Living in Leeds

Leeds Civic Hall

Monday we started classes which is a big change to what we're use to doing so far on the trip. Prior to Monday we were essentially in holiday mode, nothing to do each day except for a few things that we had to get done. But classes brings new excitement and reminds us that we are indeed here to do school.

Living in Leeds is much different from Calgary which is not surprising. Cailey and I are excited to not have a car to get around, and are looking forward to buying bikes to get around quickly. So far we've been able to get where ever we need to by walking. The Leeds metropolitan area has a population density of 1380/km2 compared to Calgary's 238/km2. In the first few days Cailey and I marveled at how we could walk downtown from our place within 10 minutes. Walking to downtown slowly lost its appeal as we live atop a long steep-ish hill so it's a bit of a drag getting home...but it's exercise.

Leeds General Infirmary 

Walking downtown the architecture looks much older than Alberta. It's reminds me of some of the Parliament buildings in Ottawa. The Leeds campus is a large mix of new and old buildings. The traditional Great Hall is a beautiful building (very Harry Potter-esque, on the inside and out) vs. the Roger Stevens Building which is a very strange building to get around.  The campus is very pretty and very green, especially compared to the University of Calgary this time of year. 

Leeds University Great Hall

Cailey and I have very different class schedules. Cailey's is much more...flexible...than mine but we're both very excited for our courses. I'm excited for two of my geology courses which have field work components. In Explosive Volcanic Deposits we'll be mapping Scafell Pike in the Lake District and in Advanced Sedimentology we'll be mapping turbidite deposits in the SW of England. Cailey is looking forward to Traditional Alcoholic Beverages where she'll be learning about the history, culture and chemistry around brewing beer, and for her final project she gets to actually brew her own batch! 

We've been settling in to a more relaxed pace after finding our swanked out pad. We've become addicted to tea biscuits, mostly Ginger Hobnobs and regular Hobnobs for that fact. But we've weaned ourselves off of those when we realized that each biscuit contains 4% of your daily fat. 2 packs in 2 days was way too too much. There's a large selection of tea here and we chose Yorkshire Tea on high recommendations from our landlord who said it was the best tea in the UK.

Between getting ready for school and getting our flat functional we've been to two of the four climbing gyms in Leeds, the Depot, and the Leeds Wall. The Depot is a large dedicated bouldering gym with good music and very well set routes. The Leeds Wall is in a giant warehouse and they use a lot of the vertical space. You bring your own rope to lead, but roughly half the routes are lead only.  Routes are graded on the french system so that'll take a while to get use to.  None of the climbing gyms in Leeds are very accessible without a car, with the exception of the University wall which is lackluster but a five minute walk from our flat. We've been relying on the kindness of the university climbing club for rides to and from the climbing walls. Weather has been keeping us from getting outside for climbing and I'm getting antsy to get out on grit. Fingers crossed.

So far Leeds has been great and we're looking forward to the next 5 months here and getting around the UK.