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Tag Archives: friends

09 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by frannyritchie in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

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friends, London, Tate Modern, UK

The Tate Modern has some dumb stuff.

Our return to the UK pretty much coincided with the arrival of another friend, who came into London and whom I met at the Tate Modern on Friday evening. I was only able to go to the 4th floor, which is half awesome and half AWFUL.  Tate visitors: You can go ahead and skip the “Energy and Process” section.  Also, I’m just going to go ahead and say this: I FRICKING HATE VIDEO INSTALLATIONS. That’s right. I went there. I like movies, I like paintings and sculpture and especially photography, but I hate video installations. A lot. They are stupid. Much of the 4th floor of the Tate is stupid.  But I really enjoyed the opportunity to walk across the Millennium Bridge eating candied almonds and the view of the Tower Bridge across the water, and some of the art didn’t suck – the Picassos were ok, for example. They can keep the Picassos.

I was really concerned that our friend get the authentic pub experience, because she’d eaten at a Wetherspoon’s (which is kind of like an Applebee’s). So we took her to the Old Spring, which is one of our faves. But then we also went to The Anchor in London and so it ended up being a very pub-filled few days.  But oh well. There are worse things.

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Wales!

30 Monday Jul 2012

Posted by frannyritchie in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

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friends, Pembrokeshire Coast Path, travel, vacation, Wales

The last couple weeks have been dedicated to having All The Fun: Oxford, the Cotswalds, Ireland, and now Wales. I’m racking up an impressive number of photos and am lucky to have blog collaborators/partners in crime (beyond my stoic, long-suffering husband) to do things like march 12 miles along the Welsh coast. The photo below is about 10 miles in, during our banana break.  Its all just nauseatingly beautiful.

Realistically, I will probably not post until we get home this weekend.  Try not to miss me too much, and know that I’ll be back with all sorts of good posts in August.

Book Review: MWF Seeking BFF

16 Monday Apr 2012

Posted by frannyritchie in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

book review, books, culture, England, entertainment, friends, MWF Seeking BFF, My Friend Lauren

Image courtesy TheDebutanteBall.com

A friend recommended MWF Seeking BFF to me a while ago, and I pre-ordered the British paperback off Amazon immediately.  Its a book about a woman who follows her boyfriend (subsequently, her husband) to Chicago, a city where her social network is a little thin.  After a couple years, she realizes that she hasn’t found her go-to girl in Chicago: she has a social life, but no one she can call on a moment’s notice.

The friend recommended the book to me because, obviously, I am also in the process of finding a social life in Cambridge.  The author of MWF Seeking BFF goes on a friend-date once a week for a year – meeting friends of friends, going friend-speed-dating, at one point even hiring a friend for an afternoon – and reports back.  The good news is, after a year of working really hard to make friends, she calls it a success: she’s met lots of people she really likes, and some have become close friends.

Its not exactly literature, but MWF Seeking BFF is a solid read.  I didn’t love the whining she did at the beginning – “I don’t have anyone to get a pedicure with!” – but I empathized just the same.  And I took heart from the conclusion: almost everyone the author, Rachel Bertsche, met was open to new friendships and was pleased to be invited on a friend-date, even though not all of them became friends in the end.

The thing that I did wonder the whole time was, what had she been doing the previous two years of her life? I have spent six months in Cambridge frantically trolling for friends, and while I’m not popular, exactly, I’ve met some people on whom I can call in a crisis and who have lifetime-friend potential.  When I mentioned the book to My Friend Lauren, I said I didn’t think the experiment – 52 friend-dates in a year – would translate to Cambridge, because its too small and because so much of the social life centres on the university.  She said “and its so un-English” – which was an important factor that I hadn’t even considered.

For the most part, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how friendly English people are, in defiance of cultural stereotypes.  Its been better than I was expecting – although when i said that to a Swiss friend, she said “What were you expecting?!”  We’ve made a commitment to being in the country for a long enough time that people are willing to commit to getting to know us.  And of course the advantage to living in a university town is that new people are always arriving, most of whom don’t have a pre-existing social network in the area.

That said, if anyone has suggestions for ways of making new friends, I do welcome suggestions…

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