London, A Little Dirty

So, a few weekends ago, Rebecca and I were visited by a most welcome house guest. Mike came and visited before he flew back to Vancouver.  Before I start this story, I feel that it is important to explain the friendship dynamics that me and Sanchez have. Firstly, Mike and I went to UBC together and then met up again in Arizona, him in Globe and myself in Morenci. An average visit with him meant that I/a group of us would stop in globe on the way to Phoenix and we would then spend the next two days trying to decided what to do. This usually meant that what we did was meander about, drink, eat, and discuss what we thought we should do, which was usually not much. I personally thought it was great. Add in Woot and the trifecta of indecisiveness was complete and don’t get me started on the inability to make decisions if you added Jarred.

But let’s continue with the story at hand. About a month ago, Mike emails to let me know that he will be in town and that we should hang out. Simple instructions and I quote “Yeah, let’s do something. I don’t really want to see the tourist stuff.” OK, this is going to take a bit of thought. Usually Rebecca is the master at things to see in London, but she loves to do all the things I would probably define as touristy. But, yeah, there are a bunch of cool things that we can do in London that aren’t touristy at all. I’ll do some research and we’ll figure something out.

Advance to Thursday before he gets here. Shit! Sean you’ve not done a lick of planning, as usual. Well, we can discuss with Mike when he arrives to get a better feel. But there is a couple really neat bars we could go too, some different food options. It will be good.

Friday, Mike comes into London, where I of course am late to pick him up, but it’s all good.  We chill, for the night and decide what to see Saturday. Here is a look at the photo’s of what we did in London.

Figure 1 - The Tower of London

Figure 2 - The Globe Theater

Figure 3 - St. Paul's

Figure 4 - Big Ben

Figure 5 - Westminster Abbey

Figure 6 - Buckingham Palace

As you can see, the "no tourist things" went out the window. We even got a pub lunch of fish n Chips in there.  We walked from the Tower of London all the way to Buckingham Palace and made sure to see every thing on the way. Including a lovely piece of 2 inch steel sheet in the Tate Museum of Modern Art. I still say the artist took the easy approach and the piece would have been much more striking as 3 inch plate, but what do I know.  I also learnt that my wife is in the wrong profession. Most would agree and say that she has the personality for school teacher or some other peppy position. But, what she should be is a tour guide. Without a doubt in my mind. Walking about giving the details on each thing that we walked past. I highly recommend the experience.  Unfortunately, Mike’s camera decided to bugger up. Right at the end of the two week vacation.

After the walking tour of London we spent the evening at a Canada Day BBQ. Simple BBQ, nothing to really mention, except that one of the hosts friends, who is actually a old house mate apparently will let anybody in the world stay with at his apartment, so he brought the two people currently crashing at his place. An Austrian hitchhiker and a shaggy dude wearing pants with one leg red and the other green. I won’t lie, when I saw them I immediately thought about Lance and his love of crazy people.

But alas, Sanchez had to be on a morning flight out so we had to end the visit and we sent him on his merry way to Heathrow and on his adventure back to Canada. 

Sean vs British Rail

So, as you all know, I’ve started a new job. All in all, I am enjoying the new experience. It’s really quite neat to go from somewhere like Morenci that had thousands of employees and took almost an hour to drive from one side to the other, to Stowmarket in which I already know almost every employees name and can walk across in about 5 minutes. But the one thing that I didn’t see coming was the epic battle that would become my life versus the National Rail.

First, let’s get something straight, I think that the UK national rail system is great. Maybe not the best in the world, but it makes an absolute mockery of anything I have ever seen in North America. There is no where that I have lived in which an hour and a half commute by train would be possible.  I mean, if I miss a train, that sucks, but it’s a half hour and then the next one will take me on my merry way. Even thought I work in a small English Village.

However, some of the things I’ve had to deal with are the most ridicules things that I have ever heard of. Let’s just go over this week. Monday, the whole of Britain was in a joyous mood as the weather hit the highest that it had hit in the entire year. At a toast 33 degrees Celsius (92 F, for the Americans in the crowd) , National rail had to cancel many trains as it was too hot. Wait, 33 is too hot?  This isn’t good, and summer has really just started.  Apparently all of Britain would shut down if it ever had to deal with a month of Arizona summer.  And to make things so much better, I spent the entire train ride next to a parent and their two children that were, A) Bored, therefore acting out and yelling, and B) because the kids were acting out, the parent kept yelling at them to stop embarrassing them.  At least, I had something to watch for three hours. Always stay positive. Next, apparently in the UK after a really hot day (hehe, that still makes me giggle thinking that 33 is a really hot day) there will be thunder storms. Ah, the UK is a country build on rain, I’m not too worried about it. Tuesday…. First the morning train is delayed due to recovering from the excessively hot day, then the night train home is slowed to a crawl due to flooding. Seriously? Flooding? In the UK? It rains here almost every day. Wednesday, we decided that weather was no longer a reason to have issues. Nope, it was going to be a train failure. Somewhere ahead of us a train had stopped moving and that meant that I got a lovely few of an empty field for a good long time. I mean, would it have been too much to ask for us to have been stopped so we could at least see some cows? I’m really not a hard person to please here or better yet somewhere with connectivity for my trusty Google phone? No, middle of an empty field…  That brings us to Thursday, better known as today, and I can proudly say, that as I sit here and write this, the train is chugging a long quite nicely. So here’s hoping nothing changes on that front.

This week hasn’t been the only case of National Rail trying to beat me. If you remember upon arrival the trains tried their best to get me lost somewhere in Northern England never to make it to Scotland. Then you had Rebecca’s fun getting stuck trying to get down from Scotland and then there is my personal favorite. Thankfully, I didn’t have to live through this one personally, but last fall the train ended up being  delayed and cancelled because of leaves. Yes, you read that correctly, leaves. But according to the railway if it had been just normal leaves things would have been fine, but these leaves were different and caused all sorts of issues. This now means I have a mission before fall, find out what tree leaves are these so called special ones, and burn down all those kinds of trees within a mile of my route home.

So, I would like to keep saying, I am still enjoying taking the train, but ugh. Sometimes these things are just… wait a second, message over the PA… shit, this is going to be an adventure…