Laura In London

On Monday I received a phone call I had been waiting seven months for. Laura was in London.

Laura and I went to school together, but didn't really spend a lot of time hanging out until last year, when we discovered a mutual love of day drinking. And although inappropriate alcohol consumption seems a poor grounding for any kind of relationship I now consider Laura one of my closest friends, thanks primarily to the $3 drinks at Bar Century and an excess of free time. I mean, we do actually have a lot in common so that probably helped. But mostly it was the drinking.

So that's what we did.

It was incredible to see her again. She was staying in Camden, so on Wednesday I took half a day off work and went up there to meet her. Isabel came too, making Laura the one person to have infiltrated each and every one of my friendship groups. We spent the first part of the day trawling the markets, but once Isabel had to leave we got down to business.

I knew seeing Laura would be a slightly bittersweet occasion. She is basically the embodiment of everything I left behind, and seeing an old friend is so different from seeing the various family members who have come over while I've been here. Inevitably we talked about the various people we knew back home and reminisced about the past, but over the several hours we spent together we also spoke a lot about our future plans. And I have to admit it was reassuring. When Laura arrived I was super excited, but also slightly nervous. It's been so long since I've seen any of my Australian friends that I wasn't sure how things might have changed.

Once the pubs had closed and we'd run out of vodka I decided it was time to go home. And despite reassurances of her return in August ("there are heaps of times even at home when we wouldn't see each other for a month") leaving was difficult.

But not as difficult as I'd anticipated. Leaving Australia was the hardest thing I've ever done. I remember sitting on the plane, feeling totally along and realising that two and a half years is a really long time. I had no friends, no safety net and no way of knowing whether I was making a huge mistake, so I wanted to cling to everything I was leaving behind. Now all those concerns have become non-issues. London feels like home now too, and the friendships I've made here are no less valid just because they're newer. And, most importantly, I don't want to go home. Seeing Laura made me very happy, and August will be a blast, but it didn't make me miss home at all. If anything it made me feel more at home here. Besides, I'm only ever a (painfully long) plane ride away.

Get me to the Church on time

Yesterday I became one in a long and illustrious line of Aussies-in-London to partake in a tradition upheld since 1979. Like the good Australian girl I am, I spent my Sunday at The Church.

I first heard of The Church shortly before I left home at the end of last year. My mother is still in touch with the vast majority of her school friends, and it was at one of their Christmas parties that I learnt of the Church's existence. I was chatting with Mark, a pushing-fifty father of several, when he urged me to get to a Sunday service. The fact that this knowledge was passed down to me from a former wild child gives you some idea of how proud an antipodean tradition The Church is.

So I dragged myself out of bed at eight on Sunday morning, draped myself in a bed sheet and prepared myself for the worst (best?). Going to the Church requires a serious effort. For one thing, you have to catch the overground to get there (seeing the sky out of a train window is a sure sign you're going a long way away), and for another they only open for about four hours, after which they deposit you, drunk and disoriented, back out onto the street to make a public spectacle of yourself.

But dear God, was it ever worth it.


The hours I spent in the Church were the four most debauched hours I've had...well, since leaving Australia. The whole place is geared towards getting patrons as as drunk as humanly possible, as evidenced by the cheap booze and cheaper strippers. None of the usual societal norms seem to apply, as long as you have a drink in your hand and a vacant grin on your face. Not to mention I'd thought my toga party days had finished with my university degree. Apparently not.

I also got the chance to talk to some shearers from Wagga about Coolamon, the town I didn't think anyone actually knew about. It wasn't until I spent some time with Aussies again that I realised how true most of the stereotypes are (in the best possible way).

After the Church turfed us we trekked it all the was back into Shepherd's Bush to go to the Walkabout. By this time the conflict between the time my body thought it was and the time the rest of the world thought it was had begun to take it's toll, and after the Walkabout Tinja and I dragged our empty stomachs across to the closest pub for our first meal of the day. Unluckily for us they refused to serve ancient Greeks. Luckily, we both had regular clothes on hand, which we threw on in the middle of the street, impressing the bartender no end in the process.

After feeding we walked for a bit, trying to sober up before we went home to our respective employers. I now remember the reason why I like to sleep off a good binge. The transition from drunk to hungover is hell. When I finally stumbled back into my room around 10pm I was destroyed, and slept like a baby until 3.30 in the morning, when I woke up totally sober and totally not tired. So I watched Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle and reflected that any day that sees me singing "If you're happy and you know it" with a group of drunk strangers in the Maccas bathroom at 5pm is probably a good one.

Hello, Goodbye

The past month has been a veritable revolving door of people and places, so much so I'm not sure where to start. But if I've learnt nothing else from years of watching Julie Andrews, it's that the very beginning is a reasonable place.

So. Granada. What can I say? It was as if all the positive stereotype I'd every heard about Spain got together and built a city. I was only actually in the city for three days and I still managed to eat enough tapas to feed a small army, and drink my own body weight in God knows what. I honestly don't know why the whole world doesn't live like the Spanish. A bit of work, a long, wine soaked lunch, a socially acceptable nap, and then a couple more hours work before tapas o'clock. Where's the bad?

See how happy they are?

                  

I went to Granada with Isabel, Elena, and Iina, who ended up sharing my after-hours adventure on our final night. Isabel and Elena had gone home post-drinks but pre-Vogue, an Indie club in the middle of the city. The plan was originally for us to stay the night with one of Isabel's friends after we'd finished at the club - a plan that was just slightly altered when we decided to do the sensible thing and go home with a group of strange, primarily Spanish-speaking men instead, to a house where the bathroom was off-limits because it was busy housing a not insignificant crop of hydroponic weed. Naturally (I slay myself). She and I left with a book on "How to grow and use hydroponic cannabis", and the new found knowledge that "come to my bedroom" is one of those phrases that sound the same in every language respectively.

Iina was actually one of the first people I met when I started making friends within the local Au Pair community, despite the fact she lived about as far away from my area as you can get while still being within the London city limits. Luckily for me, being in Granada gave Iina and I a chance to get to know each other better and bond over such things as cheap alcohol, Mystery Jets, Lampimampi kwoffee and still being drunk at 2pm on Easter Sunday.

Unluckily for me, Iina went home to Finland three weeks later.

The Friday before she left she and I went out to dinner in Soho with Isabel and Tinja, before the two of us went to Borderline. Until now I was spending most of my time out on the town in either mainstream clubs or The Worlds End, where they mostly play very loud metal and hard rock music. But now IT'S OK! Because Fridays are indie nights at Borderline! Woohoo! So we took full advantage of the fantastic music and dancedanddancedanddanced until they kicked us out, when we dragged ourselves back to my (incredibly comfortable) bed and died.

You'd think getting home when your employer is getting up would be all kinds of awkward, especially when they're trusting their kids' physical and emotional health to your care five days a week. Turns out, not so much.

Despite London's reputation for being a miserable bitch of a city as far as weather is concerned, it has actually been sunny and stunning thanks to the timely entrance of Spring (there's sun! there's foliage! there's double digit temperatures!)

 

So, to celebrate Ingrid's birthday and the lessened chance of vitamin D deficiency, we did what any good Londoners would do: we picnicked. Albeit dressed to the nines as superheroes in the middle of St James' Park.

Side note: NOBODY knows who Sailor Moon is in Britain. Which could be for the best, given the damage I probably did to her reputation.

I'm not entirely sure what happened between the hours of 2pm and 12am, but I do know we picked up a posse of (non-superhero) new friends, ate a bunch of delicious Tesco food and somehow made it into the club we were headed to, although I'm pretty sure most of us shouldn't have. I also know I went home without telling anyone (old habits die hard) after having an ill-informed d'n'm with two of our newbies (I really have to stop doing that. Especially with people I've furnished with the info they need to find me on facebook). It was a good weekend.

If you take a ride with them you may not come out alive

Well. The last time I wrote I was about to attempt to find friends in the big, scary city. And while some of the details are rather hazy, I think I can call my experiment a resounding success. Possibly too much of a success, in fact.
When your evening starts out with being significantly under charged for a meal and drink by a good looking bar tender, things are looking pretty good. I figured that, if nothing else, I could always start chatting to the bar staff at one of the many many local pubs I went to for dinner. And for a while that's basically all I did. But around 10pm a large group of people came into the pub, and I started chatting to some guy. A free drink, an exchanged mobile number and a black cab ride later I found myself at a house party in a seedy estate building, talking to the chick who lived there about her small child.
By now I'd lost interest in the guy I'd come with. Unfortunately for me, I hadn't realised he was a CRAZY PERSON, and now, two days and over 30 unreplied-to texts messages later, I'm seriously considering calling him and yelling "NO! NO! NO!" into the speaker until he gets the picture.
After a while I started heading home, plus one. Apparently, though, cab drivers in London don't know where anything is, and we were dropped off in the middle of nowhere, in the rain, with no idea how to get home. And even though in the movies kissing in the rain seems really romantic and shit, in reality it's mostly just cold and wet. Plus I was no longer wearing shoes, which made everything significantly more uncomfortable. Still it was a better option than standing around thinking about how lost I was and how I'm ACTUALLY REALLY REALLY GOOD AT LIFE. Promise.
But, as hectic as the trip home was, it had nothing on the aftermath of the next morning when I remembered that I live and work with children, and am not actually allowed to bring men home. Thankfully my windows are wide enough to fit a human body. Joking. But almost not.

Also, today I went to Selfridges, which is pretty much David Jones but fancier. And with the biggest shoe department in London. I spent an hour in there literally caressing the amazing range of designer footwear before going home and crying about the fact most of those shoes will never grace my feet. Joking. But almost not.
Selfridges also has a "wonder room", which I'd never heard of before. Apparently it's a room filled with smaller rooms, which are in turn filled with shiny beautiful things that I don't own, and that makes you leave wondering if prostitution is really such a bad career choice.