Mince Pies: [noun]- a small British sweet pie traditionally served during the Christmas season.

 I thought I would make my title word festive as I have been included in a Chritmas Holiday feature on Shannon Fitzpatrick's amazing blog, What's Up Whimsy! She has a feature running right now where she has asked a bunch of bloggers to tell her what's at the top of their Christmas Wish List.  She's calling it 12 Days of Holidays: A Blogger Wish List and today she has posted my wish. Thanks for making me a part of the blogger community Shambo!

After so much time here, the library is starting to make me sad.  A man sternly told me to stop eating today as I was "in a library".  REALLY!? I didn't notice.  Who does he think he is, telling me not to eat.  He's made himself a serious enemy and should probably start sleeping with one eye open.

UPDATE ON THE CHILBLAINS: I was, in fact, right about me having a chilblain on my toe.  I'm probably going to start practicing medicine right now by only consulting wikipedia.  If anyone's looking for a new doctor, give me a call.

On a lighter note, I'm almost done all of my work (before I have to start studying for exams and writing essays) and that means that it's almost time for me to go home for three whole weeks!  I will be on Canadian soil at 12:30 this Friday and I couldn't be more excited.

Wellingtons: [noun]- more commonly known as Wellies, water-proof boots made out of rubber. Bagels: [noun]- no one can beat Tim Horton's

It should come as no surprise that I miss Tim Horton's.  It's definitely not their coffee that I miss but those delicious bagels.  They sell Tim Horton's-ish bagels at the grocery store but at places equivalent to Tim Horton's they are more like round pieces of bread.

Last Friday (November 26) I went to London where I didn't eat any fake bagels.  My whining stops now, I swear.  My friend Caleb (I thought I would reciprocate the gesture) celebrated his 21st birthday last Saturday and he wanted to go to London as his birthday present to himself.  I joined him on this 24 hour adventure that started at 4 am on Friday morning and ended at 4 am on Saturday.  We took the coach, aka the bus, to London where we saw a whole lot of super awesome stuff. 

London is too cool.  There was this awesome skate park where a bunch of kids were, surprise, surprise, skateboarding but there was also a DJ playing, people (legally) spray-painting the walls and it seemed like there was some sort of photo shoot going on as well.

Brace yourself for the best segue ever: Speaking of cool, there was no heating on the bus on the way home.  At the time, I really wasn't that bothered by it.  I mean, yes it was 3 in the morning and it was snowing for the first time since I've been here and heat would have been lovely but I think I was too tired to care.  Apparently I should have cared though as I have frostbite or one of its close cousins on one of my toes! I can't believe that I have frostbite especially because I have never even come close to getting frostbite in those bitterly cold Ottawa winters.  I'm actually pretty proud of it, it makes me feel tough which I can't imagine is a characteristic frequently used to describe me. Update: after extensive research, Dr. Wikipedia has informed me that I have Chilblains. 

THE SNOW! So since that fateful, frostbiting Saturday morning, it snowed for about three days.  The havoc that has been reeked is hilarious.  Schools closed, classes canceled, buses stopped, taxis stopped, pizza deliveries (a particularly devastating one for me) stopped all because of 5 inches of snow.  This is a pretty substantial amount of snow but schools were canceled for three days.  I don't think 5 inches of snow would render one day of bus cancellations for B.A..

Walking to school is now a hilarious adventure where I get to laugh at all the people slipping around on the unplowed sidewalks because they don't have sidewalk plows, or even regular plows as far as I've seen.  The other reason why there is so much slipping going on is because most people wear Wellies, the basic equivalent of rain boots, as their choice snow walking shoe.  I do have to admit that I have been wearing my rain boots to walk in the snow.  However, I have an excuse.  Me wearing rain boots as snow boots is happening only because when I was packing I figured winter boots wouldn't be entirely necessary and they take up a lot of room when you can only bring two suitcases for a year long trip.  Sure, Wellies do the trick in terms of keeping your feet dry but, lucky for me, flat bottomed rubber shoes + ice = minimal friction.

I was suppose to go to Edinburgh this weekend but my trip has been canceled due to the snow. My last weekend in the UK in 2010 was spent in Leeds, with a lot of time devoted to the library.

Rah: [noun]- A posh twat.

There are so many other definitions for Rah but I couldn't resist the succinctness of that one.  More on Rahs in a bit.

This past weekend I went to Northern Wales.  When I told my flat mates I was going to Wales the general reaction was "Why would you ever want to go to Wales?" so I was a touch nervous that I had made a terrible mistake in deciding to go there.  Luckily, I found some pretty good reasons for wanting to go to wales.

1. It's beautiful in a British Columbia/South Keys/Grand Bend/Nova Scotia sorta way.

Taken in the town of Conwy

Taken in the town of Llandudno

2. There are 600 castles in Wales.

Conwy Castle

3. You know how I obsessively wrote about the artist Turner here? Wales must have been his point of inspiration.

Llandudno

4. Animals everywhere!

Horses on our walk to Aber Falls

 The sheep above and below are from Aled's Sheep Farm

Back to Rahs and there relevance to this post.  Me, Andy and Hannah all went on this trip together and it was organized by a company called Don't Be A Tourist.  At one point on this trip, we got into a conversation with our tour guide (kind of gives us away as tourists, right?) about hipsters.  Why? Nobody knows.  Anyways, we were trying to figure out what the British equivalent of a hipster is and seeing as our tour guide was a native to the lands of the UK, we thought he might know.  This lead to him explaining what a Rah was.  His definition was as follows: A rich girl from London, wears tights and Ugg Boots, has a massive purse on her arm, her cell phone in her hand and sounds like she's saying "Rah rah rah rah" when she talks.  I LOVE this definition.  I was curious to know elaborations on his definition so I looked it up at urbandictionary.com.  I highly suggest you do the same, the definitions are hilarious and so very accurate.  Apparently, according to our tour guide, Leeds is a hot bed for Rahs and their male counter part Rah Boys so knowing this word is key to my survival.

In summary, if you have the opportunity, go to Wales.

Knackered: [verb]- exhausted

Is what I was after watching/listening to eight hours of super awesome live music on Sunday!  This was the deal: on Sunday, November 14th Leeds University Union hosted this music festival called Constellations.  The initial draw for me was Broken Social Scene which is, seww ironic, a Canadian band.  I saw these bands in this order:

iLiKETRAiNS

Dam Mantle

Gold Panda

Liars

Local Natives

Los Campesinos!

Broken Social Scene

Basically it was the coolest thing I think I've ever done on a Sunday and we all know I'm always doing great things on Sundays soo you can't even imagine how cool this was (editor's note: I just realized that this may seem like I'm being serious because recently I have been doing great things on Sundays like being in Germany, but just to clarify that was a whole lotta sarcasm).  I have no pictures as of right now but I may have some later and I will post them then (cough Hannah cough cough).  The only low point in the day was when I realized that I had been standing for five hours and the only thing I had consumed in that time was alcohol.  That pesky alcohol keeps sneaking its way into my blog posts, I really don't know how it keeps doing that.  Anyways, I got chips and a non alcoholic (!?!?!?!) beverage and everything was fine.  Don't you feel like a better person for knowing that story? 

Düsseldorf: [noun]- the capital city of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and center of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region.

As my German ancestors would say, "guten tag!"  It has already been pointed out to me that Monday, the promised day of the next post in my previous post, has come and gone.  I beg for your forgiveness, or as my German ancestors would say, "sauerkraut."  As you can see, my German vocabulary has really expanded and become very accurate.  This is thanks to my weekend trip to Düsseldorf!  Me and my travelling buddies Andy and Hannah had a whirl wind adventure in the North Rhine this past weekend.

Turns out, there isn't a particularly large amount of stuff to do in Düsseldorf unless you want to drink beer (which, trust me, I did, I just don't have the photographic evidence) or spend a lot of money shopping.  However it was beautiful so we spent all of Saturday walking around the city and window shopping.  That last picture was our lunch and there was a delicious apple something or other that we had for dessert.  I would like to relive that half hour of eating every day of my life.

Because we saw and did everything there was to see and do in Düsseldorf in a very efficient manner on Saturday, we decide that we would take a train trip over to Köln/Cologne on Sunday morning and spend our day there.  So that's me on the train to Köln.  That train's final destination was in Switzerland which is more or less the coolest thing ever.  Actually, now that I think about it that was the first time I have ever been on a train where its final destination was in a different country from its initial destination.

Köln is home to a very impressive Cathedral.  I think there would be more Catholics in North America if someone could toss together a place of worship as impressive as this.  I would go to church just to hang out there.

We also climbed up the bell tower there which involved 97 meters of pure claustrophobia in a skinny, winding staircase with two way traffic.  The result of my hard work was entirely worth it.

German Quasimodo was just running around down below there, workin' the bells.  Swearsies.  He doesn't like his picture being taken though so I refrained mainly because that hunch back on the German version is worse.  And then there was the view.

We also covered a lot of ground in Köln.  We went to the Museum Ludwig, we ate a delicious meal, we saw this amazing instrumental band playing in an arcade with excellent acoustics and we also saw a Nutcracker workshop.

Apparently my Oma opened a restaurant in Köln in 1985 and she sat for the portrait for the sign.  Were you aware of this Dad?!

Temple Newsam: [noun]- a Tudor-Jacobean house with 1500 acres of land, in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England

I'm very sleepy and I have a big weekend ahead of me, which you will read all about on Monday, so this post is going to be short. I went to Temple Newsam today on a field trip.  It's beautiful and near perfection.  I read on one of the information mabobs that someone named Lord Darcy once owned it.  I pretend it was THE Mr. Darcy then I pretended I was Elizabeth Bennett and that I had travelled back to the time of Mr. Darcy then I realized that Pride and Prejudice is fiction and that I would have to break some sort of reality/fictional barrier instead of traveling through time for Mr. Darcy and I (aka Elizabeth Bennett, 21st century reality version) to plausibly meet.  If you couldn't already tell, it was a great day.

At the moment that last photo there makes me want to stab my eyes out but I know I'll appreciate it next year when I'm missing my casual day trips to country houses.

I would like to leave you with some baffling information:
I miss country music and sports that aren't "football." MY SASKATCHEWANIAN ROOTS CANNOT BE DENIED!

London: [noun]- the capital and largest city of England; located on the Thames in southeastern England; financial and industrial and cultural center

THE ANSWER TO THE CLUE IS HERE! I know so many people were sitting on the edge of their seats, constantly refreshing "Dodgy", waiting in grand anticipation for this moment.

This past weekend, on the 23-24, me and my friend Hannah took a trip to London.  My original intention for the trip was to meet with one of my bosses from the summer and his wife but unfortunately I couldn't get in touch with them.  ANGELOOOO!! Where are ya?

We arrived at King's Cross station early on Saturday morning and our first order of business (after eating a delicious meal, of course) was to go shopping.  We went to Oxford Street which is the home of a very large Top Shop.  If you had the time, you could spend a solid five hours in this store and still not have seen all the clothes/jewelry/shoes/purses/food.

After Oxford Street we headed down to Trafalgar Square, and to walk there we went through Piccadilly Circus.   In Trafalgar Square is The National Gallery and let me tell ya, these Brits don't kid around with their art collecting.  In The National Gallery they have so many art works that I have been studying since high school.  For me, it's so exciting to see art works that I know so much information about but have only seen in slides or on the internet.  The first art work we saw was Leonardo da Vinci's The Virgin of the Rocks.  To keep things short and sweet, I love this painting.  Other artists who's works I was excited to see at The National Gallery were Botticelli, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Velazquez and Rembrandt.  Another artist who's work I couldn't believe I was finally seeing was Turner.  I don't want to bore anyone to tears with why I love his work so much so just judge for yourself:

In order of apperance: Dido Building Carthage, Rain, Steam and Spead, Margate (?) from the Sea and The Slave Ship.

So going to The National Gallery was a nice little life altering moment for me.

On Saturday night we went to Freud's Bar with Hannah's friend who is from England and goes to school in London.  The bar specialized in making fancy drinks and I had a Brandy Alexander, solely because of the Feist song. 

Sunday was a wonderful day of riding a double decker bus for the first time since I've been in England, getting lost and finding what we were looking for.  What we were looking for was Brick Lane.  To use Toronto as a point of reference, imagine Kensington Market plus the St. Lawernce Market smashed together and multiplied by fifty.  To say the very least, it was hip.  This street couldn't get any more hip even if every true hipster there ever was moved there and The Sartorialist was there 24/7. 

I already want to go back.