This morning, I did everything that I usually do, with one exception. I took out the blue dress that Josie leant me the night before and put it on with an awesome gray and white striped cardigan. Why, you may ask? Because today, Lowrie had arranged for us to have a REAL tea party. At the school.
See, apparently having tea for reals is a full meal sort of thing. But with really high quality sweetbreads and cakes, sandwiches, chocolates and dessert pastries. Like, tables full. And you dress up, and then follow a slight order of ceremony. You take your cup and saucer, put in your tea bag of choice, and as you wait for it to steep, you walk around and pick out your first few treats and put them on your saucer around your teacup. Then you sit and chat and munch. Then you get up three or four more times and sit down with new people to talk with.
So, we all dressed up a little and went downstairs for breakfast. Josie and I left a little early, as we wanted to go over to Lydl's to grab some chocolate butter biscuits for tea, so we had something to contribute, since we knew this was going to be an expensive little activity for Lowrie.
We then walked to class and had our final lesson until noon. We spent the morning going over everything we had learned so far. Lowrie had some good reinforcement exercises for us, as she made us write, speak, listen, and read everything we had been taught. She then taught us how to conjugate all the verbs we had been using so that they could be used in the past tense, so that was cool. Finally, she taught us three songs. The first was 'head, shoulders, knees and toes,' which actually translates more to something like 'head, shoulders, legs and foot fingers.' Then we learned a 'good morning' song, which we knew very quickly since we had already been practicing all the phrases since the second day. The third song was a farewell song to the tune of 'goodnight ladies.'
For the sake of memory, here are the three songs:
Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes
Pen, ysgwyddau, coesau, traed, coesau, traed, coesau, traed, pen, ysgwyddau, coesau, traed, a llygaid, clustiau, trwyn, a cheg.
Bore da:
Bore da! Bore da!
Sut dych chi? Sut dych chi?
Da iawn, diolch! Da iawn, diolch!
Sut dych chi? Sut dych chi?
Farewell song:
Hwyl fawr, ffrindiau
Hwyl fawr, ffrindiau
Hwyl fawr, ffrindiau
Mae'n amser dweud hwyl fawr.
Tw ra lw ra bon ta'n ni,
bon ta'n ni, bon ta'n ni.
Tw ra lw ra bon ta'n ni
mae'n amswer dweud hwyl fawr.
When the lunch hour arrived, Lowrie told us we could go, but to be back in an hour and to not eat a big lunch. I really needed to work on my journal, seeing as how I've been a week behind for quite some time now, so I decided to stay at the school while the others went to town. So Lowrie handed me the key (i thought she was joking when she handed me a super old-fashioned key, like the one you use for old wooden chests and boxes) and I locked up after everyone had gone. I had a tremendous rush of satisfaction not only as I locked the seriously old lock in the door, but also after looking through the keyhole and seeing all the way through, just like I read about in stories all the time!
So I went back to my spot and kicked up my feet on the mini chairs we each got out in the mornings to use as foot rests (holy moley, I'll never second guess the benefit of a footstool again after these last few weeks!), and set about my writing. I wrote for the entire break, making some pretty good progress, when I saw Lowrie park and come up to the door. I got the key and opened it. I was happily surprised to see her 6 year old girl and 4 year old boy burst through the door before her as she carried a covered tray in. I said hello to everyone and asked Lowrie how I could help. She said that she and her mother (who was getting the car organized still) had everything under control, so I happily went back into the toy room with the kids.
They were so cute! I had seen them before when they came to the Millennium Center after our tour, but only for a few moments. I went over by the tubs of toys where they were standing. They were both super shy and started to back off, but I just knelt down and grabbed a few toys out of the bin. And that was all it took. Within the next few minutes, they slowly eased into the happy chatter kids are so great at. The cute little boy kept handing me farm animals, I would ask him what sound it would make, and he would respond with a cute little pigs 'oink' or a cow's 'moo' or a giraffe's silence (his look was hilarious though). By the time the rest of my travel group came back to the classroom (like ten minutes later) the cute little boy was sitting comfortably in my lap playing with a pig and i was tickling the little girl with a bouncey snake toy.
Once everyone was back, Lowrie had us all take our seats again (the children were sent out back to play) and Lowrie's mother taught us about Patagoina. I knew nothing about it, but apparently it's a spot in the southern tip of South America where a ton of Welsh people immigrated when tax laws forced them out of their homes about 200 years ago. They didn't want to go to America, because it was before the Revolution, and so America was still under English rule, and the Welsh were doing all they could to get as far away from English influences as possible. So to South America they went. And it was a hard life for them. It actually sounded a ton like the Pioneers trekking across the US. They had nothing, it was a desert wasteland, and had to always watch out for Indians. But after many years of trekking and slow development, they somehow survived, and now thrive. And still speak Welsh! In South America! About fifty years ago, the language there almost died, as it's easier to speak spanish or portugese there, but a revival has taken place in the last twenty years, and the Welsh language has come back strong.
After the lesson ended, the announcement was made: it was tea time!
We got up excitedly and quickly filed into the little dining area. To our astonishment, the whole square table was covered in trays of treats! All different kinds of homemade sweetbread (some with chocolate, others with orange, and some with icing and nuts) two trays of fancy sandwich halves (like with the crusts cut off and everything! Some were fancy BLTs with cucumber, others were some fancy cheese with sauce, and still others had an awesome thick prawn filling. It was crazy!), iced cakes, homemade English sconnes with raspberry jam and clotted cream, and tray of jammy dodgers. In the kitchen, the kettle was singing and two different types of herbal tea, honey, sugar, and lemons had been left out for us to use. It was incredible!
Well, one of my goals when I came here was to not miss out on an experience, so I decided to try a little bit of everything. Okay, most everything, there were a LOT of sweets and cakes on that table, and even I would have burst if I had tried everything. I went to the kitchen and made up a cup of Redbush tea with honey, then sampled...well, as much of everything as I could. :) The scone was definitely my favorite! They aren't like scones we have in the states, ours are deep fried, but theirs are baked. It's like a cross between an english muffin and a regular muffin, just kind of crumbly. Anyway, the jam and clotted cream on top put a smile on my face that probably took a good half hour before it went away. Oh, it was that good!
The tea was good, the cakes were good, the company, the place, the purpose, it was all just so good.
Well, after I ate way too many sweets (its called living, gentle reader), we all meandered back into the classroom, where we bid Lowrie a very tender farewell with our goodbye song we had just learned. We were able to get a few pictures with her too. Before we left our school room for the last time, I gave her a big hug and thanked her for everything she had done for us. I know I'll miss her, but I'm okay with that, because that's how I know that I really truly loved my time here.
Onwards.
When we got home, we sat and chatted for a bit, then I went up to my room for a little me time. I can't put my finger on it, but I really have been craving some hermit-time the last few weeks, so I usually take advantage of my down time thusly.
After a few hours, Tom summoned our group to our house where we all walked down the street to a fun pub for our big farewell dinner. We pretty much flooded the place, as all 19 of us ordered at once. We went outside to the big tables and waited about an hour before our food was ready. I was really feeling like a big burger, surprisingly, and I was totally stoked when my awesome meal came out! Haha, I felt a little bad, but the stuff everyone else ordered didn't look nearly as yummy as my big Welsh burger. I also tried some of the Brown Sauce that is as common here in the UK as ketchup is at home. It was like a vinegary, not quite barbecue sauce stuff, but it was DANG good on a meaty burger! Pretty much, I loved it. That's all :)
The guys wanted to come over to watch some more Sherlock, but with a 4am departure the next day looming over us, we knew we needed to go to bed as soon as possible, so we took a rain check.
I was totally planning on going to bed as soon as possible, but fortunately got on the wifi to check my emails first. To my surprise, I found that two different offices at BYU were interested in hiring me right away, and needed me to send in some online applications. So for the next few hours, I juggled filling out two applications on my ipad and Abbey's computer, after finding an old copy of my resume on my dropbox and editing it on Lydia's Word program. Yeah, it was intense. Eventually, I got my resume updated, sent in, and both jobs applied for. Sort of, one of the applications wouldn't let me past page one of the questions, regardless of which of the three devices I tried, so I just emailed the very patient supervisor my answers to the questions I could see and let her know that I was doing my darndest.
After that, it was about 11:30 pm, but before I went finished off my day and went to sleep, I took a quick shower and organized all my collected treasures, so I could see how much room I had left in my bag before I headed north.
Once this was done, it was finally time for me to jump in bed and snooze for a few hours before our last day in London finally arrived.
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