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...