After concluding my vacationing with David in Venice, he went on to Rome and I returned to London (I love saying "returned" as though I live here...). Now the real mission of my summer begins: ethnographic research on the British school system.
And that's how, on Wednesday, I found myself getting off a train at the Virginia Water station, about 40 minutes southwest of London. TASIS: The American School in England doesn't seem like an obvious place to begin my research, but it turned out to be a great transitioning point from the American curriculum I've grown up with to the British system that still feels unwieldly and foreign (practice saying A-levels, 6th form, and worst of all GCSE's in a casual way). I arrived in the midst of the last day of the year for TASIS and thus had upperschool exams and lower school picnics forming the backdrop to my interviews. (As to what I'm finding, what I'm learning, I might need a separate blog for that :-)
London has been...rainy, characteristically so, I guess. Compared to the other cities I've visited, London seems so much more a part of the work-a-day world; my favorite experiences have been times when I felt a part of that world: riding the tube home, reading The London Paper, shopping for groceries at Waitrose. My hostel is nestled in Swiss Cottage, a beautiful area just enough removed from the smog and the congestion of downtown. There's an amazing park, Hampstead Heath, just up the road. I went for a run there yesterday and the panorama of London took my breath away (or maybe that was just the climb ;-)
The title for this post comes from what a Vodafone salesman said after asking how I was enjoying the (then sunny) weather. "It's not always this nice here," he explained.
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