beboots

 Hey guys guys guys:


I found my keys! \o/ I am SUPER pleased and relieved to get them back. :D 

You see, for the past two days, since Tuesday evening, when I lost them, I've felt super-stressed out about not having these keys. Yesterday, I actually ran back and forth around campus to all of the possible lost & found bins on the route between the Tory building and the Van Vliet Centre (the gym), where I HAD to have lost them. And each time I visited the like six or seven different lost & found places, I got nothing. I have since learned a lot about the university system of lost & found, and it's actually a bit more complicated than it has to be: there's Campus Security, the libraries, and the Info Link (information booths), and they all have separate systems for lost items. If I didn't find it today, I would have called in tomorrow morning (I got business cards with phone numbers for inquiries) as a last ditch resort, because ALL of the like dozen Info Link booths accumulate all of the week's lost & found items in the one giant office in the Student's Union Building on Thursday evening, so it would all be in one place on Friday morning. 

No dice this morning, when I went running around (I'm getting exercise, at least, running across campus?), and after class, I met a friend who treated me to tea for helping her edit a paper. And as we stood in the long lineup for Starbucks in CAB, I looked to my right at Cameron Library. I never go in there, you see, it being a science-oriented library, and I'd already checked the CAB Info Link booth three times for my keys in the last few days... But I thought, what the heck, I may as well try. 

AND THEY WERE THERE. \o/ I was SO relieved. These keys are quite important, and hold significant emotional meaning to me. As a child, I always wanted a nice chain of keys (it made me feel important - and still does), and I would actually put those cheap little diary keys on a keychain just to look cool. :) I actually have some pretty neat stuff on here. 

That big black key is my car key - the first car that I really consider "mine", although it's in my parents' names. The two keys that look the same are keys to two separate rooms in the university (the Honour's room, where my desk is, and the office of the professor I worked for this summer... which I have to return next week, hence PART of my desperation to find this keychain again). The red one is my house key - luckily enough, my father DIDN'T go to England with mum and Ian last week, or I would have been locked out of the house for the evening and would have had to crash at a friend's place until the next day when I could get a key off my sister. 

I'm very attached to the three keychains, too. Coin themes! The one on the left is the newest: a reproduction of a Victorian-era one penny piece I bought while in Britain this past summer. Then is a fake Las Vegas $100 chip, bought by my  best friend when she went down there a few years ago. Then I have a reproduction roman coin (with a very similar figure as on the reverse side of the one penny piece!) from Bath, in England. I actually lost the first one I got, and this one was bought by ANOTHER friend who visited England a few years later. I love it. And the last one... you probably know. PIRATES of the Caribbean! :D They're hard to find, so I'm extra-glad I didn't lose this one. 

So there you have my keychain! ... Now that you know all about it, you have no excuse not to help me look for it the next time I lose it. >_> 

But seriously, guys, finding my keys is a huge load of stress off of my back. Also, I finished a midterm today in an area not my specialty, and I don't think that it went all that bad! So things are looking up. :)

Day: Negative Seven

All right, so I can't remember how much I've spoken to you guys about this, but in exactly seven days (no, really, my flight would be taking off right about... now) I'll be leaving on a plane to London (Heathrow), then transferring to a flight to Dublin.

This is, of course, assuming that all goes well, and that the volcano cooperates with my travel plans. Which I hope it will; I've been trying to accumulate good karma over the past little while.

As-is, I'm kind of annoyed with myself for booking the flights that I did. I'm leaving just before 7pm on Wednesday, May 26th, and I'm arriving in London sometime around 10am in the morning. Then I sit around for six hours until my 4pm flight. So essentially I "waste" a day, travelling, when I could be exploring the beautiful British Isles! I think I remember looking at another flight, at like 11am or something, but decided that the connection was too tight. But six hours, especially with grabbing my bags, and then running around, probably between terminals, is definitely not enough time to even think about leaving the airport to check out London or anything. No way.

But then again, I'm sure that Heathrow, being the behemoth of a facility that it is, will have something interesting to keep me entertained for a few hours. ;)

I've decided, though, that if my flight is delayed by a day or something due to the ash of a certain malicious Icelandic volcano... I'll look into a train ride to Manchester. My grandmother lives in Leigh, which is apparently a bare fifteen minutes away from Manchester proper, so I'll see if I can drop in and see her. I haven't seen her in person since I was six, but I speak with her like every other week on the phone. You see, I'm not really stopping in England very much.

( This is the plan... )

So if anybody can tell me anything about what trains/busses are like between London and Manchester, I'd be much appreciated! (Being two large metropolitan areas, I'm assuming that people go back and forth between the two regularly enough for there to be an established transit system in place.)

I am definitely planning on writing a travel blog here, as I did two years ago for my summer in France. The posts may be shorter than those ones were, as this time I won't be toting around a laptop. I'll be backpacking it! I do have an iPod touch (although that touchscreen is annoying to type with), but I'm not sure how many of the hostels I'll be staying in have wireless internet/a computer for the lodgers to use for that purpose, so my updates may be sporadic. But there WILL be awesome photographs at the very end, upon my return. And amusing anecdotes, observations on the British Isles from a Canadian's point of view, waxing soliloquies upon the general gorgeous green nature of Ireland and Scotland (and the general brownness of spring in Western Canada), etc.,etc., ad nauseam.

I may also sneak history stories in as well. You can bet I'll be hitting up lots of museums, old crumbling monasteries, breathtaking views, etc. I hope that you guys shall enjoy!

For now... I'll fret and worry that I have everything on my list. I shall update as more ideas (and anxious travel jitters!) occur to me. :)

Days 9-10 (maybe? Have I lost count?) (Morning Post)

Today is the day that we go to Brugge! .... and its raining! Badly! D: Last night, it was gorgeous out, no clouds whatsoever... and then, I wake up this morning and think "hey, I need some light, let me open the window and illuminate the room with sunlight!" and I raise the blinds and... it's like halfway to Noah's ark outside. ;_; 

... Well, it's not as bad as that. It's raining hard, but from what I can see, it's actually almost a sunshower. Sunshowers are nice, right? (I need convincing.) See, I don't mind rain, especially here in Europe, because it's a nice, warm rain. However, it's really difficult to take pictures if you have to wipe rainwater off of the camera lense between photos. ;_; 

Anyway, I shall now report on my trip to see "Alice, etc." at the Théatre du Nord! We walked down to the theatre (it's right on La Grande Place square), and demonstrating in front of it were a bunch of people chanting against the possibility of expulsion for the "sans-papiers" (litterally, "without papers", but they're referring to illegal immegrants). They had an epic chant, and they were singing and everything. I have a short video of them from far away, but my camera's microphone isn't terribly good. Again, I'll try to figure out this youtube thing later! D: 

(Demonstrations are actually really popular in France, as I'm sure that some of you may know. Since here, I've witnessed... like two or three. I've been here for less than a week and a half, and this isn't a massive city.)

Oh, and there was a firedancer having fun outside the theatre when we left. Just so you know. That square is an awesome place for demonstrations of any kind. 

Anyway, the play itself! It was... strange, probably very avant-garde (it's France, right?). There were a lot of sexual jokes, and since that kind of vocabulary just doesn't come up very often in the context of the classroom, some of it was difficult to follow. It started off kind of dark and almost hallucinogenic, as we got these three girls who are dressed like Alice (from Alice in Wonderland), but in different colours, doing things in sync... But most of the play is about this one chick (whose name also begins with "A" but I can't remember the whole thing... it wasn't Alice, though) and her husband. Her husband cheated on her, and she tries to kill herself in various ways when she finds out. The husband then insists that "hey, you can cheat on me too", like, an open relationship... and she goes into various changes in clothing, etc. to try to attract a younger man to prove to herself that she's still attractive. Of course, when she begins succeeding, her old husband gets increasingly jealous, and then he threatens to kill himself... And the play ends with him jumping into a bathtub with a plugged in hairdryer (fireworks!).  XD It was very funny (he came out okay, just covered in charcoal).

The two main characters frequently address the audience (commenting on how stupid the other is ;) ), and it gets more and more absurd as things go on. ;) There was also a random interlude with the character of this wife (that you never see again) who runs away from home, ends up returning in the dark and making up with her husband... and then when she gets up in the morning, there are strange children and a strange man sitting at the kitchen table... and she had "made up" with someone who wasn't her husband. D: She leaves, awkwardly, saying that it was just "a little mistake". ;) The cool thing about that entire scene is that it's narrated by that wife, and she acts out the parts of everyone else. Oh, and "she" is played by a male actor. I wasn't sure for the first minute or so, but then s/he took off her wig to play the part of a male lover. He was an epically good actor. 

Anyway, if you ever get a chance to see it (even in translation), do so! It's very good. :) Anyway, now I need to get ready for my morning's worth of classes... and then we leave for Brugge! Luckily enough, as I was typing this, the rain seems to be dying down... Now I can only hope that the rain just isn't drifting across the border into Belgium...