The Leaves have Begun to Fall

I was walking to City Street today when at some point I realized I was actually headed to City Center…oh stupid me. After my 45 or so minute walk I settled with buying some slippers at the one and only….wait for it…TK-MAXX!!! This might sound somewhat familiar to you, and just so you know it is the exact same thing as TJ-MAX, just add another X and change the J to the next letter in the alphabet and there you have it, the British version of TJ-Max. J Then I headed back down to my original location and here I sit in a shady café called Orange Café, that serves massive amounts of food, for cheap. I am currently the only one in here that doesn’t work here, but hey why not? Seize the day!

This past week has been a good week. Yesterday we went down to The Gate and had a prayer day and spent the morning praying on our own and then the afternoon praying for each other, what better way to bond with your team? I was supposed to go to the movies with my mentor but I really just wanted to spend the evening at home, so we cancelled that and I had a lovely evening at home with my British family. You see dinner around here is not eat, clean, leave…it is eat, have dessert, drink coffee and sit around and talk until you feel it’s time to move on to something more, or usually in my family’s case, get the kids in the bath and into bed. So we spent about an hour and a half or so at dinner, eating our dessert and drinking coffee. It all began when Carys and Rhian wanted to try my Dr. Pepper, that they had never had before, so they each tried a little bit and Carys really didn’t like it, Rhian said she didn’t like it, but she drank most of hers, then Marilyn and Warren both decided they would try it as well since they had never tried it before either….the consensus on Dr. Pepper is that it tastes of mouth wash…lucky for me that means the entire 2 Liter bottle is mine! Then I tried some sort of drink that they have. A lot of the drinks here are concentrated and you mix them with water or sprite or something, so that is what this drink I tried was. It is called Menthe and you mix it with Sprite. If you wanted to honestly know what this tastes like then get a bottle of Sprite and literally mix it with mint mouth wash and drink…it was even green, ewww gross, is all I have to say, luckily I hadn’t finished my coffee yet so I was able to rid myself of the awful taste fairly quickly. We had a lot of fun trying new things though. Next Rhian decided it would be funny is she had me say “tomato,” because I say it funny… She got the biggest kick out of hearing me say it my Texan way and then hearing me try to imitate her in saying it her British way. It was actually really funny and amusing. Then we watched some Wallace and Gromit, which is a cartoon like movie with very few words, but actually pretty funny. It was good spending some time with the family last night and laughing a lot.
This afternoon I got on the bus and at one of the stops I was the only one left on the bus and the driver turned the bus off, shut the doors and left. I was very confused by this, but he soon returned...maybe he had to smoke or use the bathroom, I don't know but it was weird.