The Wetlands

Ok, time to get my blog up-to-date a bit; I won’t bother you with all the crazy, amazing things I have done the last couple of weeks, nor tell you about the extraordinary, interesting and sexy people I have met. Why? Because I’m gonna tell it with pictures, and I don’t have pics of everything (and also because I don’t feel like typing too much ;-)

I’m starting to get the impression there’s a whole community forming here in London of people I knew elsewhere and who have come to live here. Since a month I share the city with Ruth –Russssssss for friends- and Mikko. Ruth is my old flatmate from my time in Madrid. She’s a very nice warm-hearted Spanish girl with this soft Southern accent from the Canary Islands. She followed her Finnish boyfriend Mikko to London. To rap up the whole love story: Mikko did an Erasmus in Madrid, hooked up with Ruth (I kinda linked them, I guess), they both went back to their homes afterwards (las Islas Canarias and Suomi -or something meaning Finland), had a difficult distance relationship for a while and then decided to get together somewhere in between.

They ended up spending a year in the middle of nowhere –which is: Delft (the middle) in Holland (nowhere)-, where Mikko could do his Phd. But there wasn’t really much to do there for a girl that studied Spanish law, spoke Spanish and just enough English to speak to a Dutch baker or supermarket employee. Incredible what love makes people do for each other. I went to visit them there last year with Soen (another Madrilenan connection from Belgium, currently residing in Mauritius), needless to say that their social and her professional life were a bit on the lower side.

Luckily, Mikko managed to get into Imperial College to pursue his PhD and thus they moved to London at the end of December. Ruth’s English is improving rapidly, she’s combining a couple of little jobs and is going to try to get something more promising as soon as her English is good enough.

Why all this information about people you don’t even know? Because otherwise you’d have no clue who the people in the next picture are!



Here you see Ruth, Sebastian and Soetkin Oh, yeah, Mikko is not in the picture, he was at the university that day, I think I forgot to mention he’s a workaholic. We went for a hike in the Wetlands (moeras-achtig iets), in Barnes-Hammersmith, some 10 km from the centre of London. Wow, I thought, that sounds nice, being outside of London for a day, in the nature,… You can imagine one needs that once in a while in a hectic city as this.

So we met up, I had a huge coffee from a nearby Starbucks (on Sunday mornings students most of the time do other things than hiking in nature -no further comments) and entered the Wetlands. It was the annual open door so instead of an incredible £ 7 we could go in for free. And I’m glad I didn’t pay for it! Nature? Yeah, okay, it was an old ‘wetland’ but those Londoners turned it into a theme park.

This is about as close to nature as we got.

I just wanted mud, grass, clean air, no people nor city. What we got was, hardened roads, multimedia explanatory screens imitating the sounds of birds and lots of people and still the London skyline on all sides.

Nevertheless we had quite some fun… making fun of the Londoners. I guess that’s the difference between a real city kid from London and people –like most of us- who actually played in woods and saw cows in the fields when we were kids.
A lot of those Londoners were dressed as if they were going on an expedition in Papua-New-Guinea. They all dressed to impress each other with hiking shoes from the right brand, a silly ‘adventurer’s’ hat, binoculars, and they were all that serious at it. The park was also a sort of protected area for birds, so you’d have lots of birds and… birdwatchers!!! What a great kind of people, getting up early on Sunday mornings, spending hours waiting for this one glimps of a nearly extintinct bird and then write epic stories on their community’s website about what a good look they had at… the bird. Sorry, I’m letting myself go here a bit. But, as they say, one image says more than a thousand words.




20 birdwatchers with photo cameras, some of which had about the size of a RPG, watching one heron (reiger).



Afterwards we went for a nice windy walk along the Thames,



had some drinks and then had dinner at Ruth and Mikko’s place. And Mikko was even there to eat with us, only to go back to university afterwards (Sunday 8pm…).

That’s it for this time