London one-way!

I spose I’ve told you about my latest trip but you don’t really know what I’m doing and where I’ve been living.

The answers are pretty easy – I’ve been back in the office writing for Moneymagpie and loving it, and sleeping on whoever would have me on their couch – for that I have to thank Lija, Sarah, Neil and especially Jasmine. The main reason I haven’t had a place to myself lately is that I’ve just been traveling so much and I really don’t have that much stuff and everyone’s been great at putting up with me! So this week I’ve let Jasmine have her place back, which I’m sure she is loving! And I’ve moved into a backpackers in Edgware Rd for several weeks. It’s so close to everywhere that I don’t need a train ticket, just a bus ticket. I can walk to work in Notting Hill, and the few care shifts that I’m doing in the evenings are also around the Notting Hill area.

It’s also given me a fresh lease on travelers and backpacking. I’m in an 8 bed dorm with Ash (from South Africa), Kayla (Chicago), Sam (Sydney), Alex (originally Texas and she looks just like Hilary Duff!), Niki (Byron Bay) and a girl from Romania. Niki has only been here for 4 weeks, fresh out of uni, so she freaked when I told her I’ve been here for 14 months! Niki and Alex dragged me out to Camden last night to party a bit, but the big party will be next weekend for Mikala’s birthday, which I’ve already been told I’m in!

Backpackers are like instant friends, my first night we all sat up until about 1 just talking and stuff. The backpackers is above the Brazen Head pub, so we have breakfast in there in the morning, and in the evening I prefer to bring my laptop down here and plug in at a table rather than sitting on my bed – a bit difficult when I have the bottom bunk. Any of you who know me well will know I have a particular aversion to the bottom bunk (apart from in Barcelona when Lija had to leave me on the bottom bunk because I was in no state to climb!) but I really had no choice here so I just hug my pink beanie pillow as I fall asleep! Don’t laugh!

Today is Saturday July 12th and Lija has finally moved out of Mary’s and into her new place in Old Street, nice and homely as I found out when unvoluntarily helping with moving stuff on Wednesday night in the pouring rain, can’t say we don’t have adventures every day! But today after I finished a shift with Mrs A, who was so happy to see me back – she thought I’d dropped off the face of the earth, I was just a bit pre-consumed on the last trip to send post cards! Anyway, so I was on the way to meet up with Lija and as usual pacing along to music, half watching where I’m going and that I’m not going to run into poles or trip over pavement (it happens quite frequently – no comments please!) and looked up to see a street festival, so i told Lija how to get there and we wandered around for a bit. It was really random, but good kids fun. We didn’t stay long because we were on the way to the British Library.

I’ve been saying that I want to go for ages, so I just decided it was one of the things I was going to do today (one of the other things was to jump on a train at Paddington and go wherever was the cheapest return ticket no matter how far…it was very tempting!) But there are a few things we saw at the library which were pretty cool, and we didn’t know they were there. For example: the Magna Carta, The Gutenberg Bible, notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Charles Darwin, Shakespeare’s first folio of work, Jane Austen‘s correspondence arranged on her very own writing desk, notes fom Lewis Carol about Alice in Wonderland, and original scraps of paper with song lyrics scribbled all over them by The Beatles – Yesterday, Help and Ticket to Ride were written, scribbled out, and perfected on scraps of paper before they became what they are today.

Afterwards we managed to have a ten-pound-each night out, which is awesome for a Saturday night! We went to the Stockpot for dinner, 4.20 for home-cooked lasagne and then 5 for a movie ticket at the Prince Charles. The Prince Charles Cinema is on the skirts of Leicester Square, but they bring movies out slightly later than the other cinemas, so they are cheaper to hire and we get cheaper tickets. We saw The Other Boleyn Girl, with Scarlett Johanssen, Natalie Portman, Eric Bana and I was thrilled to learn that Jim Sturgess (from Across the Universe) featured as the Boleyn brother. He however met the same unfortunate fate as his famous sister and heads were literally rolling at the end…eww!

Tags: british library, cinemas, home, library, live, pub, the other boleyn girl, Travel

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 12th, 2008 at 4:54 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.