3 posts tagged “london”
It's been sensory overload so -inspired by the awesomeness of twitter- I am just going to give little headings and comments... Maybe a few photos that don't belong to me.
There will be more photos and video actually created by me in the next few days. We're taking this blog offroad and going non-linear! Wooooo!
First Impression
London is exactly what you expect it to look like. That sounds facetious but it's not. No where else is exactly what you expect it to be like... In fact it is so familiar it looks fake. Like someone has built a theme-park replica of London in the style of Old Sydney Town, MOTAT, etc.
But I think I get this 'mini' impression because the buildings that are nineteenth century or earlier have slightly smaller door and window dimensions because people were more hobbit size back then. It's a little bit creepy but awesome.
On Having Foreign Flatmates
Heidi lives with a veritable Benetton ad of different nationalities and she has a theory behind it which I like. That crap about not wanting to be a kiwi who goes to London and only hangs out with other kiwis is actually more cliched that the kiwi that goes to London and does hang out with other kiwis.
But it's unavoidable.
Here's why. Think of your home town. Your social group is filled with friends you have had since primary/high school. When was the last time you inducted a new member? A decade ago? Exactly.
So why would Londoners be any different? What in hell would they want with a bunch of Antipodeans who view their hometown as a tourist attraction? The things they want to do are the things you want to do in your home town. Hang out with relatives, replenish your groceries, sleep in, play PS3, gossip about the slut from high school who is divorced and living in a trailer with three kids.
Now, kiwis and other internationals actually want a new social group and want to engage with the city in a more intense way.
You see? It's literally impossible to insert yourself into a foreign culture and completely deny your upbringing. So if I hear one more kiwi/australian say they don't want to hang out with other kiwi/australians I am going to stab them.
Which brings me to:
Stabbing
There's actually heaps more stabbings than get reported internationally. And it's never too soon to make jokes about it. Usually in the context of going somewhere for a drink. Example: "where is the cheapest place to get a drink around here without getting stabbed?"
Hyde Park
As mentioned on facebook, no Victorian prostitutes waiting to get murdered which was a little disappointing.
The first fifteen squirrels weren't disappointing, either. But its on about your sixteenth squirrel sighting when you realise that you haven't just been incredible fortunate in seeing so many squirrels... The park is literally overrun with the fuckers and it was probably squirrel armies not Jack The Ripper that killed all those prostitutes.
And the Diana memorial fountain really is absolute rubbish. It's clearly designed by someone who found her annoying and pointless. Someone like me. Or, oddly enough, Germain Greer.
Heidi's Magical Adventure
She begged me not to talk to Shashma about this hilarious incident so I am going to blog about it instead.
Heidi met us after work (2:30pm) at Liverpool Station -which is mere metres from her workplace- and then spenty forty minutes getting us extremely lost on the way to a pub that was literally down the road.
During this magical adventure through the warehouses of Shoreditch we passed her work. Twice.
Not content with ruining our afternoon plans, she then invited us to dinner in Brick Lane which meant standing up Shashma.
All in all, a truly excellent afternoon and many thanks must go to Ms Regan
Brick Lane
Awesome. At least my food was... Heidi's wasn't as great. But that's the luck of the draw.
Customs
Passing customs at Heathrow for the first time as a permanent resident who has never been here before was easier than getting the Heathrow Express train.
I was literally asked more questions and given a more thorough credentials check waiting to board the train than I was as I entered the country.
And think about it... An Australian passport that was issued with a family visa in Wellington because of a gay de facto relationship with a kiwi travelling on an Irish passport who has never been to Ireland in his life.
If that's not some terrorist shit then I don't know what is.
iPhones
Sigh. Not yet as James's HSBC card hasn't been activated. This is because you can't ask for or set a pin in a branch. HSBC will instead send a letter to itself (at your local branch) that it will then destroy after two days if you haven't claimed it.
Then it will send itself another letter.
This is my bureaucratic nightmare. When we asked if we could just choose our own pin instead the woman behind the counter looked at us as if we just asked if she had any spare cats we could rape.
Fosters
I'll be damned. It wasn't just the buzz at the New Orleans Jazz Festival. The export shit really is drinkable. That's several countries worth of proof now.
Not that I drink it. It just comes free with a sandwich around the corner where I am staying so we've had it a bit.
Instead, we're currently having a love affair with cider over ice. Yep.... roll on more cliches!
Tom's drinks
This was last night in Westminster. You know you're not in kansas anymore when the two block walk from the tube stop to the delightful old english pub walks you past numerous policemen with machine guns and half million dollar fortified SUV convoys roar past you down tiny cobblestone streets.
It's creepy because you know that they are the kinds of cars that literally cannot stop if you are in the way and will mow you down rather than risk an abduction/assassination of whatever deposed/exiled African president is behind the black windows.
All in all it was an awesome night.
Our Accommodation
We're vacating our hotel room this morning on our way to Abbie and Tan's place.
Now listen. Very. Carefully.
Anyone wanting to holiday in London needs to hit me and James up for details about this place. Sixty nine quid. Own bathroom. Free internet. Reasonable size room (we have 3 chairs, coffee table, desk, cupboard, etc) and it's metres from a tube stop.
Some things are walkable, others aren't. But I don't think you'll find better in Zone 2 (it's on the cusp on Zone 1).
Peace!
Sydney to Bangkok
Premium economy is SO worth it… unless you were in our seats. Or the seats behind us. In fact, especially the seats behind us. None of the reading lights worked on our side of the premium economy cabin, our VOD didn't work (but would play whatever was on), neither did the couples' in the seats behind us... and the woman behind us was getting cold water dripped on her from the air conditioning! Suck!!
Plus, it transpired that whenever I plugged my Mac into the power socket, it shorted out the entire entertainment circuit in the cabin. Apparently Boeing plugs aren't set up to take such "powerful" computers. (It's more than a year old and was bottom of the line back then.) But then the same thing happened when I plugged in my super-ancient, super-shit three year old laptop.
This sounds like complaining but really I'm not. The cabin manager, Kerry, was extremely helpful.
In fact, a couple of hours into the flight when I ran out of battery and I lied about being a writer who actually had to do some work on this flight (I really just wanted to watch the DVDs that I had packed specially) he took me all through business class and first class to see if there were any plugs that worked. This was just so he could find somewhere to charge it. I wasn't getting an upgrade. He wasn't that nice.
Oh my god, and first class is freaky. I wasn't even sure if I was still on the plane anymore. We emerged up the stairs into this very dark room. You could just make out a few pods spaced out evenly like alien eggs -but none of the occupants. I was pretty drunk so the fact that I remember it as being a little misty is probably because it was like a scene from Alien and I have subsequently collapsed both memories together in my head.
Then this woman (the flight attendant) emerged from out of the darkness at the front of the plane, abruptly whispering at us about what it was we were doing there. (The guardian of the eggs!)
Yeah, so travelling first class must be something like returning to the womb... But with champagne.
Anyway, Kerry worked out that if we removed the battery from the Mac or the acer, my "super computers" wouldn't short the entire plane and lead to us dropping out of the sky over South East Asia.
Here's something that's a little weird... I have absolutely no recollection of dinner. None. According to James I was quite lucid, but I must have been pretty wasted or something. And what's weird is that I don't get memory loss from intoxication. I do recall having a weird mental freak out whilst listening to the ipod after dinner so maybe the whole "changing my life forever" thing temporarily snapped my mind or something?
Nah, it was probably the booze.
When we landed in Bangkok we were told that we didn't have to get off the plane if we wanted to. But we totally wanted to because we stank like we had been holidaying inside a dead yak.
So we raced off to the Qantas club, having been told that the plane will be re-boarding in half an hour. That should be just enough time. Of course the Qantas Club was ages away so we worked up a sweat doing that "airport waddle" that everyone does when they're trying to walk fast with multiple bags but not actually break into a run because they don't want everyone else to think they're holding up a plane or are lost in any way.
We get there, shower while two middle-aged thai women waited just outside the frosted glass of each shower cubicle. (It was weird, but not weird enough to stop me. If they see anything, well, that's their problem. I hope that hadn't recently eaten.)
I finished before James and waited out in the main area by the bar.
The bar!
Must. Drink. Free. Alcohol.
Factoring in that I only had a few minutes before James got out, and that we had to get back into a shaky, metal object, and that I was wearing winter clothes in the tropics, and that I had just brushed my teeth... Wine was out of the question.
But there wasn't enough time for a beer.
Bailey's Irish Cream! On the rocks.
I had time to throw two of them back before James emerged and we had to airport waddle off. It made sense at the time but, to be completely honest, I wouldn't recommend it.
Bangkok to London
After Bangkok they turned the lights out.. I took a sleeping pill and
went to sleep. Apparently you are supposed to sleep for six hours and
then wake up on the dot.
Mine lasted exactly three hours and then I was completely awake and lucid. (“three, two, one… you're back in the room.”) This is not surprising as I managed to build up a tolerance to rohypnol in my teens -and that's an illegal date rape drug.
Anyway, the VOD didn’t work, the plug for the laptop didn’t work and neither did the reading lights plus I felt completely awake.
I was literally trapped in the dark slowly going insane.
This only lasted an hour (they re-set everybody's in-seat entertainment just for me. Suck it!) and then it was back to Billy Connolly’s World Tour of Ireland, England and Wales. (Incidentally a really handy intro to being a foreigner in England.) But I made sure I mentioned it to several of the cabin crew during that hour of dark boredom. This has relevance later. Read on.
Oh yeah. Our flight plan took us over Western Pakistan, Northern Afghanistan, up into the Middle East, over Iran, skirting under the Caspian Sea -just missing Georgia- before flying in through Eastern Europe.
We literally toured the conflict zones of the world. I found that hilarious.
Anyway, so we finally make it over Eastern Europe and I swap seats with James (as agreed) to get the window. Being that I had never seen Europe before in my life I was extremely excited.
And then disappointed.
Clouds.
Clouds to the horizon. Ain't never seen nothing like it. We literally saw NOTHING until Germany, which we only caught a glimpse of.
Also only a few glimpses of North West Europe, one little patch of farmland in England and then… London.
In the peculiar way that typifies the English weather, it was somehow a lovely summer day underneath the thick cumulus blanket that completely blotted out the sun.
And it was worth the wait.
There was an audible gasp as the plane dropped below the clouds. The
guys sitting in front of us were traveling on business and they fly
regularly into London. I eavesdropped as they remarked on never having
seen it look that good from the air in fifteen years.
It was way better than this but I didn't take any photos, did I? So this is someone else's shitty (compared to mine) arrival in London town. But you get the idea/
The impressed guys in front of us even got some of the lesser known tourist destinations wrong/didn’t recognize them, it was that clear. But Gordon, the big fat nerd who has spent the last eight weeks reading guidebooks cover-to-cover got them right. (“Oooh. Look. That must be some kind of palace.” It’s Hampton Court you losers!)
So yay. Best landing ever.
Oh, and as a result of the snafu with our seats we each got a hundred bucks worth of duty free gift vouchers for anything in the in-flight magazine. We both picked things to the total value of exactly one hundred dollars. I love being that passive aggressive.
So thanks Qantas!
Your planes explode mid-air and are somehow less sophisticated than my three year old, broken laptop but we got some great noise canceling headphones and a universal power adaptor out of it.
Yes, thank you. I WILL be renewing my Qantas Club membership.
Probably because it is.
When I moved to New Zealand almost five years ago I went through the whole process of throwing things out, giving them away, selling them (Ha! If you ever want to work out how well your life is going try and see what price you can get for the crap in it)... By the time I was through was was left of the first 22 years of my life could basically fit in a shoebox.
And now I am doing it all over again... This time for two people.
Familiarity shouldn't necessarily feel odd but this bout does. It feels like something more... something karmic. Let me explain why.
James leaves tomorrow to spend a week and a half in New York (for work). He's the one that does all our personal admin because, if you have met me, you know I am positively allergic to it. So rather than letting out a masculine shriek at the prospect of dealing with Her Majesty's bureaucracy I am choosing to look at it as a life lesson.
Karmic point one.
Karmic point two is being forced to make a value assessment on your entire existence. When I left Australia I was throwing out old report cards, photos of friends from when I was younger... Hell, I sure wasn't taking any of that with me. Out it goes!
Thing about it was... I didn't especially like the life I was leaving in Australia. I was definitely ready for a new one. But this life, my kiwi life... Well, I like it. Heck, I am even a bit proud of it.
But proud of it how much?
Enough to save those Lord of The Rings posters I got in Wellington the weekend that PJ won all those oscars and the town went crazy? They have extreme sentimental value to me... It was the first time I had gone on a 'kiwi' holiday on my own, having only been in the country for a couple of weeks.
Enough to save the memory blocks I made for James for Valentines Day and his birthday?
Or the seashell my mother brought back from Santiago at the end of the Camino Trail?
To your eyes the answers to this may be 'yes, if they mean something to you' but these are just the things my eyes landed on from where I am sitting right now. All these little things add up.
Clothes and homeware can be given to good will, furniture and computers can be sold... But it is probably one of the cruellest ironies that the things you least want to part with are the ones that are the most likely headed for landfill.
This 'odd' familiarity I feel I am taking as a lesson. The first time I moved countries, dare I say it, I may have been a little too rash with the disposing of mementos. That's why it feels like this time I get another chance to put a bit more thought into it.
The books, however, are coming with me. No matter what I am never starting my library from scratch again. Once bitten....
