🌍 LSE Summer School x GoodGym #3

Once again, running has proven it has the power to bring people from different cultures together. Denzel the GoodGym run leader took students from New York, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Denmark & Belgium through the streets of London.

This was the 3rd of the LSE Summer School x GoodGym group run series, ongoing until mid August.

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Once again, all of us meet outside of The World Turned Upside Down globe where everyone got acquainted before we got into our warm ups. With the weather being a bit cooler, it made the run a lot easier. The team found out very early on that running through central London in the afternoon can be a bit of a challenge so I gave them tips on how to navigate the busy streets safely.

The run reached it's more enjoyable stage once we reached Green Park. A good number of the team wanted to find good running spots in central so running through Green Park was like finding gold to them. As we enjoyed not having to swerve in and out through groups of people, we eventually ended up at Buckingham Palace. Unfortunately the front of the gate was very busy and the group wanted to finish in time to watch the England match, so I made sure to get a picture for them where we could get a lot of Buckingham Palace in the background.

From there we ended up running down The Mall, a very iconic running spot as it's where the finish line is for the London Marathon. This lead to a whole conversation about marathons in general and who would actually run one. We were happy to find out that Johannes and Elias have both already run a marathon, both in under 4 hours.

We soon reached Westminster where everyone got to see the iconic red phone booth, it was a big surprise for them to find out that modern Londoners don't actually use them anymore. Everyone got their cameras out when we reached the Big Ben, everyone knew it would be big but the actual size was a big surprise. The team were then blessed with another great central running route, a straight line down from Westminster to Temple near the Thames. The route only had a small amount of crossings and there's a lot of space for groups to run through without disturbance.

Now we've reached the final stretch where we ran up a hill in Strand before taking a short route back to LSE. The team all had a good amount of running experience so the distance wasn't a problem, plus they really enjoyed getting to explore London properly. I took the team through some cool down stretches then we parted ways to go watch the England match. Another successful run.

A Monday afternoon visit for Mrs S, and it was a warm one in central London. As we ran down the list, she got stuck on the type of pasta that's a bit thicker than spaghetti, and between us we threw out all known variations of pasta until we finally arrived at linguine...thankfully the Waitrose at John Lewis had exactly what she wanted on the pasta front, and pretty much everything else too bar a couple of items - I was offered a glass of water with the recently bought elderflower cordial in it by way of post walk refreshment, which hit the spot perfectly.

A cooler Monday afternoon walk from Mr R's front gate to Tesco and back with the now very familiar list and reusable bag in hand - I played a little memory game of picking items without referring to the list, and nearly got a full house, just the tin of prunes caught me out...

One of Gurseva's regular volunteers cooked up a storm on Saturday, so everyone was treated to kidney bean soup, potatos and mixed veg alongside the regular veggie rice.

There was lots of food to give out so we could be generous with the portions. There were a lot of compliments about the food!

Yesterday, there were only two volunteers signed up to help distribute food this evening. Without more helpers, the charity was about to cancel. Goodgym to the rescue!

Thanks mainly to Goodgym Greenwich, we were able to rustle up 7 helpers to assist Jas, and we were able to go ahead.

Today there was veggie rice, bread and biscuits to hand out. And because of the heat, the standard hot chocolate and coffee was replaced by milkshakes to cool everyone down in the heat.

We made a great team, and managed to hand most of the food out while chatting to the crowd that showed up, and each other. Within the hour all food was gone and we packed up and dispersed to catch the England kick off!

I like the fact that Miss N sends me to the (wide range of) local Turkish supermarkets around Church St Market, it certainly widens my horizons on what you can buy... - this week it was a visit to see Sinbad to find a couple of boxes of Dates, that Miss N had kindly taken a picture of, and for which she also gave me excellent instructions on where to find in the shop. A quick tour of Aldi, and we were all good for another week.