I Can't Think Of Anything Witty To Put Here... - Episode 5

Hey Gang,

Well, it's been over a week since I updated and Matt's getting mad at me, so I think I'll update lol. No no, the thing is, I know that I'm going to write a ton of stuff every time I update, so I always avoid it because it takes up an hour of my time. As soon as I'm actually writing it though, I'm really enjoying it, so really, I'm just being super lame. Excuse me, "well" lame. That's me trying to assimilate to Brit lingo. I really don't get the whole "well" thing though. It just sounds like bad grammar to me, which it is since it's lingo, but still. Basically though, "well" is just a replacement for "very." So you can say, "You look well nice" and it means "you look very nice." I think.

Let's see, what other words have I learned? Um, well Grahame (the dad) keeps saying "tea" (or maybe it's "tee") whenever it's dinner. I don't think it's English lingo though, I think it's Scottish. He lived in Glasgow when he was going to university so he picked up all this random stuff that most people (unless you're Scottish!) don't understand, including me. Basically, I look to Cherry to translate at times. Apparently this is what happened with the last au pair since she was from Slovakia and still learning English. Man, I hope I come back with all these terms that no one will understand just for the heck of it.
Oh, "dreake!" I'm not sure if that's how you spell is, but it basically means dreary and you would use it when describing the weather. "You should put on a coat, it looks dreake out." I don't even know if that's how you spell it, but you get the idea.


See Hayley's List of Artists She's Been Listening To!

Duffy - Stepping Stone, Mercy, Warwick Avenue
Coldplay - Everything
James Morrison (not to be mistaken for Jim Morrison, who is well, dead) - You Make It Real
MIA - Paper Planes
Sugababes - Here Come The Girls
The Automatic - Steve McQueen
The Ting Tings - That's Not My Name
Adele - Everything
Will Young - Changes
McFly - Lies
The Kooks - Sway

These are the songs that continue to play quite often on BBC Radio 1, which is the station that I pretty much only ever listen to, mostly because I don't know of any other stations lol. Oh, well there's BBC Radio 2, which is basically the equivalent of QM/FM in Vancouver, but it's got some good oldies. The thing with these 2 radio stations though, is that it's quite repetitive! Over and over again, you hear the same news for 10 minutes or the same discussions, so I really need to start limiting myself to a couple hours a day to avoid this fiasco.

Well, after I posted my last entry, I went to Mary Arden's House just a couple hours later. Mary Arden is Shakespeare's mum and her house and farm that she grew up in is now quite the tourist destination, along with everything else in Stratford-upon-Avon. I went with Cherry and the kids so it's more of a place for kids, but it was really cool nonetheless.
Interesting fact: Up until the mid 70's, the house that's just next door to Mary Arden's was believed to be Mary Arden's house, so for years (like hundreds of years) people were visiting the house next door thinking it was Shakespeare's mum's house! It wasn't until some historians were looking through some old documents that they realized what was going on. Not bad eh? lol

It's actually been sunny quite a bit this past week, so I'm quite pleased. In fact, I'm well pleased. I haven't even worn my wellies this week! Which is kind of sad because I like wearing them but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

Last Friday I finally got to go out and hang out with people my own age! Cherry knows a girl my age who helps out with Brownies, Louise, who said she'd take me out clubbing, so off we went to Leamington Spa for a night of clubbing. I ended up meeting about 12 people cause all of her friends were out and about that night. It was the night before everyone goes off to university, so they all wanted to see each other. Most of them are leaving anyway, there's still a few who start next week or in 2 weeks. (By the way, I met a girl who's going to Oxford for university. That's right, I now know a girl who's attending one of the greatest schools in the world.) But yeah, it was Student Night so we all just went from pub to pub and then to two clubs, Mink and Smack until we finally settled on Smack. Mink was more like a bar and it seemed a bit pretentious so we liked Smack better.

I always knew how Americans had the stereotype of us Canadians (and vice versa), but I never knew (or really thought about) that the Brits knew of our stereotypes too! When I was talking with some of Louise's friends, they were really into asking me if I say "eh" at the end of all my sentences. Yes eh. Of course I do eh. I'm also a lumberjack who lives in an igloo eh. Then they started saying how I have a cool accent. I have a cool accent?! I don't think so, I'm pretty sure English accents are the coolest ever!! Geez louise!! Oh and they also think I hug polar bears. It was so funny though, it got to the point where everyone was introducing me like this:

This is Hayley, she's Canadian. She hugs polar bears.

I later explained to them that I'd never seen a polar bear before, nor a beaver, the nation's rodent. And of course, I asked if their national animal was the pigeon. It was good times.

Oh by the way, they don't i.d. in bars or clubs and I sure as heck don't look like I'm even 18, so that's a bit odd. The only time I got i.d.'d was by accident as the bartender mistook us for some other kids. So if I were a fairly mature looking 13 year old, I could totally just go right into a bar. Then again, kids are allowed in pubs all the time. In fact, there's often playgrounds for the kids just so the parents can have a drink. Crazy eh? (Eh!)

So yes, overall my night was tons of fun. Very tiring though, since clubs don't close until 4am in England. How crazy is that?! You gotta have a heck of a lot of stamina! I didn't, cause I'm Canadian and I hug polar bears in my spare time, so I went home around 3am, which was fine by me.

After Friday night, I had a relatively uneventful remainder of the weekend and week.

Oh! I met up with Aurore again and we went to Rugby for some Thai food. Holy macaroni, was it gooood. Although it's not like I'm really deprived of Asian cooking, we have it all the time in this house. I had salmon (Canadian smoked salmon that I bought from Steveston) last night, and tonight we had curry. Then there's the Chinese restaurant right across the street so all I need to do is open up a Japanese restaurant and I'm set.

Tomorrow I'm off to Blackpool! I guess I'd compare it to Vegas, except not nearly as glamorous. It's very bright though apparently. Grahame described it as "nasty cheap and tacky" so I guess I'll go with that. We're going to Pleasure Beach though, which is basically Playland so it should be fun, just as long as I avoid the ridiculously scary roller coasters. I'll try to put up photos of Blackpool when I get back on Monday!

Some of you have been wondering how my gluten-free diet has been going and I can honestly say that it's been going spectacularly. First off, if you're going to be gluten-intolerant, it's good to be gluten-intolerant in the UK cause there's so many others like me too. Thus, there's tons of alternatives. It's just so common here that there's shelves of food that actually taste good and aren't feeble attempts at cereal or bread. Okay, the bread is kinda bad and I have to toast it every time I eat it, but I can live with that. The cookies are good though. Oh and another great part about being gluten-intolerant in the UK is that almost all food has allergy alerts on the labels, which doesn't just include nuts, but also gluten! Unfortunately, I now realize just how much food has gluten in it. Things you never thought would have gluten in it does. That's cause it's total filler for most products. Gross.

Okay well I'm off to sleep now. Got a big weekend ahead of me!

Ciao mein!

Hayley

P.S. I'm still attempting to bring "ciao mein" to the U.K. and later Europe. So far, it's not been successful. Lame!!