May your lives be long, may your wishes all be simple, and may your hearts stay strong.

OK this may be kinda gross…ok actually I can pre-confirm that it is kinda gross, but it is relevant in my life and thus, I shall share it because this is technically MY space and I can if I want…So I’m coming off of having that cold that I had (which, thank God, is finally going away!) but I still have the residual phlegm that I keep coughing up throughout the day. Usually, I try to be very discreet about it when I do it cause I know it’s gross, but for some reason, Its like I just don’t care if Laura gets to see the whole show. I feel bad grossing her out but I mean she’s my sister…isn’t that what I’m supposed to do? OK so here is my thought that I feel compelled to share. Whenever I cough something up, sometimes there are people all around and I don’t feel like I should spit it out right in front of the old lady walking towards me. Thus, I keep it in my mouth for up to a minute or so. Gross eh? Well the gross thing is that, while it’s in my mouth, sometimes I like to separate it by smashing it between my tongue and the roof of my mouth and I like to kinda “play with it” in my mouth. Now I know that is gross and if that was all I had to share on the matter, I wouldn’t have shared it. My thought, and the thing that I don’t understand, is why I can be so perfectly fine with doing that while it’s in my mouth, but that the second it leaves my mouth, it becomes completely and utterly revolting to me. Like there is absolutely no way in hell that I would spit it out into my hand and then put it back into my mouth. And there is no way that if I spit it out onto the ground that I would even TOUCH it! And it really is completely ridiculous but for some reason, the fact that it has left my mouth makes it completely disgusting. And the reason this baffles me is because usually, I am a very rational person and so I could go through a thought process very similar to what I just wrote, and end up either being grossed out before it left my mouth, or being perfectly fine with it after it leaves my mouth. Either way, I would at least have an uncompromising standard on the phlegm. But what baffles me is that there is just no way for me to get past it. I enjoy playing with it when it’s in my mouth and that’s not going to change. But I will still never be able to touch it once it leaves…crazy.

Ok so next thought, when I was in the hostel in London, I noticed a guy that was pretty much just ALWAYS in the dining room, writing in some book. He was obviously traveling alone and I just couldn’t figure out why in the world you would travel all by yourself to London and stay in a hostel in the center of the city, only to sit in the basement dining room and write all day. And me and Ian actually even tried to talk to him one day to get him to come hang out or at least do SOMETHING other than write. We were blown off though. So anyways, like the one time that we were in there and he actually left the room for a minute, we went over and…hehe…read his book…I know. We’re bad. But we just had to know what the heck he was writing! So anyways, what we found in the book, I don’t think either of us would ever have expected…the guy was writing a freakin cookbook!! Like all that was on any of the pages was just page after page of recipes! And we hadn’t even seen the guy cooking or anything. Like he was just making up recipes in his head and compiling his own cookbook!! It was so weird and I’m not gonna lie, we may have made fun of him behind his back….but I didn’t feel bad about it cause we had tried to get him to stop earlier and come hang out with us.

Tom’s are the worst shoe ever to go on a long hike in. I could go on for an entire paragraph about this but I just feel like it is so self-explanatory and intuitive that I don’t need to. They just have really really thin soles and so you can feel every rock underfoot. The feeling of being barefoot isn’t always a good thing…

**14 hours later**

So Laura and I woke up at about 10:30 this morning, got dressed and stuff, then we went to the bookstore to find a new book for Laura to read. She picked out three books: The Reader (respectable), The Boy Who Kicked Pigs (slightly less respectable), and The Quotable Slayer: Quotes from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the complete opposite of respectable). She claims though that she bought the latter for a friend who would enjoy it…mmmhmmm. Right…

So anyways, then we went to the grocery store and got some stuff for breakfast (including a motherload of grapes) and we set off for the park in which we are currently sitting. This brings me to the whole reason that I have gone through the events (aka nonevents) of this morning. It was so that I could tell you about the woman and her dog. So lets set up the scene: Laura and I are both laying down in this big field and I’m on my laptop and she’s reading about the future serial killer boy who likes to kick pigs. I was showing Laura a song on my laptop and then after that song was over, I decided to play the song “if I can’t have you” by adam lambert as loud as my laptop would go. So it’s blaring as this lady walks up behind me. Laura tried to give me the hint that someone was coming but I wasn’t paying much attention to anything other than the otherworldly product of lambert’s vocal chords. Thus, the woman was upon us before I really had a chance to save dignity and turn the music off. So by the time I finally turned around to see what Laura was talking about , this woman was already right on top of us and talking to us. The timing was such that, the exact moment that I turned my face around and saw the woman, her dog flew right into the nook of my neck and proceeded to nuzzle/slobber all over me. And she didn’t even try to get him to stop or anything! Like the whole time she stood here and talked to us about nothing, her dog was just all up on me and I was trying to push it away and get it to stop flinging its slobbery face and tennis ball all over the place. Anyways, by the time she left, there were little droplets of slobber all over our stuff with a large concentration of both slobber and dog hair on my right shoulder which took the brunt of the nuzzling. Let’s just say that I wish the woman hadn’t been so nice cause I actually would have been cool with it if she hadn’t stopped to talk to us. Whatever though we laughed about it so it’s all good.

So anyways, Laura and I got to Bath yesterday. We haven’t actually gone to see the bath yet but we’re planning on it at some point. I have really loved Bath so far. We got here yesterday and we were planning on just staying one night but after a couple hours, I was like Laura, I really want to stay here 3 nights…and she said we could. It’s just really peaceful here and there are parks everywhere too. It’s a pretty small town so when you’re in the middle of town, you can look up at the hills that surround it and see where town ends and it’s just kinda nice. The area that it is in is also really beautiful. Just like some rolling green hills. I think that if I were to ever have studied abroad in England, this would have beeen SO much more appealing than studying abroad in London. Even though London is really cool, it just has such a busy feel compared to this place. And the weather has been PERFECT too so that’s probably made it nicer. It’s like 60-65, sunny with a light breeze. Like my ultimate weather.

Unfortunately, Laura informed me that I was the ONLY one snoring in our room last night. That sucks. I’ve always hoped that I don’t snore. Which I don’t think I really do usually…I think it’s just cause I’m still a little sick that I snored. But whatever, I can own it.

I threw a bird a grape and it looked like it made his day. So I threw him another one and he loved that one as well. That’s my story.

I really like how long it takes to get your food at restaurants here. I mean if I had anything that I actually needed to be doing, I might care, but here, it’s so relaxing to not have your food come out like immediately and then have your plates taken away and your check brought to you immediately after you’re done. Like yesterday, Laura and I probably spent almost 2 hours eating lunch and I just thought it was really enjoyable. We were sitting outside and it was nice and the food was good when it came…I liked it. But the don’t seem to ever bring you your check til you ask for it which I appreciate because it doesn’t make it feel like the want you to go ahead and leave.

So originally, we had thought that whenever Laura got here, the pictures would flow like honey (which ironically doesn’t really flow very well…). However, as it turns out, even though Laura is taking a ton of pictures, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are on my computer and are, thus, not making it onto the ol blizog. Whatever, I’m hoping that my words will be enough for you.

As it turns out, Laura and I are very cheap. We pretty much just refuse to pay entrance fees. Like we keep walking into these places that I’ve heard about throughout my life (i.e. Westminster Abbey, The Roman Baths, etc.) and yet we just can’t seem to stomach the crazy entrance fees. But seriously though, it was 15 pounds sterling to get into Westminster. That’s like $25 in the US. That’s just way too much to get in to see one church. I mean I’m sure it’s awesome in there…but then again I’ve seen St. Peters in the Vatican so it’s not like anything is really going to top that anyways.

Sidenote: there is a guy who, the whole time we’ve been sitting here in this café, has just been STANDING in the open area near the front door, playing some game on his Nintendo DS. I don’t get it. He was here yesterday doing the exact same thing. And it’s not like there aren’t any seats or anything or that it would be weird if he just wanted to sit down…but he doesn’t. He continues to just stand there with his Nintendo about 6 inches from his face. He’s obviously really into it.

Ok well I’m going to read some more of my book right now and close this post up. But the last thing I’ll say is that Laura and I stopped into a random art gallery that we passed on the street and there was a guy with a bunch of his paintings up in there that may be one of my favorite painters I’ve seen. His name was Akash Bhatt. I haven’t looked him up online yet but I’m about to. He blew me away. And then there was another guy in there who had just one painting up in the gallery but it was the best painting in there. His name was Nathan Ford. This is the painting that was up in there:
And it looked SO much cooler even than that when it was a 4 ft by 5 ft oil painting. Really cool. Ok and I did JUST look up Akash Bhatt and he’s got some awesome stuff on his website. The kind of stuff that makes me wish I was rich enough to buy quality art.

Ok well I’m out for now. I am going to go talk to the girl sitting across the street looking lonely…oh wait. No I’m not.

Christian to the Roderick