Our last morning in London included Anya’s visit to the London School of Economics (LSE). I walked her there, but because this visit included a “shadowing” of a student to a class as well as a tour, I left her there to walk the 5 blocks back to our hotel afterwards.
The shadowing was well prepared and presented. Yet, perhaps her hopes were too high, as this was her favorite program on paper; she came back disappointed. The math lecture seemed very simple. The two other male prospective students seemed to dominate the questions, with little attention or time left over for her. The guy next to her in class was man-spreading and seemed inattentive to her personal space. Perhaps she was just a bit tired and more sensitive to everything.
Meanwhile, I had finished packing, checked out, stored bags in the luggage storage, and was waiting in the lobby for her report. We talked over more of her LSE visit at dim sum, Cantonese brunch, which is special food for us.
A quick trip to Selfridges (which overwhelms me at this temple to materialism) filled the remaining time prior to retrieving our bags and heading to the airport.
We arrived at the Arlanda airport (between Stockholm and Uppsala) at 11:45 pm. The city bus is about 1/3 the price of the bullet train, which saves only 20 or 25 minutes in our transition to get back to our bicycles, which were parked at the bus/train station and waiting for us (no stolen bikes! The saying is that you haven’t lived in Uppsala long enough if you haven’t had a bike stolen). With a short wait for the bus and the biking back home, we were in bed at about 1:15 am. Yes, we were tired, but fortunately Anya felt we had a very good trip.
Today, we both slept in, but I awoke to work some more on my sermon. I’m preaching tomorrow–in English. My translator, Agne, came by at 10 am, to go over the translation, as he will be translating (consecutively, sentence by sentence). I really don’t like speaking like this, but my Swedish isn’t good enough yet to do it solo in Swedish. Agne is quite a theologian and Luther scholar, so we had some good conversations, and my theology was solid, though he made a suggestion on my introduction to strengthen it. It is stronger, but I did like my first introduction and had to spend another chunk of time rethinking how to pull things together. I’ll let you know how it goes!
With blessings,
Beth
So much for websites, eh?
Glad you are spending the time and money doing your own research, especially in this era of communications. To spend 4 plus years without a good fit would not be a happy time.