Studio to Street: Week one

This has been the week that I´ve landed and gotten settled in the YWAM base in London. This post is a bit of shambles, I hope you enjoy the pictures. You can go to Naomi´s site for more pictures of our internship.

The eight interns, from left to right: Joel (Argentina), Donia (Switzerland), me, Mary Alice (US),
Aaron (US), Nadia (Switzerland), Victoria (Canada) and Noami (also Canada).

One of the landmarks we visited was the Big Ben,
here we also prayed for the government of England.
  

YWAM in the UK and Wales have in the last weeks gone through a tough time where they were in danger of losing the visa´s for 350 of the 600 volunteers that work with YWAM here. The UK government has been tightening their immigration laws.
But through God´s grace YWAM was allowed to keep their status that allows them to invite foreign-workers into the country. Praise God for that.

The «Art House», where we sleep and eat.
(It´s only the left half of the blue building)

God´s welcome card to London

If I have the chance, I love to go everywhere on foot, or by bike, but London´s just too big. So we spend much time on busses and trains, which gives me a lot of time to do sketching. Unfortunately, the sketchbooks I brought from Norway are a bit too big to take along on the buss. Luckily, at a church service at Hillsong Bermondsey, they had put out notebooks on the chairs for everyone. I took two.
These books are the perfect pocket-size for the «on the go» pace of this city.

Nice surprise: a free new pocket-size sketchbook.

City-life

Since we are all crammed into one house, my personal «time alone with God» has in the evenings been moved outdoors, where I walk the moonlit streets of the suburbs. Another thing I´d have to get used to is not having a whole deluxe basement studio for myself. In the house I´m doing drawing, inking and colouring in a couch in our livingroom.
The place we work on our projects is a big church-building, here we have lots of space. We will be here mondays, wednesdays and fridays, and work on our projects.

I have seen lots of old churches in London, but this is the first one I´ve seen from the inside.
Our team is allowed to use this church in Notting Hill to make our art and practice music and dance.
Sitting at the table drawing is Victoria, she is on the «Visual Arts» track with me.

On thursdays and on saturdays we are going into to the city centre to hang out in areas of Camden and Soho, which are the artistic- and entertainment-areas of London.