After a late night talking to people at home, I sleep in pretty late today, waking up to a text asking if I wanted to explore Kingston, a local town and renowned shopping center. I hurriedly got ready, and headed over to meet the girls to catch the bus. Sadly, it was rainy and gross outside, but we are in England.
Before we caught the bus, we walked to the Teddington police station to get our little personal alarms for our keychains. They're these little plastic contraptions, a little smaller than an egg, that have a flashlight and a button for an alarm, as well as a pin you can pull out that makes the alarm continuously go off. The idea is that if someone approaches you, you can pull the pin out, and the noise will either scare them off or attract other people to the scene. Nice little peace of mind thing.
We walked back to the main drag to catch the bus, and on the way, a car drove by us and splashed water all over, mainly drenching myself. It was legitimately something that could've happened straight out of the movies, and didn't do much for my mood that was already glum due to the weather.
Fortunately, the buses here aren't too hard to figure out. Each bus station has a poster listing several destinations, then lists the bus route needed to get there. Every time I use public transportation here, I'm thankful for how wonderful, and compared to America, efficient it is. Londoners tend to complain about it, but they have no idea just how good they have it.
When we got into Kingston, we stopped at a bank for Danielle to try to get some traveller's cheques exchanged. We've both run into some trouble with the traveller's cheques here, whether it be finding somewhere to exchange them, and then trying to find somewhere where the commission fees aren't exorbitant. And the exchange rate doesn't help either, but nothing much we can do about that.
Our first stop was the local T.K. Maxx, or in the States, T.J. Maxx. I mostly just spent my time looking at everything. Again, everything is about twice as expensive here, and that's accounting for the exchange rate. For example, in the States, at a Target or Walmart, you can find a pair of Skull Candy headphones for $10, or somewhere around there. T.K. Maxx wanted 12 pounds for theirs. Twice as much. I'm generally too cheap to buy clothing, but it was interesting comparing prices and looking at everything.
Across the street is a giant, 4-story shopping mall that we went to next. Again, everything's outrageously expensive, so we did a lot of window shopping. They have a pretty cool store called "Fat Face" that I liked, as well as a store called "Superdry," but way out of my budget. They even have an Apple store. :) There's this really neat place called Muju, or at least I'm pretty sure that's what it's called, that has a little bit of everything, from stationery supplies to bedroom furniture and clothing, all in neutral colors. Pretty cool. We've all latched on to a store over here called Paperchase, which is basically a stationery store as well. We've found some cute cards there, and spent a lot of time admiring their beautiful and detailed design lines for their supplies. I brought three journals with me to write in, so if I fill them all, I plan on buying a Paperchase one. A little bit of an incentive to write a lot. :)
We decided to come back for dinner, then I came back for an early night in. I talked to my host family for a while, and asked about laundry, which my host lady promised to show me how to do tomorrow morning.
Decidedly time is moving both fast & slow at the same time, and although people talk about this phenomenon all the time, I've never really felt as if I've experienced it - until I came here.
All in all, a good day.
And so ends Day 9.
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