Greetings. I'm hopelessly behind here. I've been busy with work and travel these past couple weeks, too busy to visit my lovely little blog. For now, I'm finally adding a post I wrote weeks ago now: way back when it was still October. I first wrote it on paper, which was actually a nice change from the usual: writing on computer screen. It's a nicely tactile experience to write on paper. And it's also nice because there's less chance of losing everything you just wrote as I just did at the hands of two wrong keystrokes or something sinister like that. Long live paper. And now for that promised tome from October. Oh, and for the record, I've been in Florence/Pisa, Italy for a week and am now wrapping up a week in Bratislava, Slovakia. So far my first visit to the "continent" has been quite brilliant. There are plenty of impressions to type your way. Some day. For now, here's October.
Thursday, October 10, 2008
Four weeks into this venture I’m nearing a better rhythm for my days – beginning to better juggle the work in front of my computer with the non-computer work of relationship-building and experience-gaining. I’m also learning slightly savvier was of getting around. It’s good.
Yesterday I wrote a piece I think I feel really good about. Today I finished it and sent it on its way to its editor. And then I headed out – feeling liberated after writing the kind of piece that leaves me feeling most alive – to meet a friend at an art gallery in a part of London I haven’t been to yet.
By only paying for the train to and from Victoria Station and walking 15 minutes instead of jumping on the Tube that would have taken me one stop closer to the gallery, I saved money, got exercise and soaked up another bit of London’s streets. And now I’m sitting in a Starbucks on a busy street corner near Victoria Station not minding the early darkness or the cold because it’s cozy here and I’m stopping for a bit. Sitting. Reading for more than a 10-minute stretch, which I’ve been aching to do since I arrived. Splurging on a mocha instead of the cheaper hot chocolate. Lingering.
And speaking of rhythm: when I get home in an hour and half or so, I’ll still catch business horus in the States and can return some emails I left when I dashed out for the gallery. Brilliant indeed. That’s the part of being five hours ahead of eastern time that I like.
The frenzy of arrival and settling is starting to ebb. I’m adjustable and go-with-the-flow enough that I tend to underestimate the time it takes to re-rhythm things in new places. So I need to keep learning to plan time for that, when time’s available for that. The weekend with the house to myself while my landlord family was away for a wedding was a good time for working my head out of guest mode to renter mode. I have ownership in this home. I’m paying to be here so shouldn’t have to tiptoe around. I’ve never lived with a family as a lodger before, only as a guest, so it’s been unexpectedly challenging to figure out the difference in those roles.
Now just as I’m settling into more productive days that are sprinkled with cozy moments like this one, I’ll be disrupting my schedule with a little jaunt to the Continent. Next week I’m the willing participant in an unplanned (before I arrived in London) trip to the Tuscan region of Italy. I’ll be there nearly a week before I fly back to spend a day at Stansted Airport in London and then leave on an evening flight to Bartislava, Slovakia. This trip to Slovakia was the one big excursion I was planning for this fall. An old friend is there just until the end of November, and we knew we had to visit if we were both going to be in Europe for the same few months. Hopefully I can jump back into my infant rhythms easily upon my return, even if I’m a bit fat with new images and experiences.
I continue to be amazed—in spite of the ever-present challenges of this way of life—that this is my life right now. I feel like I’ve been given the most exquisite, generous gift. I hope I will enjoy and celebrate it well.
The gallery, Saatchi Gallery, was a really nice experience. The rooms were big with only a few pieces in each room, on white walls or light-colored wood floor. The pieces were shown off well by their simple, clean surroundings. They were more accessible than I expected. Most of the pieces were very large but were enjoyable partly because they weren’t all crammed in together. The rooms of the gallery felt more peaceful than the usual museum/gallery display because they did not feel like sensory overload. The current Saatchi exhibit is all by Chinese artists, but for me that wouldn’t have been obvious based on the art. A surprising amount of it felt Western-themed to me.
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