A bad start to my Christmas

**Continued from the beginning of December 18th.**

I left the house and hauled my suitcase running all the way to the bus stop to catch the bus. The bus was going pretty slowly, so I was worried I might not make it to the train station on time. Once I got to town, I went as fast as I could all the way from the bus stop to the train station. I got there a few minutes before the train was supposed to leave, but the train was running late because of bad weather (it had been snowing the night before, so I had some time to wait. The train took a lot longer than normal. Then I had to get off in Manchester and switch trains to get one that would take me to the airport. It was running really late too, so I had to wait around again.

I finally got to the airport terminal and had to spend some time figuring out how to get to my hotel. I could see it, but I couldn’t figure out how to get there without just making a mad dash across the middle of the street while dragging my suitcase behind me, so that’s what I did.

There was a bug line to check in at the hotel, but I checked in and went to relax in my room. I was looking forward to a nice, long sleep in a big comfy bed. 

A nice big bed!

I decided to use the Internet to check the status of my flight to London for the next morning and I found out that it had been cancelled! All the flights going to London had been cancelled!

I freaked out a bit and phoned my parents, trying to figure out what to do. I tried seeing if I could find someone to ask, but by that time the lobby was filled with people looking for rooms, and the only person I could get a hold of on the phone was only able to tell me that my flight definitely cancelled. Eventually I decided that I should catch a train to London and try to make my flight for the next morning.

I went and bought a train ticket, then packed up my stuff, and lugged it all the way back to the station. I was about 10 minutes early, and trying to figure out which platform I was supposed to be on, when a conductor who was hopping to go yelled at me that I should hurry up and get on the train because it was leaving, so I did. I was a bit worried that I was on the wrong train, but then I realized that it didn’t matter since they would all go to Manchester Piccadilly anyway.

I got off at Manchester Piccadilly to find out that the train to London Euston had been cancelled. I got in a line hoping I could get a refund or something, but got distracted by hunger, and went to find food. While I was eating I saw a couple guys get into a bit of a fight, so that was my classy dinner entertainment.

At that point, I wanted to just take the train back to my hotel, sleep for the night and deal with everything later, but then I heard them say that there would be a train leaving for Euston at 8:30, so I decided to catch it. I waited on the platform, and it was a long and cold wait. Then they said that the train would be 20 minutes delayed. A train finally came to the platform, but then they said that we couldn’t get on it. 10 minutes later, they relented and let us on.

After sitting in the train for a bit, they came on with an announcement saying that it would be at least another 45 minutes before they could leave. At that point I was so exhausted from lack of sleep that I basically just passed out.

The train finally started moving at about 10:10, and I spent the ride trying to sleep, and partially listening to the conversations going on around me. Of course we ended up arriving in London incredibly late (around 12:30), so the tube had already stopped running, and of course there was no one around to help everyone figure out how they were actually supposed to get to wherever they were going with their train tickets.

Arriving at London Euston.

I decided that I needed to try and find a way to get to the airport, so I tried to figure out the bus schedule, and then I went looking for the bus stop so I could catch a bus. I caught a bus and headed off to Paddington Station.

Once I found my way in, I just sat down on a bench and started crying. I was exhausted, upset, cold, trying to find my way around a huge city I had never been to in the middle of the night, and alone. I was sure that my Christmas was about to go horribly because it was off to such a bad start. I needed to find a way to pass some time, so I started writing in my journal, and I wrote until my fingers were cold, then put on my gloves and wrote some more.

Cold, dark Paddington Station.

There were some workers there, but not many other people.

Eventually I had to get up and start walking because I was far too cold. By that time, it was a little past 2 in the morning. I got to the other side of the station, and an elderly man came up to me asking if I was on my way to Heathrow. When I told him yes, he asked if I’d like to share a cab with a nearby couple. It definitely seemed a little sketchy, but I was too cold and tired to care anymore. I just wanted to be somewhere warm, so I said I’d share the cab to Heathrow with them.

He took us out to his car, and I was surprised to see that it was just a regular car with a “cab” sticker in the window. It seemed sketchy, but I figured that I would probably be safe with the random couple. It turned out that they were from Romania and had been visiting Cardiff. It turned out the driver had moved to London from Morocco 40 years ago, so he spoke French.

We got to Heathrow Terminal 1 safe and sound, and as soon as we walked in, all you could see everywhere were people lying on the floor with tin foil blankets. So many flights from the day before had been cancelled due to snow that the airport was filled with people sleeping on their luggage. Someone had even set up a tent. I made my way to terminal 3 to find the Air Canada counter.

Tent in the middle of the airport.

Water bottles and tin foil blankets were about all the help anyone got.

I found the Air Canada counter, and a space on the floor nearby so I could sit down and write in my journal. By that time it was about 3 in the morning (on Sunday), and I had only slept about 6 hours total since Friday night.  I wrote for a while, but I was sitting rather close to a door, and rather quickly, it became too cold for me to stand.

I headed back towards the Air Canada desk and ticket counter, and that was when I found the People’s Republic of Canuckistan. The people in front of the ticket counter had draped their tin foil blankets over the queue posts, making a fort, and had erected a sign that said “The People’s Republic of Canuckistan” on a piece of newspaper. It made me proud to be Canadian.

The fort in all its glory.

Close-up of the sign.

Next - The adventure continues at Heathrow.

Into Week 7 and a day in Manchester

**Apologies for the length and the outdatedness. I'm trying to catch up!**

On Friday (November 19), my only class had been cancelled, so I got to have a relaxed morning. I got up and went to the bank to sort out my bank card and put some money into my account. When I came home, there was a crowd of people outside the back of my house for a big protest about rising tuition fees, and cuts to spending. I sat for quite a while in the lounge just chatting with whoever was there, and watched a couple episodes of Peep Show with some housemates around dinner time. I also got an email form my lecturer saying that I would be able to write the exam early so that I could go to Dublin!

That night 4 of us decided to have a bit of a flat night out (with only 1/3 of the house, it wasn’t the most successful). Claudia, Ash, Stef and I wanted to do a bit of a bar crawl just because Stef and I hadn’t really been to many places in town. We started out by going to the Friary, which is a big old friary building that has been turned into a pub. It was quite a nice building. We played a game of pool (me and Ash versus Claudia and Stef), and it turned out that none of us were very good at all (the consumption of alcohol probably didn’t help the three of them). Ash lost us the game when he sunk the 8 ball. Andy and Jonny met us there, but we left them to head to Cuba, a club we hadn’t been to before. It was pretty fun, there was a fair number of people there, and the music was decent to start with although it seemed to progressively get worse as the night went on.

My Crew ('cause that's how I roll).

We stopped for food on the way home and then all decided that none of us wanted to buy anything, so we just went back to the house. I was pretty tired, so I headed to bed fairly shortly after. It was just as I was trying to go to sleep that I realized how much work I needed to get done in the next week, so I started freaking out a bit and had a hard time going to sleep. Then I had a bad sleep because I had a dream about my dead dog dying all over again.

I woke up in a terrible mood on Saturday. Bad dreams, stress, a bit of a stomach ache, and a lack of sleep made me feel like crap. I chatted with some people in the kitchen before I headed off to the library to try and be productive. I read a fair bit of my Marketing text book before I packed everything up and went home because I was so tired.

I napped for a couple hours and then got up and had some dinner while watching another couple episodes of Peep Show. I was so not hungry that day that I didn’t even finish the food I made for myself (that’s rare).

That night I decided to forgo going out in order to get some more work done, and I got a bit of my French composition written before I went to bed.

On Sunday, I got up because Alex had promised to make pancakes for breakfast. I went to Central (the little grocery store by our house), and picked up some CANADIAN maple syrup, and some chocolate chips to go with the meal. We had 6 people from our house (me, Claudia, Alex, Mitch, Duc and Kevin), plus Alex’s friend and Mitch’s girlfriend. It was really tasty, I enjoyed my maple syrup.

After the meal, Claudia, Kevin and I decided to stay in the kitchen and clean EVERYTHING. We washed all the dirty dishes, cleaned the counters and the floor, and Kevin vacuumed the stairs and corridors. The place looked beautiful once we were finished. The rest of the day I spent reading and washing anyone’s dirty dishes that I found left around our kitchen.

On Monday, I spent most of the day reading again, but I went to the PhotoSoc meeting in the evening. We watched a documentary called Shooting Robert King about a war time photographer. It was quite interesting although it had some rather gruesome parts. It followed him throughout 15 years of his life starting at the age of 24, so you really got to see how his career flourished as the years went on. The rest of my evening was spent trying to get more work done.

On Tuesday, I went to my normal class, and then had a massive nap before my afternoon class. I spent the rest of the evening trying to get work done, and prepare myself for my trip to Manchester, but I managed to squeeze in a Skype call to my friend back home, just so that I could see the moustache he had been growing for Movember. And it was just as creepy as my friends had warned me that it would be.

Lolz on Skype.

On Wednesday morning (November 24), I went to my seminar, and then the lecture that I had before immediately rushing to catch a bus into town. I went straight from the bus station to the train station in order to catch my train to Manchester, but I ended up with more time to wait than expected, so I had lots of time to buy myself a snack while I was waiting.

Lancaster train station.

Once I got to Manchester (after sleeping for most of the train ride), I just started wandering, looking for some food for lunch. I ended up getting a falafel sandwich, and kept wandering.

I ended up at the Town Council, where there was a big Christmas Market, so I walked around there for quite a while looking at all the things and smelling the food. I ended up buying myself some mini Dutch pancakes coated with icing sugar that were piping hot and delicious. Then I went into the City Hall (/Town Council or whatever), and looked at the jewelry show they had set up inside. There was some very nice and very expensive jewelry there.

City Hall.

Random, creepy robotic moose head on one of the market stalls (some kind of German restaurant or something).

I came out of the building, and went walking around the back, towards the direction I had come, when all of a sudden, I saw a huge group of people heading towards the back door of the building. Then a flood of police officers ran in front of them to block the door. It turned out that it was another big protest about rising tuition fees, so I stayed there for a few minutes to take some photos of the crowd of people with their signs, and all the police officers trying to keep the peace.

The first few people to get to the City Hall.

The crowd grew very quickly.

Swarms more people up and down the street.

Then I went to the Art Gallery. It was pretty nice, there were quite a few paintings that I enjoyed, even though probably the most interesting part about it was being on the upper floor and looking out the window towards the City Hall. The crowd of protesters had gotten even bigger since I had left, and there were more police officers as well. It looked pretty exciting.

My view from inside the Art Gallery.

By the time I came out of the Art Gallery, the crowd had dissipated, and it was starting to get a little dark, so I bought myself a sausage roll from the market and decided to head back towards the train station and theatre. It let me get a few last photos of Manchester before dark and meant that I would be back closer to the theatre for the ballet.

I ended up going into a coffee shop buying a Pumpkin Spice latte (which was entirely too much coffee for me, I still can’t persuade myself to like coffee), and just sat there reading my Marketing text until I decided it was time for some dinner.

I ended up going to a little Italian restaurant for dinner, and had some pizza before heading back to the theatre.

I got to the theatre just as they were opening the doors to let people in, and I found myself a chair and read more as I waited to get to my seat. There was a little TV showing the stage, and I watched it for a bit because you could see some of the dancers practicing. I was SOOO excited that I was about to see The Nutcracker for my first live ballet!! It was like my childhood dream come true!

When I finally got into the theatre, I really liked my seat because I ended up sitting behind a woman who was quite short so I had an easy view over her head. The theatre itself was beautiful, and I took a couple photos of it before the ballet started (I wasn’t allowed to take any photos of the performance itself).

Outside the theatre.

The stage.

Part of the theatre.

The performance was great! I enjoyed it so much! From the beautiful costumes, to the live music (the music that I have always loved!), it was the perfect way to kick me into the holiday spirit! It was great timing that that morning had also happened to be the first morning I had seen frost on the ground! It was finally starting to feel like Christmas!

After the ballet, I headed to the train station (which was literally across the street) to wait for my train and read more as I was waiting. I finished my readings while I was on the train and then I chatted with Stef for a while after I got back before I went to bed.