London one-way!

Another waste of a weekend mostly due to the miserable atmosphere with the pouring rain. 

Ok, maybe that’s exaggerating because we still did a few things, but there’s just wasted time and I really want to utilise it as best I can. I don’t know my plans and even though I’ve started working, which is such a great thing, I’ve lost that time to explore, so I only have the weekends – like all normal people who work! 

Friday night I wasn’t up for a late night on the other side of town so Lija went to Ali’s on her own. I felt bad that I haven’t been for a run all week, but the weather’s just been bad, so I walked up to Stepney Green to grab some movies from Blockbusters. It’s a half hour walk or so, only walk cos I’d just eaten dinner so I wasn’t up for a run. The clouds were dark and rolling fast, it started spitting a bit but I managed to get there and back without getting rained on. I ended up watching Miss Potter, with Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor. It’s about the life of Beatrix Potter and it was such a beautiful film. I didn’t get to sleep until late. 

On Saturday I woke up at 10.30 to a txt from Lija, saying that she’d b back soon, so I went down to the net café to talk to mum and dad for a bit – gotta love the free international calls through Skype! I got a lasagne portion from Budgens and had that with salad for lunch. I watched Little Miss Sunshine, which is an awesome film – just hilarious – and sat with the recipe books I borrowed from the library, choosing the tasty, easy ones to write in my book. 

Simon came home (after being out all night – the tube of shame, not the walk of shame) and asked me if I wanted to go watch the footy with him. He left first, cos I was still doing things, but he texted me where he was. The Slug and Lettuce is a pub in Fulham that shows AFL games on skyTV, but Fulham is on the other side of town, so it took forever and I didn’t get there till 4pm. But it was so worth it, although I’ve been checking the sports news in the weekly TNT, I haven’t actually seen a game of footy since I left home, and this is the time of year when I’m supposed to be sitting outside in front of the fire with dad watching the Pies play on a Saturday afternoon. 

Well, I didn’t get to see the Pies, but I did watch the Essendon/Melbourne game – which was exciting to watch that incredible comeback by the Bombers. We also saw the start of Geelong/Swans game, and I was happy enough to leave when we did because the Cats were winning. The pub was pretty cool, they have all the AFL scarves hanging up, and signed Jerseys from a few different teams – they had a Pies one there, and also a Melbourne Storm one – all the boys signed it last year. 

I watched a bit of rugby at the next pub we went to, we were catching up with some of Simon’s mates. Mates from his travels at The Slug, and his footy mates at The Fest, a pub dedicated to Munich’s Octoberfest. The girls are dressed in the little skirts and pushed out chest, like Drew Barrymore in Charlie’s Angels! Two guys, one big guy with a beer gut, a beard, and long grizzly hair, and the other with the geeky Jack-Osbourne-pre-weight-loss look with the thick black rimmed glasses, these two guys were the live act for the night, and they turned out to be pretty damn good. 

We left the pub at about eleven to head off to a house party, but I wasn’t too keen for a late night, and Lija was (finally) on her way home, snotty nose gunky throat and all, so we both met up at Embankment station, and went home. On Sunday Ali, Lija and I all went out to find the Spitalfields market. We ended up running into

We stopped and had lunch at a small café. I had an omelette with avocado, tomato and cheese salad, and the other two had lasagne. After we walked Ali back to the station, along the way we finally found Spitalfields, so went back to there. It’s actually under cover, half in a building, half under a roof as big (but not as high) as an airplane hanger. And yet, there wasn’t really a whole lot there. The fruit and vegie section was dismal, although they had a few nice art and craft type stalls, clothes, posters, books, etc. Because our market stalking didn’t produce any fresh vegetables we had to stop off at Bethnal Green Tescos for shopping. Lucky we went when we did because it closes at 4pm on a Sunday. Again, a limited supply of fresh fives (fruit and vegies – five a day to stay healthy). We watched a bit of the Diana tribute concert, then put on the movie Stranger Than Fiction, with Will Ferrel, Emma Thompson, Dustin Hoffman, Maggie Gyllenhall, and Queen Latifah. All these stars in a little known and not very popular film. I saw it when I went to WINTV in February in Ballarat. I love it because it’s about so many things, from a boring existence to the fun of figuring out if life is a comedy or a tragedy. How an author works, writers’ block, the words used to describe actions – “the folders sweeping across the table like the shores on the sand”. We didn’t bother much with dinner, did stir through tomato pesto sauce with cheese and ham filled pasta at around tenish. That was when it began to get dark and actually felt like dinner time.