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.
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