London!

Hello Everyone!

I hope all is well wherever you're reading this from! The past bit of time since I've written here has been absolutely incredible. I spent last weekend in London and it deserves its own blogpost. 

I took the train from Bradford to Leeds, and then Leeds to Kings Cross Station on Friday afternoon. The plan was to spend the night at a friend's who I was meeting once he was off work. Naturally, I decided I should go to the easiest attraction to get to from the tube... which happened to be Piccadilly Circus. Needless to say, I did a lot of shopping. That area of the city is absolutely gorgeous and fun to explore, despite how crowded it is. The evening was spent at a friend of a friend's glitter filled birthday party featuring musical performances, lip syncing performances, cuddle puddles, and a lot of blues dancing. I am disappointed in myself for not having taken any pictures of the party. Blues dancers of London, you will be seeing me again very soon and I can't wait! All of you that I have met so far are fantabulous. 

Piccadilly Circus

Saturday I went shopping in the Camden Market, which were stuffed with people, stalls, and incredible smelling food. Needless to say, I also bought a lot of stuff, including some souvenirs for people back home. I met up with Katherine, a lovely friend from back in Winnipeg, and had an incredible time catching up, eating sushi, and eating ice cream made with science from Chin Chin Labs. They make the ice cream in front of you using liquid nitrogen and a Kitchen Aid mixer. To top off their lab theme, they kept all of the toppings in beakers and test tubes. All other ice cream is now ruined for me. It might be the best ice cream I will eat in my life. 

Market Hall in the Camden Market

Camden Lock section of the Camden Market

Chin Chin Labs in the Camden Market

Ice cream toppings

The best ice cream I will ever eat

That night I went out with Katherine and a number of her flatmates. We were too cheap to pay to get into a proper club so we ended up at a casino, with a club inside of it, and took over the dance floor. On the way home we stopped at a 24hr bakery for what was surprisingly incredible baking, I had the most satisfying donut of my life and I will stand by that statement until someone proves me wrong.

The group of us near Leicester Square

The next day was packed with a ton of sight seeing. Despite having had a late night, Katherine and I made a point of seeing majority of London's major sights in one day. She makes a fantastic tour guide. I don't remember the order of everything or the names of each specific park/place... So here is a bunch of pretty pictures of things, including in and around Buckingham Palace, the parliament buildings (Big Ben!), the London Eye, Trafalgar Square (outside the National Gallery), the Tower of London and probably other things I've forgotten!

 They shut down the street for tourists

Picnic in Trafalgar Square with Katherine

Red Carpet at the London Film Festival in Leicester Square 

We saw Brad Pitt and Shia LaBoeuf

I spent Monday wandering around the St Paul's Cathedral area and walked across Millennium Bridge to Tate Modern (the modern art museum) in the morning. Before heading back to Bradford, I grabbed lunch with Katherine and went to the National Gallery. I could easily get lost in there, despite there being a chronological order to the paintings. 

St Paul's Cathedral

Millennium Bridge

Millennium Bridge

Salvador Dali at the Tate Modern

Description of an installation that was solely a mirror on the wall

Really cool installation, I should have taken a picture of the artist's name

Trafalgar Square on a busy Monday afternoon

That was London! Thanks again Katherine for being an incredible tour guide! The weekend was amazing and I can not wait to return. 

And an honourable mention to James and Adam for taking the train to Leeds with me when I was on my way... and because I didn't mention them before. You guys are fantastic. Thank you for letting me hide at your flat and play video games/your guitars. 

I'm not planning another trip for a bit, but if I happen to randomly leave Bradford or something really exciting happens I will try to write about it sooner :) 

xx

Emily

PS Sorry the postcards are taking forever! I've written them! I just have yet to actually go to the post office. 

Freshers Week/York/Settling into Bradford/Berlin

Hello Everyone!

Sorry I have seriously sucked at keeping up with this since I arrived in Bradford. I am genuinely surprised with how busy life has been since I got here. I've been making an effort to try and be involved in the campus community and meet people. I joined the Ultimate Frisbee team, which isn't exactly trying something new, but it has been a ton of fun and I'm going to a tournament with them this weekend! It has allowed me to actually meet some English people. The personalities remind me a lot of a less geeky version of my team at home. I'm pretty sure I could match a lot of specific people. The same sense of humour has carried over so I've been spending a lot of time with them. They train far more often than we ever did, but I've definitely been gaining skill fast because of it.

Living in a flat with 10 other people seriously helps with meeting people as well. Everyone, with the exception of one person from England, is here on exchange. We have a huge variety of personalities and countries spanning across the flat. To name them all, starting with me in Canada, we have the USA, England, Sweden, Finland, Australia, The Netherlands, Spain, and, Germany. Luckily, everyone has been getting along really well and it's been a really great group of people, despite us all being very different. Our building is super cool and runs on solar power!

Front view of the block of townhouses

Back view through the bushes, if you look at the roof you can see the solar panels

The first week was full of parties, getting to know each other, and figuring out ways to try and make our place feel like more of a home. I've been slowly accumulating pictures and keepsakes to put on my wall and my room, when actually clean, is now feeling a lot less like just somewhere I sleep and more like my own space.

I'm just wrapping up my second week of courses. I'm taking International Marketing, Regional Politics (focusing on Africa and the Middle East), Consumer Behaviour, and Global Business Environment (a glorified economics class that will count as an International Management back home). Because of the credit values, this is going to end up counting as if I was taking 5 courses back home, which is awesome. They have far less course work throughout the year. For assessment from all of these courses I only have 2 individual essays (3000 words in total for both), 1 group essay (2500 words), and 2 exams. In total, that's slightly more than I'd expect from one class back home. It does put a lot more pressure on each individual thing, but I'm really happy about the reduced workload and my courses being solely on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. It gives me a lot more freedom to travel as much as I want. Also, the School of Management (where all of my courses aside from Regional Politics takes place) looks like a bloody castle! The only issue is that it's not on the main campus, however, there is a free bus that comes hourly that will take me there and back.

School of Management

On the first weekend I spent here there was a day trip to York planned. We spent the day wandering around the town, sightseeing and shopping. One of the most interesting places we went was a tower in the middle of the town. From the top you have an incredible view of the city. The most interesting part of it was how it was used to hide Jewish people who were under attack during the war. It had all of these hidden nooks that you could wander in and out of.

Memoriam plaque

Outside of the tower

View inside from the top, there are more smaller rooms inside of those arches

View from the top

Obligatory cheesy looking off into the distance shot

More of the view

The other trip I have taken thus far was to Berlin for the Berlin Blues Explosion workshop weekend, which is the worlds biggest blues dancing event. I stayed in a flat with 2 English people who live in France, and 2 Swiss people, who both happened to be fluent in French. Needless to say, it didn't take me long to realise how out of practice I am with my French. Somehow, it almost seemed better after a few drinks. Every night we danced until at least 5am, and I made it to classes the next day for 2:00pm. Unfortunately, I was only there for Saturday and Sunday and had to miss the classes on Monday. However, the lessons I had were incredible. Saturday, I spent time on specific moves and how to use tension in blues with Fabien Vrillon (France) and Lisa Clarke (England), that ended in my feeling extremely sassy. Next was an extremely open class breakaway dancing and shuffle blues with Gaston Fernandez and Alba Mengual (Spain). For the first time, I really feel comfortable with dancing in breakaway and no longer feel like I don't know what to do with myself. The exhausted Sunday lessons started with the snuggliest dance class I've ever had taught by Mike "the girl" and Dan Legenthal on close embrace and ways to play with your dancing while that physically close. The day ended with a really fun class on fast footwork taught by Brenda Russell (USA). It really is unfortunate that my classes with Dan Repsch and Jenny Sowden (USA) were set for Monday. I had amazing dances with them in the evenings, but I have yet to take a class from them. I'm hoping that opportunity will come up again soon. 

Korean Food Saturday Night

The best cappuccino of my life (much needed and delicious) Sunday morning

Berlin being pretty

More of Berlin looking lovely

The classiest burger joint that played the best combination of 80s and 90s music

I really wish I had been able to take more pictures of the actual dancing, the venues were all incredible. However, using a cellphone as a camera left me to be very limited in what I could do. Nothing turned out particularly well, however, if anyone is interested feel free to email or message me and I can send you a link to pictures taken by the professional photographer from the weekend on his website. One of the best parts of the weekend was watching a Jack and Jill competition done solely with the instructors from the weekend. I would have been totally happy watching them dance all night.  

I've been going out here far more often than I ever did at home. I guess it's a part of life and living on campus. Student bar nights have been a blast and I've loved that I get to go dancing at least once a week, even if it isn't blues. I've booked a few more trips with dancing involved and am trying to not count down the days until I get my blues fix. Something tells me I'm going to come home and be far more involved in the dance community than I was previously. 

I'm going to try to get on blogging more ofter, but I've been here actually living my life rather than just writing about it so I make no promises as to how often I will actually post. As per some requests from last time, I will try and take more pictures and will go through the other ones I have and post them on Facebook soon enough!

Hope all is well in wherever you're reading this!
xx

PS if anyone feels like mailing me something or wants a post card send me your mailing address or I can send you mine! 

Glasgow

I know I said I’d get on this sooner, but life has been crazy and fantastic and an adventure.

I’m in love with Glasgow. It’s quite simple really; the people, the beer, the whisky, the kilts, the music... it's all magic. Glasgow is magic.

My first day was mostly spent sleeping and spending time with the lovely Kitty, who kindly allowed me to stay in her humble abode. Immediately upon seeing my accommodations I was absolutely thrilled. The bed was made, fresh air was flowing through the window, and there were instruments at my disposal. The "traditional" Scottish food, tea-cakes and Irn Bru, proved to be sugary and delicious. Everyone kept saying that haggis really isn't that bad... but I can't seem to get past the whole eating an animal's respiratory system thing. 

I spent my second day shopping down Buchanan Street and enjoying the surrounding street music. Many of the shops here were quite similar to home (Forever 21, H&M, TopShop and such) but I did find a few UK stores that I loved. Most of the stuff in it was a bit preppy for my taste, but Jack Wills was true to its motto of being "Fabulously British" and I found some trousers (here pants means the same thing as knickers) that I could not resist. 

Inside of Jack Willis

I couldn't resist taking a picture with that name for a clothing shop

I went down to Loch Lomond that afternoon. It was absolutely stunning. I took a boat tour of the Loch and learned all about the houses that were originally owned by business people and politicians, many of which are now luxury hotels and apartments. 

That evening was spent blues dancing in the back room at a bar called The Griffin. I really should have taken pictures. This is where I met many fabulous Scottish dances, as well as a Swedish one who happened to be living in Scotland. It was one of the most fabulous evenings of dancing in my life. I think I was able to have a conversation with nearly everyone who attended, and they were all fantastic. The dances ranged everywhere from sultry to silly and each one had it’s own bit of magic. Every single dance that night was great.

Friday I saw a TARDIS while shopping on Buchanan St! Serious highlight right there. I spend some time in the museum of modern art which currently has a Generations exhibit for the 25^th Anniversary featuring work by artists from Glasgow and artists who attended the art school in Glasgow. There were two series that really stood out to me.

The first was inspired by the difference between buildings and architecture. Building, being the function and the actual standing structure and architecture, being used to refer to the artistic details and cultural significance of the building. The artist made hundreds of churches out of cardboard. The attention to detail and time that went into the project must have required a ridiculous amount of patience. If you look closely, you can see the pencil marked grids on the individual pieces of cardboard.

The second tracked culturally significant events that happened annually from 1989 onward. It is being done as a permanent installation and will continue to progress as time goes on. It was done in multiple circular rooms, some with a banister and a view to the floors below, and some years in small individual cylindrical rooms, which is where the panoramic pictures were taken.

And of course, while there, I saw the Duke who always has a pylon (or traffic cone as they call it here) on his head. Sometimes the horse has one too. 

After the museum, Kitty took me to this lovely tea-house in the West End called Tchaiovna. It was essentially a hippie den with the largest variety of teas I had ever seen in one place. There were proper tables and a patio, but we sat inside this little nook with a tiny table and pillows on the floor instead of chairs. I really wish I had taken pictures. It was absolutely stunning.

Friday night was easily one of the best nights of my life. I went to my first Ceilidh (pronounced Kay-lee). For those who don’t know (I didn’t either) a Ceilidh is a traditional Scottish dance party, complete with whisky, beer, live music, and of course, men in Kilts. It was a lot of jumping and clapping and stomping and laughing. Yet another thing I should have taken pictures of on Friday.

I know that I’ve already been in Bradford for nearly two days, but that’s for another entry.

Missing all of you lovelies who aren’t here!

xx

Emily