A Weird Weekend

... but weird in a good way.

As any of you who have met me recently know, I do seem to spend a lot of my time here in London bemoaning my lack of a social life, while all the time being secretly too lazy to leave the house. Well not so this week.

For starters, I have covered two morning classes in the last seven days which has seen me out of bed at times usually reserved for the entering of my nocturnal nest. And, also, I have been quite busy really.

I was out noshing on great Korean food on Monday night. Met Amanda for lunch on Tuesday and nearly got stranded at Baker Street between classes when the Tube stopped running for long enough for me to break into a mild sweat. Thursday night was a workshop in the school after all the students had gone home. But the highlight of the week has to be Friday.

My students had been bugging me about taking them to the pub. Which is not really deemed a suitable lesson plan at my school:

Aims and Objectives of the Lesson: teach students how to order beer followed by teaching my grandmother how to suck eggs...

So I had to submit an elaborate lesson plan to liberate the little blighters for the afternoon. We went on a magical mystery tour around some of the sites near the school. It was a lot of fun. We went to St James Park and to the Horseguards Parade where the students spent quite a lot of time taking photos of each other next to the lifeguards.



Onto Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery- to warm up mostly, we spent most of our time in the gift shop.

Then, and only then, did we go to the pub. Five hours later I left it. I have really been lucky with my first class here in the UK. They are great and interesting and also interested. I now have standing invitations to most of South America and promises of tour guides when I get there. We danced a lot though my memory seems to be telling me that we might have been the only people in the pub doing so. Daniel, the Mexican guy, kept having his photo taken with any pretty girls walking past while Camillo tried to reassure me that there is more to Colombia than cocaine. And I tried my best to answer complicated grammar questions after five pints of Stella on an empty stomach.

It was a fun night and on the way home I saw my first cough-free train.

Our local train company seems to think that it has so many extra carriages running into Central London that they can just squander them by banning people with a tickle in their throats from sitting in them. Being the honest soul that I am, I quietly moved to another part of the train and coughed there happily and unhampered by the rules.

There is also this at Fenchurch St station, though my sister tells me that it isn't really what it says it is. Well, strictly speaking it is but I take the words to mean more than just that they won't charge you to use the ATM.

I spent Saturday with my cousin and her family.

While they were less taken with the cold outside than my students had been the day before, we got a lot of mileage out of the Science Museum.

And in the evening I met up with my mate, Rory's, sister, Isabel. It was almost like being on a blind date but without the air of desperation hanging around us. it was the first time that we had met but I felt like I had known her for longer. We chatted and chatted and not exclusively about Rory either. I hope that I will see her again this week.

And all I really want to know is, who should tell Rory about Isabel's new tattoo, me or her??