Snow and the V and A Museum and Little South Asia

London has been dumped with massive amounts of snow this week...approximately 1 inch or so. It's also been extremely cold this week--about -2 C or thereabouts. For this reason, most sensible and paranoid Londoners have stayed home instead of going out into the dreadful weather. My school however, opted to stay open since the main roads were clear (and Gascoigne is located on a main road). The teachers in my staff room were joking that if this were the London Blitz, our head would have said, "The skies are clear. School's open." Sarcasm aside, it has felt damp and chilly this week, and unfortunately the children have not be allowed out to play in it because none of them have snowsuits--an unheard-of thing in London. So they've been pretty hyper this week as it's been an entire week of indoor recesses (and they REALLY want to play in the snow since it's such a novelty), after two weeks of holiday excesses and being spoiled rotten. Furthermore, it's been less than 15 C in my classroom this week as one of the radiators wasn't working. It hasn't been a great week for teaching. However, I've been trying to keep the above things in mind and not take it personally when they get up and start pacing around the room in the middle of a lesson. I'm hoping it warms up soon so they can get outside again.

I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum with a friend from church today. I believe it started out as a gallery for Victoria and Albert's collection of things. It's an extensive museum now, somewhat like the ROM in Toronto. We spent four hours touring through three exhibits: sculptures from Medieval and Renaissance Europe, including Roman fountains and depictions of the three magi among other things; various artifacts from China: Ming vases and furniture from various dynasties, clothing and grave relics (I'm not sure if that's the proper term...various articles that were buried with the dead) and some modern art pieces; and finally an exhibit of photography, of which my favourite was a photograph of a woman selling newpapers while behind her was a flurry of activity making a statement about the constant motion of time about us.

For dinner, we walked down Brick Lane, which was clearly a hub of Indian and other South Asian restaurants and stores. At each restaurant, there was a man outside doing a hard sell job on each person who passed to convince them to come into his establishment. Free wine and beer were on offer, as well as 25-30% discounts off menu prices, and special deals where you get an appetizer plus main course plus dessert and drinks for a single rate. We were accosted more than a dozen times in the span of two blocks by these marketers. I had to laugh as each man politely waited for the man in front of him to finish his spiele, and then as soon as we walked on towards him, he'd launch into his appeal for why his restaurant was better and how many awards it had won from various sources and what better deals he could give us . It reminded me of time our family spent in Nigeria some twenty-odd years ago, when fruit sellers would complain, "Why do you not buy from my hand?" after my mother had purchased bananas from a competing trader.

Have a good week all. JKN