Leeds: live it, love it

After days of being confined in our house, fooling myself that I am studying (but really devising imaginative ways to distract myself) I finally finished my last exam (ever!) and stepped out in to my city, Leeds. With my trips largely consisting of the library and tennis court, I had become unfamiliar with the city I call home. Thus, I was able to objectively observe its character as a walked (her?) streets. It was an old industrial city, that has being revamped- attracting masses of students and becoming a finance centre. They call it 'the Swan', (morphed into a flashy 'hub' from being a smoggy ugly duckling) However the otherside to the new facade is also very vivid and present. There are huge amount of illegal immigrants (along with a reactionary neo-Nazi movement; the infamous British Nationalist Party has its headquarters in Leeds), homelessness, crime...
I will write more about these thoughts later (I am catching a train in an hour, and I am still in my PJ's, haven't packed and Drew wants me to make him a lentil ambledown roast), and instead I will mention a few things I have being up to. To celebrate the end of my 'under-graduatedom' Drew and I went to to West Yorkshire Playhouse. We saw a play called 'Bus' that explored the changing face of Leeds. The playwright used the setting of the city's bus systems as 'mobile battleground', exploring the divisions caused by the explosive makeover of the city (the scars of its plastic surgery?) It was really surreal, as Drew and I commute into town on the bus upon which each scene was performed, thus went we went home we felt that we had stepped on stage. Theatre has so much scope for insightful social commentary, and forces the audience to look deeper at lives that are so easy to dismiss on a day-to-day basis. The characters of play included two 'hometowners' that where homeless, and could no longer see their place in the new Leeds; the city had left them behind, so they never leave the buses, ruling the backseats and seeing the alien world change and expand through the glass. Their lives collide with two graduates who are trying to claim the city as their own.

Here you go! This is the bendy No. 1 bus, upon which I have spent on average an hour a day for the last three years (apart from when cycled in the days before my bike got stolen, and we moved to live at the top of a hill).

After the play drew and I where on our way home when I found a tenner in the street! (the coolest thing ever!) so we went to watch jazz and get a drink (first in ages! So I only had one- I am such a light weight!), something we would never have justified under any circumstances, apart from a freak piece of luck!

Last night we went to a friends birthday bash, where we watch phantom of the opera, prompting drew and I to sing al the way home (which did not cause a scene, as it was four in the morning, and the streets of Leeds where full of wasted clubbers dressed up as scooby-doo doing much weirder things)

Ahhh! Drew's yelling at me to get my butt into gear! So bye for a week! We are going to visit my parents in Carnforth, as well as spend a couple of days in the lake District. I collected loads of ASDA grocery coupons which I exchanged for a free night in a hotel in Grasmere.

blessings xxxx