The main benefit of volunteering is that you get a little pin (badge) which lets you jump the line (queue) at almost all the other buildings! So on the way home I stopped by the two buildings near where I live. One was an environmentally friendly house that was build last year (they anticipate getting a cheque back from their energy provider at the end of the year!). This is the first house in the UK that I have seen which truly has draft proof windows...oh for the little things in life! The other building is a school for children with various learning and physical dissabilities. Many children have autism and the entire building is accessible in every way you can imagine. Much imagination has gone into making the whole building user friendly and easier for the children to adapt to - apparently orange is the easiest colour for people with sight problems to identify so there is a stripe running down all the corridors which is orange. The children walk single file on the line without having to be told to do so! Really great place.
Today I was at the Royal Festival Hall http://www.rfh.org.uk/main/index.asp which is undergoing a 111 million pound refurbishment! It is currently a mass of scaffolding inside and the only way to see the building was to book ahead. I have used this building many times since I moved to London for classical music, the Poetry Library, the free jazz and the cafes. The views of the river are great and the coffee is no more expensive than anywhere else! So by volunteering I was able to go on the tour twice and once again, assuage my desire to organise people and places. The people who work there were very stressed by the whole thing, although they did organise it quite well. Each tour had 15 people on it and tours started every 15 minutes. At the Expo in Hannover in 2000 there were 1000 people going through the pavillion every 15 minutes. Needless to say, this was relatively easy to manage. Although the Brits love to tell you why they aren't happy or tell you in detail how they had trouble finding the building...how many ways are there to interpret "Belvedere Rd"? Either you come to that side of the building or you don't! Most people were lovely though and I got to speak German three times, once with a man from Namibia!
Jumping topics, I have bought a new duvet cover...the old one was getting quite faded. So at a recent trip to Ikea I took a leap into a new colour scheme.
Normally I go for soft greens, neutral cremes or warmer tones, like red sheets. This time I went turquoise, blue, yellow and brown! I matched the brown in it to the brown that I bought to paint two of my walls. Actually, the brown in this duvet cover and my other, more neutral one, is the same tone as the curtains as well. So the wall colour was picked to go with all three. This shift in colour for me has been great! I love crawling into bed and am looking forward to the first day I will get to sleep in! So far I have been needing to get up as soon as the alarm goes off, so hopefully Friday morning this week I won't have to jump out of my nice, colourful bed!Tomorrow I am back to the library to work and am both looking forward to it and dreading it. I will have to make lunch and be organised. At least I have unpacked almost everything now and I found my theatre tickets for this Wednesday! I'm going to see Bobby Baker, who is a performance artist here in London who has a funded position at my university as a 'fellow' for three years. She is a wonderful performer and has a big show at the Barbican this week. She is also a Christian and has been very supportive of me every time I have talked to her. The last time I saw part of a video of her work I was laughing so hard I was crying! If you have a moment, do check out her work. http://www.bobbybakersdailylife.com/ http://www.barbican.org.uk/theatre/event-detail.asp?ID=4273
