the little differences that keep life interesting...

slowly but surely i'm coming across some of the little differences in language which can lead to embaressment and mirth. it started when i told Alex that i'd put zucchini in the stir fry. "around here," i was told in a straightforward, but helpful way, "it's called a corgette."

eggplants are aubergines, but a loo is still a loo. i'm pretty sure i could get away with referring to it as a bog as well... although not in front of the Queen where it's a lavataory.

a buck's night is a stag night, but hens are still hens. i was corrected on that factoid when we spotted 3 of them, all going in different directions, meeting on a street corner in Piccadilly Circus on a night out in the city. Alex is in the habit of correcting me on these things almost with the sternness of a school ma'am, saying "In Britain, which is where you are, it's called a..." because sometimes i need reminding...

warm beer actually means room temperature... or at least the temperature of the cellar it's stored in, the tap pumps it up the pipes rather than it being force-fed under pressure, needing a couple of pulls to pour the pint and contrary to expectations it's quite pleasantly drinkable. Fosters is in fact served on tap in most of the pubs i've been in so far, but they serve beer as well.

a bottlo or bottle shop is an off-licence and i couldn't help but laugh out loud when we walked into one this evening and found that they had XXXX by the carton in pride of place in the window. when you can get some seriously drinkable polish and czech and belgian beers on the cheap i have no idea why people drink that dirty water, but if i find someone selling Carlton Draught, VB or Pure Blonde i'm getting some, even if just the educate some of the locals.

the public transport system is fantastic and not a shambles, but you do still hear people complain about it when they get delayed a couple of minutes. it takes a lot to get me to use public transport at home. a gun to the head is usually effective, or being in Sydney or Melbourne for a couple of days can usually do it. i've been in a car once since i got here, and then for less than 5 minutes. i have no idea when it'll happen again but i know it won't be soon. the buses still run most of the main routes throughout the night, so before you go out to Islington for an "you can sleep when you're dead" bender you just make sure there's an N-service running and you're set... or you pile as many people as possible into a cab and crash somewhere central.

a kebab uses a pita bread half the size of what i'm used to which is split open and filled, rather than being rolled up. how people eat this on the move i'm still trying to work out. i haven't been able to eat one without it falling to pieces yet.

the hot water is turned off and on like a lightswitch to save power and the water pressure would embarress a 4 year old with a weak bladder but somehow everyone else seems to be able to get all the shampoo out of their hair.

people don't complain about how far they have to walk to get somewhere unless it's over half an hour, it's raining and they forgot their jacket. i remember the moans of complaint i've heard from people when you park at the far end of the car park from the supermarket. here i've carried two armloads of groceries home from the shop in hail and been grateful it was only 25 minutes.

young people don't share houses or flats here - they share rooms so they can afford the rent. you can live comfortably in London on P15k/year. an acceptable starting wage is 7-8/hour, but if you know where to look you can have lunch for P3, and a healthy all you can eat vegetarian buffet for P4.50. enough pre-made soups, pizzas and some pasta and sauces to last 4-5 days can cost as little as a tenner if you're careful and when surrounded by so much decent, cheap food people still flock to Maccas where the prices are almost dollar-for-pound. Pizza Hut charges P11 for a large pizza, but Sainsburys will sell you two for P2.80 that take 5 minutes in the oven.

people sleep shoulder to ankle (we're in a 2 bedroom flat with 6 people in it (the living room's been converted to a bedroom)), but they don't complain about overcrowding. terrace houses are the norm until you get half an hour out of the CBD so the population density is staggering. that sort of density makes it worth running buses, trains and tubes ever 3-5 minutes in peak hours and each one is comfortably packed with people and if a line's starting to get chockers in the morning THEY RUN MORE FUCKING BUSES! a high density draws in the merchants, so when i walk out my front door there's a fried chicken place to the left and a 24-hour convenience store to the right. if i walk 3 minutes i'll go past 2 more fried chicken places, 2 chinese take aways, 3 off-licence convenience stores, one bottlo, a tappas place, an eritrean restaurant, 2 kebab/burger & chips takeaways, 2 high-end delis, 2 dry cleaners, a laundromat, 2 real estate agents and a great southern indian restaurant and this is achieveable because it's so packed together that it's worth it. no fucker has a back yard, but no one i've spoken to cares or else they'd move out to the 'burbs. people don't complain - they just get on with it. everyone gripes, i mean everyone, everywhere, but people don't complain and pontificate about how the government should do something (the whinging pom is dead, or so it seems. they're all too busy apologising for shit they have no control over, like the weather, or the trains running late. i don't understand it either). if they don't like it they fuck off to Manchester or Liverpool. Birmingham's a couple of hours away by train, so you can still come into the city on the weekends. hell - there are people who live in the Midlands and commute into London every day by train, then tube the rest of the way to the CBD, taking two to three hours each way, 5-6 days a week. no one expects to have it all, all at once, so they move around as it suits them.

it's all remarkably entertaining, and i'm loving every confused glance i get when i use a phrase i thought was universal, but turns out it isn't. i told a South African guy today that i was going to bomb something, which i then had to explain meant that i was going to do something poorly and fail (in this case intentionally. alas i failed at failing, but that's another story). i'm loving being different, and obviously so, but only when i want to be... like whenever i open my mouth, grin and say g'day! otherwise, no one notices yet another guy walking by wearing black which is working out pretty well for me right now...

a room with a view...

i've been quiet over the last couple of days - after a verbose week or so i dropped off the radar in the face of a huge lack of motivation. my hangover on sunday didn't help one bit. it was Alex's boyfriend Ian's birthday party on saturday night and i wound up getting drunk with the boys out in Islington down the road and around the corner from Angel station. a good night had and i feel i held my end up fairly well. there was one conversation i had with a floppy-haired lad:

"How ye doin? Are ye noo drinkin?
course i am - just havin a break, y'know?
"...I dinn'a think Australians took breaks..."

we got back to Lambeth at somewhere past 4 in the morning after a freezing late night bus ride which i'd have had difficulty navigating while sober, and chose not to think about much while drunk. Alex knows, so we followed Alex. in Alex we trust. joyously, one of the nearby take-aways was open at that ungodly hour and so we got home with hot chips (covered in garlic sauce) in hand.

sunday was one long hangover. i dragged myself up at 1:30 in the afternoon and spent the next 11 hours feeling sorry for myself. a walk down to the local grocers led to the acquisition a fresh baguette, ham, cheese and tomato and this filled the hole, but didn't fix the head. i spent most of the day playing Unreal Tournament sitting in the armchair in the living room and not moving much, apart to refill my water glass.

yesterday was similarly unmotivated. i made the trip into town again to apply for jobs jobs jobs but wasn't performing and so i called it early and returned to my laptop and armchair. the job hunt continues to get me down. i can't help but feel that i'm just about to crack something open and then it all dances away laughing in my face. my hard work on Lou's CV and applications seems to have paid off though - she's landed herself an interview for tomorrow. this is awesome - we need a win.

that said, i'm writing this lying with my headphones on, At The Drive-In playing off my laptop, lying in my own bed in the room we secured a week and a half back. our own room where we impose upon no one and can spread out shit out wherever we please. it's freezing fucking cold outside - i went out to check out the sleety-snow earlier and even with 2 jackets on i was COLD, but it's pleasant in here. the double-glazing keeps the road-noise down to... nothing really. the drone of the cooling fans on our laptops is louder most of the time. there's ample furniture provided with more hanging space and shelving than we need. it's going to be a comfortable base of operations, even if we have absolutely nowhere to put anyone up who comes to visit. it'd be nice to have a flat of our own with our own rooms and a couch we could have surfers on, but have you seen the rents in this fucking town???

we got the move done in the afternoon, after i got back from Leicester Square. it took two trips, mostly because we had to go back to borrow bedding from Alex. that girl is way too nice for her own good. once we get some cash coming in we're taking her and her boyfriend out to an Eritrean place down the road that she's been wanting to go to for ages (i remember her mentioning off-hand once, weeks ago). i've even got Ian on-side and made him promise to find excuses to stop her from going until we get our shit sorted.

regardless, it took us about half an hour to rearrange the room to our liking - shifting things here and there, in and out, until we had a better idea as to where everything would fit. the result is a massive difference which feels more open than before and should suit our needs quite well. we got some photos of what it was like when we got here, if to prove the state of the paint and whatnot. once we've settled in and stuck some things on the walls and hung the flag somewhere (i brought a flag with me. it reminds me of home...) and stopped living out of our fucking suitcases i'll have to take some new ones. it'll be after i've fucking dusted, too - i was almost regretting wearing black when i was shifting the furniture around here i was so covered in dust.

tomorrow i'll go back into town and make more phone calls. i've taken to using the bus since it's almost as quick as the tube, but less than half the price. this is becoming important... not because i've run out of money per se, more that i'm getting tighter than a rabbi on the day before pay-day and i'm trying to stretch my available cash further. it's been so long since i've really had to worry about cash that it's taken me these last 3 weeks to remind myself what it's like to be unemployed with no job lined up. hey - maybe tomorrow, yeah?

city of lights and sirens...

there are two impressions of this place which i think will remain with me for a long, long time... that is, unless something else particularly nasty or, conversely, awesome happens. one of these is the near constant sound of sirens you get in the inner city. staying with Lou's cousin Alex just off Brixton Rd in South Lambeth it seemed like every 10 minutes there'll be another siren. walking across Westminster Bridge, or past Buckingham Palace, or just about anywhere in Zone 1 and there'll be cops screaming past in full lights & sirens mode. walking back towards the Underground along Portabello Rd in Notting Hill and there was an ambulance parting the crowds like they were the Red Sea.

out in Beckenham has been much, much quieter. almost disconcertingly so. last night when i stuck my head out the door for some fresh air before bed (Lou's Gran keeps the heat high in here, so if i air out my room it cools down enough to be comfortable to sleep in) and all i could hear was a cat yowling off in the distance... probably being eaten by one of the urban foxes they get around here. i never see stray cats and dogs, but i've seen a few foxes. it's a little disconcerting - a reminder that i'm a long way from home.

out in the cold night air it was quiet. what i SAW, however, was 5 aeroplanes in the sky... probably circling Gattwick. remember, there are 3 or 4 different airports strung around this city: Heathrow, Gattwick and Luton (that i can remember off the top of my head). it was constant at Alex's place - in their attic room there were two skylight/windows. i'd be lying on my mattress on the floor under one of these watching the aeroplanes flying overhead, almost tracking the street, one after another after another. standing out the front of the house on the way in or out and there was a procession, one following the next, 15, maybe 30 seconds apart. look up in the sky around here and it's as likely to be a plane as a bird.

the drone of aeroplanes and the wail of sirens. the rattle of trains and the honking of taxis. standing on a street corner and hearing french, then spanish, then getting on a bus and being surrounded by germans. the loud expat aussies giving shit to the drunken irish guy while surrounded by english voices in the beer garden of a pub just off the south end of London Bridge. the sounds of seven and a half million people crammed into an area only slightly larger than Sydney. a cacophony constantly split by the oft ignored sound of this minute's emergency flying past to the flash of blue lights while miracles of engineering carrying hundreds of souls at a time soar overhead. the strangest thing is that despite all that when people ask me "so what did you think of London?" it's probably not going to come up. strange, really...

this post is mostly filler. like my day, really...

i said i was going to do it: i did it. today i did sweet fuck all. ok, i talked to my mum and The Boy on Skype and went for a walk and picked up some groceries and i applied for a stack of jobs and received calls from some interesting pimps and watched Hellboy 2 and Lou did comment that for a quiet day i seemed to have gotten a whole lot done, but the important aspect was that i didn't go site-seeing or running around or into Leicester Square or anything like that. i bummed around the house and i ate 2 whole sit-down meals (both of which were home-made... one of them by me!) and rested.

tomorrow's going to be busy, and the rest of this week, and this weekend and... well, so on, so i needed this day. i'm really glad i had it.

most by train, the rest by rain...

quick research online indicates that the London Underground handles around three and a half million passenger journeys every weekday. most of these people seemed to be at Victoria station this evening, standing in the covered main square trying to work out where the hell they had to be to catch their trains. it had the air of a place that's usually quite ordered and sane most days, if insanely busy. today, on the other hand, it was raining - the first serious rain i've seen since we got here. an "incident" at Herne Hill had delayed the train i was to catch. most of the rest of the lines were sporting delays and in a place where even the overlands come every 10-20 minutes at peak a 15 minute delay seems to cause madness, overcrowding and delays far greater than the root of the matter would suggest.

so it was somewhat eery getting to Victoria to find this in front of me. i had no idea where i needed to be, so i joined the crowd with the Gotye remix album playing in my right ear while my left listened for announcements and my eyes scanned the boards until i found the station i was headed to, and thereby the line i needed to catch. all good and sorted, now which platfor... oh... it doesn't say. hmm. watching the minutes ticking away, and getting sick of being pushed and jostled as people's trains arrived and they dove for the gates and eventually i saw the number 3 flick up on the appropriate line and i screamed off to find it.

3.5 million passenger journeys which would indicate, with appropriate averaging, 1.75 million people using the tubes. factor in buses and overlands and you have a scarily effective public transport system that can comfortably move the population of Melbourne in a day without getting particularly upset about it. throw in the statistic that at any given time somewhere there's a blockage on a tube, or some "incident" on the overland and you realise how amazingly robust the system is.

the ride in this morning took about 20-25 minutes, after a 12 minute walk and a few more standing on the platform trying not to look like a tourist. i'd have gotten to my job agency three quarters of an hour earlier if i hadn't been walking past Buckingham Palace just in time to see the Changing of the Guard and when it happens to be going on when you're passing... well, i figured i'd be a mug not to stop and watch.

i'm making progress on my job hunt. momentum, we'll call it. i was exhausted when i got there, and by the time i left somewhere past 5:30 i just wanted to be somewhere i could take my boots off. maintaining an enthusiastic phone voice is tiring. it's worse when you're wrecked to start with. tomorrow i plan on lying around the lovely house in Beckenham reading my book, watching movies on my laptop and pretending i'm on holiday.

still, getting out i lost all sense of direction and couldn't remember the way to Trafalgar Square (i had planned on saving myself a couple of stations on the tube by walking) so i figured sod it and hopped on the tube. a change at Embankment took me to Victoria and the literally hundreds of people in the atrium which looked like it could have hosted some of the concerts i've been to. eventually i was standing on the packed overland heading south reading one of the free tabloid newspapers that are given out everywhere i look while it dawdled on at half-speed on account of the wet tracks and after fuck-knows how long i was disgorged with a couple of hundred other people out into rainy Beckenham Junction.

so i'm walking the 12 minutes back to the house getting wet and loving it. i remembered by the first corner that i was wearing a hoodie so my hat went forwards for the first time in years , the hood went up and i was another bum with a baseball cap on under a hoodie with earphones in, dressed in black, walking down a rainy London street (and before you argue my geography, i'm INSIDE the M25 and fuck you). i was chastised when i got in for not calling from the train station, but what the hell? walking in the rain with Gotye playing was actually very pleasant, especially with the hood up and brim of my cap forward keeping the rain out of my face.

so i finally got to experience London's famous rain. i'm not complaining. the funniest moment had to be thinking to myself oh, this is good... we need the rai... wait a minute! i'm so used to looking at any rain as a blessing which may, if we're lucky, fall into the dams that it was my instant thought here.

right now i'm just looking forward to my first designated rest-day in nearly 4 weeks. i'll probably wind up doing SOMETHING, but at least i'm not planning to and for the time being that's the important thing...

take excitement where you can...

i just got my first callback from a job application in this country. it sounds silly and trivial, i know, but after a week of running around, applying for anything under the sun that it looks like i can do without getting so bored that i'll want to kill my colleagues and learning to game the system the simple joy of firing off a CV and having someone call you 20 minutes later to confirm that you'll have time to talk on Tuesday is...
refreshing.
uplifting.
gratifying.
cause for minor celebration.

the job market here is, to put it bluntly, super-saturated and full of sharks. there are a lot of agencies who are cutting each other's throats in order to survive. in Canberra i'll deal with around a dozen different pimping agencies. here they talk about the top 100. in Canberra the agencies hold anywhere between 5 and 15% of the market. here the top performers squabble over 1-2% if they're lucky. cracking into it is hard work and without the help of the consulting company i'm dealing through i'd be getting eaten alive.

the thing is that back home i'd fire a resume off on seek.com.au with no covering letter of accompaniment - just a name, number and a CV - pull my mobile out and wait the 5-10 minutes for it to ring. simply put, my Australian CV makes pimps wet themselves and dive for the phone so that they can plead me to let them put me in for a job. here i'm a little fish begging the pimps to take notice. it's why i've been so fucking wrecked at the end of each day, getting back to base and passing out at 11 because i'm too exhausted to pick up my book.

the thing is that when i get back home, with what i'll have grown accustomed to here, i'm going to be on fire. the pimps in Canberra won't know what fucking hit them. i'm picking up job-hunting skills here which you just don't need in that market but if you think i won't use them to maximum advantage later then i've been sadly underestimated.

ok, one little callback isn't the world. i've been sent down to clients a couple of times in the last few days and it's no big thing, but i needed the ego boost and the push to my confidence. it's a little peek of the sun out from between the clouds that reminds me that coming here wasn't completely insane and i'll leverage it into a pint at the pub because... well, sometimes it's nice to celebrate the little things and keep the smile on your face even if what you're celebrating is completely trivial...

pop culture references...

everywhere i go in this town i find myself on the goddamn Monopoly board. we'd been here five minutes and we found ourselves on The Strand, then Trafalgar Square. today i wound up on Pall Mall by accident, the walked the length of Piccadilly. i've been to Oxford St, Fleet St and Coventry St. i'm spending my days at the moment applying for jobs around the corner for Leicester Square. Whitehall, Park Lane, i've even wound up on Old Kent Road for no particular reason.

it keeps going, too. i've been out the front of St Paul's where the old lady's feeding the birds in Mary Poppins. sooner or later i'm going to wind up at Abbey Rd because... well, why the hell not?

everywhere we've been going we keep seeing these round blue signs saying that some Prime Minister or whomever lived here from xxxx to xxyy. you'll be walking through Hyde Park (of which i know at least 3 back home, none of them cast a shadow on the original) and there'll be a block of marble inscribed with a message saying that this thing happened in this place. walking past some looted egyptian relics we noticed a little sign saying that the scars on the sphynx were from schrapnel from a bomb dropped on the road nearby during the Blitz.

this town is so incredibly steeped in history and if you just walk from some random place A to other location B you'll likely trip over them. this place has a habit of smacking you in the eyes before you even realised you were somewhere Interesting and there is so very much here that's Interesting...

WE FOUND A ROOM!!!

after all of 2 days of looking (it was a long and arduous journey), Lou and i have managed to secure ourselves long-term lodgings. at 130Pound/week, it's actually reasonably cheap, especially for the area, and it's about 50 metres from the front of the Oval tube station. this puts us right on the Northern line, which intersects at various points with enough lines and buses to get us... well, pretty much wherever we need to go for work. i'm pretty excited by it all - guaranteed stability, a place of our own, all that sort of thing.

about that - it's actually a room with 2 single beds in it, shared with a chinese couple and one other, but then that's pretty much what this place is like. it's sharehouses for anyone who doesn't have more money than god, or doesn't mind spending most of their income on their accomodation. i have no time for this, and no intention of signing a lease or whatever so renting a room is more than fine with me.

whatever the case, in another couple of weeks (the room won't be empty until the 30th, although we may be able to be in a couple of days earlier) we'll be moving into this little place and of course photos will be forthcoming. there's a likelihood that there'll be a backerpackers stint between now and then, but at least we know that we're secure after that and there are other options in play that i'll discuss if they come about.

in other news, i've spent the last 2 days reworking my CV for the UK market and then comprehensively whoring it out to all and sundry. i've had a couple of decent bites out of it so far - it's been referred to the client twice today (which means i'm in the top 3-6), and i'm in meeting a pimp tomorrow morning to discuss "opportunities in the market". all in all, apart from being tired and passing out at 11:00 each night (yes, scary i know) it's been a good, productive day. oh, and ignoring the whole "stuck in the tube" thing - i'm going to drink away the memory of that later at the pub.

yay! a visit to a real english pub with real english people... ok, an english girl and a scot but who's counting...

panic attack...

the tube station was full of people when i got there - a hundred, two? the air was still, and it was the next best thing to silent. i've not seen this before - there's always people talking, sounds of trains, something... but now there's nothing. a voice comes over the PA advising of a broken-down train down the line and resulting delays.

the next train is announced by a building breeze down the platform - air rushing ahead of the train coming down the tunnel. at the next station the line branches east-west, and this one's for the west line via London Bridge and Bank, so i wait. it's chockers - people squeezed against the doors. some get off, others get on. the next train arrives and it's the same, but what the hell? i only have 12 minutes to ride so i squeeze on with the rest of the cattle and get crushed in from behind as one or two more people try to crush on.

it's hot and stuffy in here. i'm in contact with at least 5 people that i can count and there's barely room to breathe while i stand there listening to Cog on my mp3 player. next thing i know the train's slowing... slowing... stopped in the dark between the stations. another train's pulled out ahead from a siding and there'll be a short wait. i'm standing, crammed like spam in a tin between stations on a train while i watch the people around me start to sweat and the doors are closed and there's nowhere to go and there's no way out and i can't get out i can't get out i can't i can't get fucking out i can't out out can't FUCK....

a couple of minutes that stretch to days and the train started moving. more people get out at Kennington than get on and there's some room. more get out at Waterloo and after a year's passed we're at Leicester Square. i walk around the wet streets for a couple of minutes to get my nerves back in order. i don't want to think about what i'd have done if there'd been a problem and i'd been stuck there much longer than that. i'm going to be wary of packed trains for the next little while, i think...

harden up, princess...

walking walking walking. you know that the bus costs 90p, which is the equivalent of something like $2.50? the Underground (tube in the local vernacular) is 2Pound. as a result, there's been a lot of walking. when you walk into the Money Changer and $2700 in hundreds turns into 945 Pounds (and you had to haggle to get it up from 870) you do start to freak the fuck out.

yesterday was entertaining. we caught the bus up to London Bridge, at which point we realised we were near to Shakespeare's Globe Theatre so we went and found it. we were actually headed for the Tower of London, but what the hell. just near to The Globe was the Millenium Bridge (erm... yeah. about that...) which crosses over right up to St Paul's Cathedral. being a sunday, it wasn't open for tourists, but we found the steps where the children in Mary Poppins want to feed the birds. onwards now, we managed to find the Tower without too much trouble and did a bog-lap around the outside rather than pay the P18 to get in. we had a quick lunch nearby, and this was the point at which i made Lou walk. we walked along the Thames all along the north bank to Embankment Station (google it), then across, past the London Eye and then further to Vauxhall Cross then back past the Oval to where we're staying (you can also google Crewdson Rd, Lambeth if you're bored.

oh, the whining.... of which there was actually very little. i've been making her walk quite a lot since we got here. my philosophy is that unless we're in a hurry to get from here to the next point then we might as well save a quid and leg it. that, and we've seen some rather entertaining stuff we'd not have seen otherwise if we'd been in the tube, like the eqyptian obelish and sphinx's which were pillaged by some englishman and set along the Thames. regardless, i've taken to telling Lou to "harden up, princess" whenever she starts to speak of hardship, or you know, sore feet. it's amused us both a little, and the laugh usually keeps us going for another kilometre.

in other news, it's now day 5, and it's starting to feel a little less like a holiday. today has been spent either applying for jobs, speaking to agencies or looking at places to stay. we've had one inspection so far (which was on an estate and... well, we'll see how desperate we get before we live on an estate, let's put it that way) and another two to come in an hour or so. with any luck one or the other of these ones (both of which are walking-distance from here... mua ha ha ha!) will be decent and we can consider ourselves sorted. a chunk of the float i exchanged today has been reserved for deposit and rent in advcance, etc. it's not going to last particularly long, but that's what it was for so i'll not complain too much.

i just need to hold onto my accent and i'm sure we'll all be find. a couple of times i've found myself starting to mimic the locals and this has been... unacceptable. i don't know, maybe it'd be nice to be able to put on a genuine english accent when i get back. while i'm here, on the other hand, i'm happy with mine thankyou very much. the other night, out on the town, i uttered "bloody oath" at... something. the enormous screens in Piccadilly Circus or something and Alex remarked that she'd expected a "strewth" out of me which is the ONLY reason why, a couple of hours later, i gave her one at the length of the line outside a club called "TigerTiger". i'll not use it again, i swear... unless the situation calls for it, i suppose.

gotta go now - photos to label, rooms to see. we're biting the bullet and looking at rooms, rather than flats. we COULD get a nice place in the area for 195Pound/week, but... well sod it. not when we can pay 120 and get all bills and internet etc included in the cost. power, i've been told, is EXPENSIVE here. the folks in the place we're staying turn everything off at the wall to save juice so i'm going to assume that it's superfucking expensive.

much to see, much to do... not that it seems like i'll be getting to see or do much of it in the next couple of days with the the work involved in getting a job in this town. still, all part of the adventure...

never judge a book after 30 hours without sleep...

i was sitting on the bus, riding past Waterloo station and Alex was giving us instructions and directions and pointing out the things we went past. Lou and i were trying to act cool, but i'm glad i had my shades on because i was quietly freaking the fuck out. this i was not handling well at all.

i think it was at about this point that we were both thinking "why did i get off that fucking plane? hell - why did i get ON that fucking plant?? i mean... look at this place!"

London is daunting when you first get here, especially for a young Raven who's never lived anywhere bigger than Perth. i mean, i've been to Melbourne and Sydney, but i've been lucky enough to take each in smaller chunks. land here and take one look at the Tube Map when you haven't had enough coffee and it's like someone threw spaghetti at the page and wrote station-names all over it. the Tube Map is a goddamn Jackson Pollock. a reasonably-sized London map has both surface-rail and Tube lines all over it. for someone who's trying to work out where to meet an old friend this can become... confusing. i was trying to keep track of everything she was saying, and the places i was, and what route the bus was taking, and my brain was icing over and turning into a christmas cake.

the biggest mistake Alex made, i think, was that in being so incredibly helpful she gave us both a case of gobsmack overload. this place is a pill which needs to be attacked in small chunks. try to swallow it all at once and you'll choke.

the next day and we're both feeling a whole lot better about the world. certainly, i know that when we hit the streets Lou and i had a chat where we quietly agreed that failure was certainly an option. right now i'm handling things ok. getting back into job-hunting this morning gave me a degree of normalcy which helped to put my feet back on the ground and make it feel that i wasn't going to burn through my cash in an instant and find myself destitute. we're starting to put together plans for the coming days and this, also, is keeping me calm. i've been finding it hard to relax, but i'm getting there.

i have to say, though, that people here are actually pretty polite. i must have been jostled five or six times in Sydney when Cymun and Yun took me out. just people who refused to move aside for you. here it's happened just once, and i think that guy just zigged when he should have zagged. in Sydney i refuse to dodge people because they seem to expect me to give way. here i don't mind at all because everyone's giving way to everyone else. the vibe is very, very cool. i'm starting to dig it here quite a lot. that doesn't mean that success is assured - Lou's currently looking up information on paid clinical trials as something we can do to make some extra cash - still, we'll know more on that front after next week's job-hunting. i have an address i can put down on forms, regular access to email and a mobile phone that doesn't cost me an arm and a leg to use, which means that i have everything i need to find a job in this town. things are looking up...

10554 miles from home...

24 hours of travel sounds like a long time, and it is... except that it didn't really feel all that long at all. i'd like to say that i slept though most of it which is why i didn't notice, but apart from a 3ish hour period before we hit Abu Dhabi i didn't. the inflight movies, my book, and a miserable lebanese man who cried on my shoulder for 15 minutes in the night kept things from getting too dull.

i'd just spent 2 days hanging around Sydney proving to be poor company for Cymun & Yun. the malaise which struck me back in Canberra lingered until my last night in town and only slowly abated while they poured tea and good food into me. my weekend of good food and activity turned into small potions which i picked at and me being croaky and grumpy. the last night had me with Lou and Paul, and Lou's folks. a pleasant dinner out at a little set-course French place in Crow's nest and the next day we were off, trapped in an aluminium can cruising at 39000 feet.

i can say this much from Etihad - they got us here safe, and on time. they might haven't have had the best staff (although i'll not complain much. our main mostie (male hostie) was alright. still, 10 hours into the flight i wasn't going into the toilets without my shoes on is all i'm saying. after 14:40 in the air, we had barely time to scratch ourselves at Abu Dhabi airport (which doesn't look like it's been updated since the 60's) before we were back in the air, then it was another 7:20 across to Heathrow, watching the sun rise over europe with a nice view over the channel before we circled london once or twice and landed on time(!!).

through immigration and customs without any trouble from the sleepy staff and out the door to see a sign with our names on it. Lou's cousin Alex had come to meet us and help get our sleep-deprived arses across London while we quietly freaked the fuck out. after a guided tour of the Tube and busses, we found ourselves in the top flat in a terrace just north of Brixton drinking tea and discussing sleeping arrangements. it's tiny - the living room's about the size of my bedroom back at the flat in Canberra, but it's all bright and airy, the kitchen's nice and the bedrooms are actually quite sizeable and above-all, you can walk into Westminster and Trafalgar Square from here. i know, because today we did it by accident (yeah, yeah, "whoops! i slipped and wound up out the back-end of Buckingham Palace!" - shut up).

since then we've been exploring. the decision was made that we'd go out and a) walk and b) get some sunshine (yes, the sun shines in London. SHUT UP!) so that we could get our circadian rhythms alighed with local, so we headed down to Brixton to pick up local SIM cards, towels (we'd left ours back in Canberra to save weight) and other odds and ends needed to support life before walking back up to the local tube station (Oval). and heading to Tottenham Court Rd to meet up with Moonbug.

i'm finding that somehow i just keep finding places i've been hearing about for forever. for example, we got to Soho an hour and a half early, so we went and found a coffee. we sit down outside a cafe and across the road is Forbidden Planet - a comic store that Shadow went on about at great length. totally random. we're walking through Soho and suddenly Lisa says "oh, and this is Covent Garden!" today we found The Strand (completely randomly - it happened to be the next left). we walk along for a while because it shadowed the river before Lou realised that we'd managed to find Trafalgar Square. next thing we know and there's Westminster Abbey, Dowling St (looks like a demiliterized-zone) and Big Ben.

with TV series and movies ad nauseum based in this place, i guess you're going to see some shit you've heard about, but still...

that's really it so far - not bad for being here something like 35 hours so far. today wound up being a great long walk simply because we didn't have anything else planned. still, we're in the sort of location where you can pull that off. i've started applying for any job that has the word "Server" in the title, but doesn't stipulate "MSCE is essential". we have accomodation here for the next week or so, then there's a likelihood that we'll be heading up to Birmingham for a couple of days. with any luck i'll hear some more from these jobs i've been applying for which will make it much easlier to put some thought into slightly more permanent accomodation.

are we there yet?

it's nearly midnight... somewhere, anyway.... Sydney, i think. that means Canberra and Melbourne. Tokyo? Dili? oh, and Hobart. we always forget Hobart. me, i have no fucking clue what the fucking time is wherever it is i'm over. it's dark outside and the exterior cameras on the plane (feed from which is streamed through the inflight entertainment system - very cool at takeoff) are giving me static now. either way, while it's a bit hard to say where i am, what with the inflight GPS seeming to be unplugged, midnight sydney time means we've been in the air for a little less than 7 hours, and so a touch less than half-way through our 14 hour, 40 minute flight. wheeee!

so why the hell am i sitting here bashing drivel into my little Eee and not trying to get some absurdly undervalued sleep? did someone suggest that i might have been having sleeping problems since leaving a pretty little mouse at her doorstep in the cold light of morning? not that i think it's related - i'm sure it's the illness, headaches, coughing, that sort of thing.

brief interlude:

when you fly you can wind up meeting some interesting people. take the guy sobbing across the aisle from me. before he spent 10 minutes irrigating my shoulder he was saying that he's off to Tripoli... so see his mother who's ill. diabetes, maybe some other complications. his breath smells of the booze he's been scrounging up in the first-class cabin (he's been in and out of there all flight). why he told me this i have the feeling i'll never know, but he seemed to really want to tell someone... anyone. now he's sitting across sobbing and the hostie-lads have come by to make sure that he's not causing me any trouble. poor lad. he's going to feel it when he gets to wherever he's going and his hangover shows up on its connecting flight.

:interlude end

either way, what i was talking about before i was interruped was that since i've been sleeping so poorly i can't be bothered spending the next two or three hours trying to sleep in this shitty fucking cattle-class seat and instead get on with completely wearing myself out with the hope that perhaps i'll sleep in the second leg.

since last i had the time to scratch myself, let alone write more than twenty words in a single space, i've been all over the place. back to the flat from the airport on the Shadow & Bosslady Taxi Service, and more or less straight to bed. my visa finally arrived on tuesday, which was a relief, and the event was celebrated by packing. by wednesday about a third of my crap had been packed and deployed. by thursday i was sick as a fucking dog, and remained that way until yesterday. on friday i couldn't put off the duty any further and so the day was spent packing the rest, and the evening moving. by saturday i wasn't feeling any better, but there was still work to do - final cleanup and a repack. Paul & Lou got out the door on time and i went off to see my sweetheart. sunday reared its cold heart way too soon and by 10 i was on the highway with a stomach full of tea and poptarts and a head full of glue, fresh from the only breakup i've ever had that i didn't want to do over.

but who am i trying to fool here? i know i've not gone into any real detail about young Mc.D. i haven't felt it particularly pertinent. i'd prefer to discuss situations personally rather than try to scattergun useful information. it was more important, really, that the general idea of the situation be noted, rather than to go into the details. this means that you'd have missed a lot of my good mood over the last couple of months, and the little brunette who's been behind the larger percentage of it. it was fun, but it had a use-by date and now i'm on an aeroplane somewhere over the indian ocean and it's gone. more or less, anyway. discussions have been had. notices of intent exchanged. an agreement has been made to "see" and so "see" we shall and the rest of it we'll deal with when i make it home... one way or the other.

i spent my time in Sydney wearing a groove into Cymun & Yun's couch. they, wonderful folks that they are, fed me lots of tea and made me get up long enough to take some exercise and get some food into me. i'd have liked to have been more active, but what do you do? i was falling over i was so sick, and there was no way i was going to survive this flight if i was feeling that dead.

as it was, Lou's folks got us to the airport well on time and we didn't even have any problems with being over our luggage allowances. i woke up this morning after sod-all sleep feeling generally ok, even if i did still have a lingering cough.


Some more important stuff than "what"...

i received a message from Matt last monday asking whether i'd left Canberra for good yet. i hadn't - at that point i was waiting for my connecting flight in Sydney. it was good timing on his part though, because i'd wanted to get a chance to sit around, drink some beers and shoot the breeze for a couple of hours.

Sandra cooked dinner to co-incide with my dropping my bed and other assorted odds and ends over at hers. i managed to get through watching half of Wall-E before i had to call the game due to exhaustion.

Shadow had the day off on the wednesday, so dropping my comics, music and movies around meant that i had the chance to hang and crap on for a couple of hours. you see, considerate people organise things in such a way as to give maximum benefit to all parties involved, even when they have to work around someone's particular needs.

everything that needed to get done got done. some of it was a bit more sketchy than would have been ideal, but it got done.

i know there was more to this, but i just got hit by a wave of weary which i think may be a signal from the gods that i may actually be allowed to sleep and as much as i love giving you people something to read, i love sleep way more. in fact, if i were cursed by a witch and told that i could sleep well for the rest of my life, or watch my friends suffer you should know now that you are all destined to burn, and i'd throw my family in the fire as well just to be sure. so with that charming note:

fuck you i'm sleeping.


later, after Abu Dhabi...

i got some sleep, thank the gods. three? maybe 4 hours in the end, interrupted only when the cabin lights turned on and we were advised that we'd soon be beginning our descent into Abu Dhabi International. the airport looks like it was built in the 60's and hasn't changed much since. i've been told that they sell gold bars on the lower floor but i neveer got that far. the first thing we did was to find a toilet that didn't have floors covered in urine, then fought our way around until we found out which departure lounge we needed to be in before slumping into a couple of chairs and reading a newspaper someone had left there. it was 2AM in Abu Dhabi and the place was full of people waiting for connecting flights and neither of us had any interest in shopping for half an hour then being stuck standing when the lounge got too packed so we got through security and chilled out instead.

Ethihad Airline is... an inexpensive way to travel. the staff are reasonably polite and the entertainment system works. ohterwise, i can't say i've been impressed. cattle-class on Singapore Air is more comfortable. even Qantas is quite acceptable. i'm sure i'll have the opportunity to fly with some really shitty 3rd-9th-rate carriers over time, but i can't say that i'll be prioritising these guys unless they're massively cheaper than the competition.

i've another 5 hours to go before Heathrow and i'm not particularly in the mood for anything. it occurs to me that i've been on the move for more than a day now, what with the rush to get to the airport, then the three or so hours we hung around Kingsford Smith before actually getting on the plane. Lou and Paully had a tearful (and private) farewell. it's been an emotional time for her which is probably why the lucky bitch slept for seven or eight hours on the first leg, and is blissfully passed out next to me again now. as a minor consolation she seemed like she hadn't rested a bit when she woke up on approach so i'll not get too jealous. meanwhile, i'm going to read my book and wait for the sun to rise over europe...