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December 15, 2002

Location, Location, Location

The past few days have been busy ones, but now we're all moved in. We had to haul all our stuff up 5 flights of stairs. Thankfully we didn’t have too many boxes, having lived in furnished places for the past year. I'm so tired of moving around. At least this flat feels more like a home than the previous place, so much so that I've started unpacking for real, unwrapping things that I boxed up well over a year ago in San Francisco. The flat itself is a bit smaller, and it's not as nice, but man, the location is far superior. Misha has been enjoying Battersea Park, which is right across the street, and I have been enjoying walking along the Thames. It feels so nice to live near water again, even if the Thames is only about as wide as where the Lambertville bridge spans the Delaware between New Jersey and Pennsylvania (a bridge which I have walked over many many times, almost a decade ago). Now I will be crossing Chelsea bridge many many times.

Yesterday I walked west along the shore and saw house boats and Dutch barges docked across the river at Chelsea wharf. They reminded me of walking along the Amstel in Amsterdam. (Why is it that the things I find comfort in are things that remind me of things from my past?) There were so many runners in the park this morning, despite the rain. I am psyched to have a decent place to go running again. There is even a track in the park, which makes me want to work more on getting faster rather than going farther. That way whenever I do run my first marathon, maybe I can do it under 4 hours. Yeah, right! I'm not even planning on attempting such a thing for a while. I've been so off and on with my running this year I just don’t feel it would be right to take on such a huge task at this point in time, it would be doomed to fail.

I went up to Angel today and saw Christian off, back to America and eventually back to "the best place on earth". Relieved him of a few books. I was sad to see him go, but I can understand it. Today was a perfect day to escape London, it being a typical one in which the sun never even bothered to put in an appearance. To cheer myself I bought some fancy French verbena scented soap at a big mall near the station, which was crawling with Christmas shoppers scooping up strands of garland and pre-packaged gift sets of junk. Saw some kid on the tube with this tacky Nirvana/Cobain hoodie on, I can't understand why they are so much more of a big deal here than they are at home. No "cool" kid would be caught dead wearing a shirt like that, but then again maybe they weren't cool kids.

I have no DSL and limited dial-up access, but there's heat and hot water and an old colour tv, so I'm pretty glad to be here at the moment.

Posted by shannon at December 15, 2002 09:24 PM

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