Leaving London for a while...

By the time everyone reads this, chances are I will either be in or on my way to Spain. We've moved out of our flat, and are spending the night in a nearby hostel, before leaving for Barcelona tomorrow morning.

Much like the last couple of weeks, this week has been dedicated to seeing everything I wanted to in London, and I can safely say I pretty much saw everything I came here to see, and more.

Sarah and myself headed via Regent's Park to the London Zoo last Thursday, which was alright, despite the average weather throughout the day. The Australian exhibit was somewhat amusing, and animals that probably weren't used to such weather were soaked in rain and shivering. London Zoo is really poor in comparison to Perth Zoo, and also a lot smaller, although I haven't been to Perth Zoo in ages.









London Zoo


After the zoo, we caught the bus over to Camden, and walked around Camden Lock, and Camden Markets. Markets over here are everywhere, and are good places to pick up heaps of cheap clothes and awesome food. We'll probably head back there to pick some stuff up after we come back from Spain etc.

On Friday, I headed out for a day to explore central London a bit. I got off at Victoria Station, and walked past Little Ben (smaller version of the riverside one), past Victoria Palace (theater which Billy Elliott is being performed at), and towards the river. I then headed to St James's Park, and past the Churchill War Cabinet's on the way. After walking along the route of the Horse Guard, I passed Downing Street, which had a heap of heavily armed police.











I headed back to Southbank, which was considerably less crowded than when I first walked along there in June. It's a lot more relaxing and quiet this time of year, and all the tourist places are cheaper, and less crowded, which is good. I crossed over the river, and walked towards Temple, via Somerset House - which was made out to be St Petersburg Square in the James Bond movie Goldeneye.





Southbank




Somerset House


On Saturday, we headed to Portobello Market in Notting Hill. So many people, and so many stalls, it was kind of like the Royal Show, only more antiques and random junk people had in various buckets and crates on their tables. Some guy was selling old Slazenger cricket bats, complete with missing grip and peeling stickers. Who buys this stuff?






After exploring the market, we headed back to Fulham, via a stop off at Brompton Cemetary - which is a somewhat 'famous' cemetary, and also had parts of Goldeneye filmed there.



Brompton Cemetary


So, we moved out yesterday morning, and after getting settled into the hostel, we headed back to Baker Street, and went to Madame Tussauds. If you book online, and go late in the day, the entrance price is slashed from £27 to £12.50, so we took full advantage of that. It was pretty cool, and worth £12.50, but if I had paid £27 for it, I might not have been so impressed. We then headed back to Brick Lane, the heart of curry in London, and decided to head to an all you can eat Indian Buffet. Once inside, the place was PACKED, and the buffet was disgusting, but we were so hungry we didn't really think about the possible health ramifications until after we had eaten. Luckily, we didn't get sick, but thinking back to the state of the place, I think it was a bit of a roll of the dice going in there.







Madame Tussauds




Brick Lane


I think at this stage we will be home in about 3 or 4 weeks.

Until next time,

Ciao.

Heading to Spain..

Just booked our flights to Barcelona.

London Gatwick (South) To Barcelona

flight 5133; dep. Tue 30 Sep 10:55
arr. Tue 30 Sep 14:05


Yewww.

English weather sucks.

I've always been a fan of the cooler weather in Australia, but having to use public transport, live in an old house, and walk everywhere makes sunny weather all the more pleasurable. Unfortunately, there hasn't been too much of that here.

I've been pretty busy looking around London for the last few days. Sarah has preferred to stay at home, so I've gone to a few places that I didn't get the chance to go to earlier when there was more of us, generally because they were only of interest to me.

I caught the tube over to Kensington a couple of days ago, and went to Harrods, the insanely expensive and posh department store. With no intention of buying anything, I just took photos of all the cool, expensive stuff, including a set of mammoth tusks.








I then walked around the nearby Hyde Park, and followed that along to Kensington Gardens. Adjacent to this, I saw the Royal Albert Hall and the Albert Memorial Statue. There's so many cool parks here, and it happened to be a rare, nice, sunny day so the walk through the park made me long for football to kick around or something.






Yesterday I went to Southbank, and the surrounding areas. There's the popular skateboarding area underneath Festival Hall, which I had been meaning to check out. I then headed over to Tate Modern, and had a look around there. Not as interesting as I had hoped, but it was okay, I guess.








With a few hours to kill before work, I headed out to East London, more specifically Upton Park, Green Street and West Ham. Green Street has a movie based on it of the same name, although I didn't really recognise anything from the movie, except for of course, West Ham FC. The area is pretty rough, and as a consequence all the food was really cheap, so a sample of the local bakery produce kept me in good shape on the train journey back into the city. I had a look around the heart of Indian food in London, Brick Lane. I'll hopefully head back there this weekend to take advantage of one of the numerous all you can eat buffets.








With a couple more days in London, I'm still hopeful of checking out the zoo, Madame Tussauds, and going back to Camden. My last day of work is on Thursday, and we move out on Sunday. I've explored a bit of Fulham in the last week or so too, and I guess part of me will miss this house, even though we haven't been here that long. It even got the internet connected this week. Sucks we can only use it for a week, but it's better than nothing.









Fulham & Chelsea


One of the girls we live with is Spanish, and a couple other people have been to Spain, Portugal and Morocco, so we've got a bit of an idea about what to check out there. If we have time/money, we might check out a bit more of England up north, but we'll see.


Bye for nowwwwwww,

Mark.

Blue is the colour, football is the game...

We went to the Chelsea vs Bordeaux Champions League game last night, which was really cool. Chelsea ended up winning 4-0, so there was plenty of action to be seen. I picked up a match scarf and programme as a nice sort of memorabilia.












Soccer/Football games are a lot different to watch than AFL games. The umpires seem to get abused a lot less, likewise the players. A lot of the sledging is just directed at the opposition fans. The major difference is the inclusion of songs/chants that add another level of amusement to the game.

During the day, yesterday, we went to the Imperial War Museum, which was an interesting and informative experience. There was so, so much, to see, and we must have spent a good four or so hours there. They had a Holocaust Exhibition which was pretty depressing. There was a room that contained heaps of belongings to people that had been killed at Auschwitz. Shoes, combs, cups, toothbrushes, even a doll. As you leave the museum it really puts life into perspective, and how good we have it.

Oh, another thing about Europe. When they have restorations underway at museums/buildings, they will often put a canvas over the front, to make the building look as it normally would, as you can see in one of the pictures below.








We've put our room up on offer, and within an hour of doing so, we've got two interested parties that are coming to check it out tomorrow. So, if all goes well, we will be out of the flat on the 28th. We're not 100% sure on what we're doing after that, because we don't want to book anything before we're sure someone will move into the room. Flights to Barcelona were something like £50 with Ryanair, so we'll probably go with that.

Bye for now,

Mark.

London, still...

So, the lack of blog updates is essentially a result of a lack of interesting anecdotes to put in said updates. For the last week and a half or so, my life has consisted of work, hanging out at home, repeat - pretty much resigning myself to a boring life, conserving money and so on, but things are starting to change on that front.

Karl decided he wasn't enjoying London, so after a week and a half of living in our new flat, he went to stay with his family in Italy, and is set to go back to Australia in a couple of weeks, leaving just Sarah and myself at our Fulham residence.

Sarah decided she didn't like her job, and the ridiculously low wages she was getting (equated to about $11 AUD an hour!), so threw in the towel with that one, leaving myself as the only person who looked like staying here for any period of time.

Work is... average, very average. It's basically like a slave-labor factory farm of call centres. All the supervisors remind me of Nurse Ratched, albeit 20 years younger. The atmosphere at the place is horrible. I'm not sure if it's the case, but a lot of the supervisors are immigrants from Eastern European countries, so it makes me wonder if such an employer/employee relationship is just what they're used to.

The basic premise of the job, is that one must call up a list of numbers provided to them by a company - and then call up said customers, and ask them to participate in a short survey. As you can imagine, this is not an easy task, and you can end up calling up to 20 people before you get one person who is willing to dedicate 10 minutes of their time to answering boring, repetitive, 'on a scale from one to ten...' questions. I don't blame them.

Anyway, they have quotas for how many people you have to call, and even if you clearly exceed this quota, which is not an easy feat mind you, there is no encouragement or congratulations in any way shape or form, just supervisors walking around the room, advising everyone that they need to 'get another 3 surveys or your next shift will be cancelled'. I was once told off for going to the toilet mid-shift, and sternly advised.,

"Don't think you can go to the toilet, you're getting paid until 9 o'clock."

Regardless, I can't turn down the money at the moment, so I'm continuing to work there, for now.

A combination of all of the above points has made us feel that the idea of saving money over here, before travelling is not the best course of action, so we're going to leave the house at the end of the month, before travelling a bit throughout October through Spain, and hopefully Portugal and Morocco as well.

But onto more exciting news - with knowledge of our month and a bit left in Europe, we've started to get into gear in terms of seeing the sites, which we put off for a while because we knew we would be here for a while.

Yesterday, we went to Abbey Road which, once we got there, was only about 5 minutes walk from Lords CC, where we had been a couple of months earlier. After the obligatory crossing the road photo, and look at the studio nearby, we headed to Regents Park, and had a nice stroll around.









Abbey Road






Regent's Park


We then headed into Soho and Chinatown, before walking around Leicester Square. Whilst walking through the area, we were given a flyer for a standup comedy show and, seeing as it was only £5, and we wanted to see one before we left London, went. It was at this small, small underground club, with probably no more than 50 people, but it was good.



Chinatown




The comedy club





We had intended to go and see Chelsea vs Aston Villa on October 4, but that sold out before it even got to General Sale, so it seems the Chelsea vs Bordeaux Champions League game tomorrow.

Hope everyone is Perth is good, see you in about a month.