My flight to London
from Edinburgh was delayed, but only by 15 minutes. When I arrived at
Stansted airport, my case came through quickly and it was easy to
catch the train into central London. The train itself however, got
caught behind a much slower train and ended up taking an hour and a
half rather than the usual hour to get to Liverpool Street station! I
needed to get to the East Aldgate tube station on the Hammersmith
line (Liverpool is the Central line), but wasn't sure where to go to
catch it. The lady at the information desk told me that it was only
about a 5 minute walk, and said that I would be able to find it
easily...
I must have asked 10
people how to get there; some had no idea and others had a vague idea
of the direction I needed to head in, but one nice girl looked it up
on her i-phone for me (I miss my data so much!), so I followed her
directions, and some signs, but then it wasn't where we had thought,
so I began asking again. Several people pointed down the road and
said it was 'Just down the road' (always adding the quintessential
“You can't miss it”). However I walked and walked and still
couldn't find it! I was lucky enough to ask a pair of women who had a
map and had come from the Tower Hill stop on the District Line
Railway, and I had been going to Aldgate East to connect to the DLR,
so I went there instead! I got off at Beckton, and found the street
my accommodation was on easily enough, but for the life of me I could
not find number 207! I walked up and down the road several times, but
the numbers jumped from 191 to 232 and no one else seemed to know
either. I tried calling the host I had booked the accommodation
through, but she did not answer so I sat on the pavement for awhile
and eventually she called me back and explained that it was Flat 207
at number 191 (it would have been helpful if it had said that in the
directions she gave me!).
The lady who owns the
flat and rents the rooms was very specific about keeping everything
clean when I booked, i.e. sweeping floor daily and cleaning the
shower out after every use. When I rang her about the location she
also mentioned that the stairwell was not very clean but assured me
that inside the flat all the rooms were very clean. So I lugged my
suitcase up 3 flights of stained, cigarette littered stairs and the
other 2 flatmates Paolo and Marush let me in. I asked who I was
supposed to give the (100GBP) deposit to and they said neither of
them! I went into my room. It was not as clean as I had been
expecting, with marks and chips off the walls, crooked curtains and a
cupboard that almost fell apart when I opened it! There was no living
area, just 3 rooms, a tiny kitchen and a bathroom, it was very
isolating! I had a shower, and discovered that the shower and ceiling
were covered in mould and the shower head had come off the wall so
you had to hold it up while you showered. The bathroom also reeked of
smoke – so badly that I literally had to block my nose!
The shower was the deal
breaker – I could not stay in the flat. I also found it strange
that the host had been so emphatic about her guests being clean, and
I wondered if perhaps she did not realise what sort of a state her
flat was in, so I sent her some photos (included in this blog). She
rang me and said that it had been clean when she visited the week
before. There is no way that mould like that builds up over one week,
and I suspect that what she deemed 'clean' is a long way off what I
would consider clean, especially living in a first world country!
When I said that it was not acceptable she said that it wasn't a five
star hotel and maybe I expected too much. Maybe I had, either way I
did not want to stay there for the 5 nights I had booked. I told her
this, found a place to check into the next morning and figured I
would be okay there overnight (at least the room itself didn't smell
like smoke.
I went to bed early,
tired from a long day of travel and woke up in the middle of the
night to find fleas/ticks (some species of insect crawling on me)! I
could see quite a few 'bugs' on the bed and in the doona. There were
2 kinds, some like ticks/fleas and some more like small beetles
(which I assume were bed bugs). Needless to say, I was disgusted! I
spent the next 8hours sitting on the floor (as far away from the bed
as I could!) waiting until I could check in somewhere else. I left
the flat at 8:30am and checked in at a guest house/inn in East Ham,
right around the corner from the tube. It felt like a luxury resort
compared to what I'd come from! I had a lovely spacious twin room,
there was a nice CLEAN bathroom and a huge modern kitchen with a
washer/dryer and iron, etc. Now I just have to try and fight to get
my money back from the first lot of accommodation!
