particular error won't happen next year!

It was also too busy for my liking because I had to do a ton of work to take everything down in my classroom and box stuff up and make sure all the boards were cleaned off and so on and I was so busy with yearbook until the last minute that I didn't have a chance to deal with all that until school was already done. Then, on the last day Ji Hong and I went fritzing around Delhi to buy presents for everyone. We found a great, great new shop (new to us) called People Tree and pretty much blew the budget there. I expect y'all will like it. The flight out from Delhi was - get this - not bad at all. John took us out to the airport, which always makes me happy. I forget how good a driver he is until we have to take a cab and then at some point during the ride I'll be lurching out of my seat with Seung Yi's head craning at an odd angle and I'll think, hm...John never lets this happen... Then, at the airport, things have actually gotten better. The new front section is coming along and the ceiling is now twice the height it used to be. It used to feel super squishy and now it's comparatively airy. The lineup to get through the passport check was no worse than a busy line up in Canada and then there was amazingly enough no delay before our flight took off. The British Airways seats were smallish but it wasn't a big deal; Phet had Seung Yi up in business class and so with just myself and Ji it was easy to kick back and sleep a little.

Best of all, though, was arriving in London and seeing Mum waiting for us at the exit. Ji went barrelling ahead and hasn't stopped the Gramma Love In since then. Seung Yi, meanwhile, has finallylearned to say 'Gramma' and spends alot of the time shouting at her, "DAAMAA! DAAMAA!"

[On The Road-5-June-2008]