Okay so London doesn’t pun as easily as Nice does. Let’s accept it and move on.
I’ve been away for about a week and a half now and times have been crazy (I wrote ‘cray cray’ and then decided that if some potential employer googles me that might not work in my favour, but then I decided that any employer who doesn’t accept ‘cray cray’ as an apt adjective isn’t someone I want to work for so maybe I should change it back? BLOGGING IS HARD). A big part of why I wanted to take this trip was to get out of my comfort zone, and that’s definitely been a recurring theme thus far.
I arrived in London last Sunday, and, thanks largely to my lovely mother’s insistent planning and travel-adapter-giving and tube-map-app-downloading in the weeks before I left, I managed to get to my hostel with pretty much no dramas (although, looking back, 11-days-ago-Paige was so cute, not knowing how to use her Oyster card and clutching her 600 bags to her chest because she thought everyone on the tube wanted to rob her). And pretty much the minute I got to my hostel, I had made my first friend, booked an Alternative London street art tour with her, and headed out for drinks. Did you know that “schooner” is a solely Australian term? I asked for a schooner of cider, super proud of myself for having worked out how British money worked and with my 5 pound note burning a hole in my fist, and the bartender looked at me, all shifty like, and was all “Ah, you’re Australian and you’re new here.”
I mean, she was Australian too, but still. JUDGEMENT MUCH.
Wow, this is a long description, so maybe I’ll try to condense now.
My hostel was right near London Bridge, and therefore right in the thick of things. This was awesome, because I was a five minute walk from Shakespeare’s Globe, the Tate Modern, the Tower of London and the all-important Zone 1 tube station. Although, it was slightly less awesome on nights where some kind of sporting event (soccer? I feel like there’s some kind of World Cup coming up for that soon) was happening and the streets flooded with crazy sports fans chanting things. But hey, lucky by that point, after a week of living in a hostel situated above and around about 9 different pubs, I was a super-heavy sleeper.
London was fab – more theatre than I could possibly (afford to) see in a million years, dozens of museums that were both free and better stocked than any I’ve seen in Australia, and a public transport system that is so efficient that I have no idea why people even bother running to catch a train here (Seriously AngloBros, if you miss that one, there will be another one in less than five minutes! If I’M the one telling you to chill you know you’ve got a problem)
Highlights from the week included:
Accidentally happening upon a practice run for an epic military parade while attempting to catch the Changing of the Guard on our walking tour, therefore beating the crowds by a week and seeing pretty much the entire parade (minus the queen driving by behind tinted windows) before anyone else. Spoiler alert: there are lots of pimped-out horses, brass instruments and tanks. LOTS of tanks. It kind of looked like World War III, which was simultaneously exciting and terrifying
Seeing Wicked for the tenth time (double digits baby!) and being confused by the British accents, because every production I’ve seen (including all the Aussie ones) uses a twangy, American accent, and being especially confused when Elphaba’s accent violently fluctuated between British and American. That said, it turns out that the current Elphaba is Willemijn Verkaik, who is Dutch and has performed the role in three languages as well as performing it in the US and the UK, so she can probably be forgiven.
Spending hours between London and Bath and London and Oxford on the train, watching the countryside roll by, listening to my iPod and pretending to be in a super dramatic movie montage while I looked seriously out the window, and taking advantage of the free wifi on one of the trains. Oh, and actually GOING to Bath, and seeing the remains of the mineral baths from when the Romans ruled over England. And actually going to Oxford and geeking out on an Alice in Wonderland/Harry Potter Tour.
Spending the day with Helen, my Canadian friend, going to the Tate Modern and doing the aforementioned street art tour, which I will describe better on my other blog at a later date.
Spending the day with Sarah, my also Canadian friend, and being slaves to the capitalist system on Oxford street and seeing the truly awesome Good People, which is a realistic and unpretentious comedy playing on the West End right now which I thoroughly recommend.
And I think that’s it for London! I’m now in Nice, which is probably the most beautiful town/city I’ve ever been to, with more icecream and cool bars and topless women than you can shake a stick at, but I think that shaking sticks at topless women will have to wait for another day. As a teaser though, look at the place:
C’est belle, oui? Oui.