First off, if you are wondering what it is like travelling on the tube in London, this little video sums it up pretty well!
I took a day trip out to Greenwich a couple of weekends ago. What a cool place! There are markets and opp-shops everywhere selling the most cool stuff. If you ever need vintage clothing then this is the place to look. It is also intersected by the prime meridian. There is a huge observatory on the hill where they pretty much invented standardised time, among other things. It is quite interesting to wander around and learn a little about the history of clock-making, timekeeping and navigation. It also answered a bit of a niggling question for me.....everywhere you go over here, there seems to be a clock tower and you think, why don’t we have those at home. Before there were accurate clocks, the townspeople would get the time from the town clock to wind their watch each day. I guess most places in Australia are just too young to have ever really needed it!
Having lots of nights out and seen some great concerts. Saw ‘The hives’, and ‘Queens of the stone age’ and met a Columbian traveller at the hives who is here studying. Last weekend, my final one in London we rented a car with an Aussie dude from work, to go and explore some of the countryside. Taking the plunge to drive in London I must say was freaking me out a bit, but proved to be less dramatic than I was expecting. Despite the traffic being ridiculous, as long as you are not in a hurry (you never can be!) things are generally OK. City drivers seem terribly courteous, even stopping their car to wave you in from a side street every single time! As long as you can get used to looking all the way to the end of every street you turn in to, since they are never wide enough for two cars to pass! The motorway is a different story....when you are screaming along at around 120kph in the pouring rain and people arc up their little hatchbacks and go flying past at what I would guess is about 160kph, then cut across three lanes without indicating, almost taking the front bumper off your car in the process, one tends to get a little nervous. We managed to get through it without any accidents and got to see Stonehenge just in time for the rain to clear, even if it was blowing a gale.
Also saw a pretty cool ruined castle in a nearby town and stopped there for a yummy lamb shank and pint in an old English pub. It was the perfect way to spend a rainy afternoon. We then made our way up to Avebury where the stone circles surround the entire town. Got slightly disorientated en route and arrived right on sunset so after a brief wander around the stones in the freezing cold, we declared ‘stuff these rocks, let’s go to the pub!’
So...from where time begins to where it is killed....the transit lounge! I am waiting for my flight to Vancouver which is delayed two hours already. It has been a shitty morning as the weather has been atrocious and driving in peak hour in bad weather is no fun in any city, especially here. I couldn’t find a petrol station to fill up the car before returning it, had I known the flight was delayed, I would have looked a bit harder as they charged me what translates to about AU$4.50 per litre to top it up ‘ouch!’. Not happy! At least the lady at the counter let me check in with....um....substantially more luggage than I should have. Lucky!
To be continued......
.......It is now my fifth night in Vancouver and I am over the jetlag and finally gotten around to posting this! I am thinking that it is a pretty cool place, there seems to be a lot of stuff going on, it sort of has the cultural buzz of Melbourne but with this amazingly laid back undertone. Even the tall city buildings look like they have all taken a step backwards to have a bit of personal space. The people are really friendly too which is very welcoming. I find it pretty cool that everyone can be so laid back, yet super efficient. I had a tax number issued less than 24 hours after entering the country. We have also found that you can open a bank account online! One thing that is very uncool though, is trying to buy a sim card for your mobile. This would have to have been one of the most tedious experiences of my life! You can’t just go and grab a prepaid sim like everywhere else, oh no, those will only work in the city where they are issued! So you have to sign up for a contract which is like tiptoeing through a minefield. You have to pay your usual X amount per month, but then you gotta pay an extra monthly network access fee, a fee to call the emergency services, a fee for voicemail, a fee to see the calling numbers....the list goes on and then when you are through all that, it costs the same per minute to receive calls as to make them! Unbelievable!
We also found that Nick, our buddy from Wanaka had just come over to play at Whistler for the season, so we caught up with him for a drunken Friday night and spent the next day rather hung over! We are still trying to decide what to do with ourselves....if only you can have big city salaries and career choices with mountain lifestyle, but that is probably not going to happen so we need to make some decisions before the money runs out.
We are looking to move into a share house as the hostel is quite expensive. The only budget hostels we have found are in the less appealing parts of town and after going for a quick visit, we really are not that enthused to stay there. Vancouver is really beautiful and modern, but there is a dark side too. It is the mildest city in Canada weatherwise, so the nations homeless are drawn here in the masses. You really can’t go anywhere without tripping over a sleeping bag on the pavement somewhere, even in the ritzy areas. Head down to the seedy part of town and it is pretty disturbing, rows of dealers and prostitutes line the streets waiting to sell you whatever it is they are peddling. We watched as a crack-smoking delinquent graffitied the front of a shop while its owner left the premises, only glancing at him in casual indifference. It is quite odd that all this goes on just a block or two from the CBD, and as depraved as it is, it seems not to be especially dangerous. In the middle of it all we saw a new convertible audi just parked on the street, and there are plenty of everyday people that appear to go about their business there without a second thought. Still, we really don’t want to live there if we can help it!
