LonDon.

Hyde Park

For the first four days of our holiday we were in London. We paid more money than is morally acceptable for meals, and learnt how to use the tube, and never once went to Buckingham Palace. We had breakfast with friends, visited The Globe, walked through Hyde Park, saw The Hobbit while jet-lagged (do not recommend) and resisted the urge to touch actual Ancient Egyptian artefacts in the British Museum.

I don't want to discuss how much this dessert cost me.

British Museum, home to all the stuff the British have stolen.

London is kind of incredible. Probably I need to visit more massive cities to properly compare it. But if you’ve not been there, it’s larger than you can possibly conceive, while still being manageable. You can get to everything easily enough, and almost everywhere has something worth seeing.

At the end of our holiday we came back and spent another four days in Londonia. We stayed in a different area and were blown away by how different everything was. Every restaurant had Shisha pipes, Eastern European men gathered in large groups on the street (doing what, I’ll never know) and the tube station had a garden in it.

Bayswater

That’s the thing about London. While Australians might throw the word ‘multicultural’ around like tomato sauce at a Barbie, we don’t really have any idea what it truly means. In London, you can experience a whole wealth of cultures, accents, foods and influences. And there tends to be pockets of London where people who identify with certain cultures live and play. We went to Brick Lane, where every restaurant is Bangladeshi, and men stand outside and accost you, convincing you to come in, eat, drink, enjoy their discount, don’t listen to that guy, he’s lying to you. The influence of Middle Eastern Islamic culture means that there are late night dessert shops everywhere. Don’t want to drink alcohol? they seem to say, neither do we. Come eat ice-cream! To which I say, um… yes?!

I spent most of our second stint in London feeling sick and awful. I had a cold, but it was also cold and wet outside most of the time, so being outside was a horrible time. But also, nothing was going to stop me from squeezing out the last few drops of our holiday. We did less tourist things in those last few days and more hanging out with people we know who live over there. Just eating and drinking with them, seeing things that they like about London, doing things with them that they would probably be doing anyway.

And it was in those moments that I began to see why they live there.

On the tube back to our hotel after the Brick Lane night, I hung off the pole in the middle of the car(riage) and glowed with quiet energy as I babbled at Boyfriend all of the reasons we should do it, or could make it work.

I’m not saying we’re gonna, but I’m not saying we won’t. It no longer seems impossible.

 

Things you see on the tube dot tumblr dot com

Woah. You guys. I’ve just spent a month in the UK. We’ve been back for less than a week and already it feels like a dream, or something that happened to someone else, or something that happened four years ago.

Basically when I think back to all the things Boyfriend and I did in those thirty days, I feel like we were drunk or something. And now I am living through the holiday hangover. I’m happy to be home (my own bed! My own shower! A fridge! My laptop! Joyous), but I can’t believe how incredibly lucky we are to be able to travel, to see stuff, to do stuff, on the other side of the world and I’m sad it’s over.

But I’m back to talking to you, dear reader, every week if we can both manage it, and that’s awesome. Also you should know I’m probably going to be blogging about our holiday for the next few weeks.