The Proverbial Walk in the Park

I've decided that Britain looks best in the cool, dark fog of dusk. The sun has just set, and the elegant buildings are lit merely by the pale glow of the street lamps and the mist. My day began cruelly as I plodded to work through the snow that was quickly turning to slush, only to find that almost half of my co-workers didn't dare. I'm surprised by the UK's lack of winter preparation, mistakenly thinking that an inch or two of snow wouldn't actually shut down buses or trains. But this is beside the point. I went to work. And the day was long. The store was quite empty, though the customers that DID come in didn't seem to make the connection that the weather keeping half of the customers at home was doing the same to half of our staff. Needless to say, it was not a fun day. But as I was strolling home, bundled up like Iris Simpkins, I noticed St. John's; for the first time in almost five months, I actually LOOKED at the building. I'll be honest, as it stood there in the fog, I thought I was in the middle of Monty Python and half expected a Frenchman to bend over and fart in my general direction. But really, I was simply fascinated, in a completely inane and unexciting way. I encounter these moments--I am often surprised by them--where I wonder at the beauty and un-Americanness of this place. It's nice to realize that the city wasn't laid out to appease commuters and that the church now buried behind shops and flats stacked on top of each other like Legos would have once been the peak of the area. And this is the point where I sum up all my observances with some pithy anecdote about how insignificant our lives are in the big scheme of things. But that would defeat the point of my merely trivial wanderings of eye and mind.

The Perfect British Sunday

It started out like any other day: My feet pratically froze to the bedroom floor as I got out of bed (not to mention the whole other level of cold experienced when I opened the bedroom door). We went to church and decided to get a paper on the way home. GoodNESS it was cold! And as we were walking through town, we saw snow flurries. No big deal, snow was predicted for the next day (though I was still skeptical). Plus, it was more like a single flur every few seconds than actual "flurries." So we went home, turned on the fire, and cooked up an amazing Brunch. The menu: eggie in the basket with bacon, hashbrowns, crumpets, and of course, good English tea. Needless to say, we had a nice little spread.
The rest of the afternoon was spent reading the paper and trading places in front of the fireplace to stay warm. Around 2:30 in the afternoon, this happened:
We debated about going for a walk but decided not to do so since it started to die down pretty quick. An hour later, it started up again, this time thicker. So we quickly put on as many layers as we could, got all bundled up for a nice stroll in the snow, but by the time we were ready, the snow was no longer falling. At that point, we pretty much gave up since it was getting dark. But then, out of nowhere, we look out the window around 10:30pm to find this:
So of course, how could we resist? We took off our pjs and put on our mittens and ventured into the wonder that is snow. (While we were out, we saw many who did NOT forego the pjs and subsiquently felt sorry for them.) But it was beautiful. We were some of the first people out, surprisingly, so we got a lot of good pictures of untouched snow.



We strolled along the river and into town to find many a college student mid-snowball-fight. We wrote our names in the snow (using our feet) and threw snowballs at ducks. We then came home to our comparatively warm flat and fell asleep exhausted from excited shivering, snuggled up in the cold. A pretty perfect day.