A Cambridge Wedding

Above is the photo of us NZer's standing infront of our rented house (well 3 of us rented it) before the wedding. I managed to cobble together a suit to avoid looking out of place, the biggest score was my tie which despite being marked at 7 pounds, only cost 2 at the register. The shoes I had to buy aswell, but the jacket and pants I managed to borrow. Not entirely sure what i'm going to do with a pair of dress shoes for the next 3 months, but I'm sure I'll figure something out.


The wedding itself was fantastic and went on well into the small hours of the night.



The plan from here on in is to try to buy a car to take 3 of us arround the UK for 3 weeks. We've left it rather late given that we get kicked out of our cambridge house tomorrow. But hopefully the one we're looking at tonight will be the right one.

Cambridge

Well I've been in Cambridge since Saturday now, it's probably the most livable place I've come across yet. If i ever get to a more than 'considering it' stage about further study I'd definitely include Cambridge as something to investigate. It satisfies my being able to walk/bike everywhere requirement, has a nice relaxed lifestyle but with all the amenities of larger city (though I'm yet to test the coffee) and for the things it lacks London is only a 45minute express train away. My friend Sam does a 2 hour commute to Canary Wharf in London every day, I couldn't handle getting up that early, but it certainly proves its possible to include London as a part of the lifestyle.



The other reason why I may be finding Cambridge more livable is that I actually have a house here and have my own attic room. Three of us ex-Waikato folk have hired a 3 room house for the week, while I have nothing against hostels it sure is nice to not worry about possessions and to have my own room - even if it is a precarious climb up ladder like stairs.



Not really sure what the post Cambridge plan is, there are thoughts about hiring a van and going on a 2 week tour around the UK with the three of us, but campervans are pretty prohibitively expensive.

Portsmouth

I'm still alive, though with all the rain that wasn't a guaranteed. Just a quick update. I caught the train from Brighton to Portsmouth yesterday after seeing the wonderfully opulent Brighton pavilion. Portsmouth is another quint little place, but full of wonderful history and has the signs of many forts meant to defend it from many different wars.



Tomorrow I'll train to Cambridge via London and take occupancy of the house we've hired there for a week. I'll post more photos there hopefully.

Brighton

Well I did it. I avoided London - there was a train straight from Gatwick to brighton and I took it.



It's a coastal town which is clearly a little past its heyday. Reading the travel guide in the hostel (which despite being a new hostel is dated 2000) it suggests the west pier which was damaged in the war would be replaced by 2002. Yet it's 2007 and it's still a managed mess of steel sitting in the bay.



The Brighton pier though is still maintained and has all the usual gimmicky stuff you'd expect from a turn of the century beach resort.



The sunset view was amazing, though I probably should have been capturing it from further down the beach to get it happening over either the managed pier or the functional one - maybe I can do that tonight. At one point there was even a huge rainbow out to sea just incase the actual sunset part wasn't impressive enough.

Jersey War Tunnels

Yesterday I managed to get to the Jersey War Tunnels before having to catch my flight. It was basically a musem of the occupation of Germany set up inside an underground hospital that the German's built while they were in charge.



The basic plot was that britian decided it was undefendable and withdrew all military, half the population went with them. The Germans bombed the remaining trucks of potatos as they looked dangerous, took over the island and run arround fortifing it with huge concrete towers. Meanwhile Churchill ignored them and sailed straight arround them and retook France.



Looking at how many forts there were, its hardly suprising; it would have been an absolute blood bath to take, for little use tactically.



The hospital itself was impressive, a grid of tunnels 100m long with rooms and operating theatres waiting for action - though of course it never came.

Onwards

Well I guess my time in Jersey is coming to an end for now. It's been a fantastic long weekend. Today we covered more beaches, amazing views, a 6000 year old tomb and a lot more war fortifications.


It would have been a shame to head straight back to the hustle and bustle of London, so for now the plan is to head to Brighton. I've booked a single night at a backpackers there, though I'm hoping I'll stay longer.



Sadly my camera has a lot of crap sitting on the CCD (think film, only an electronic sensor) and this is really affecting a lot of my photos. With my traveling light (well lightish) philosophy, I didn't back my lens blower and all attempts thus far to dislodge said dust without touching the incredibly sensitive CCD have failed. Hopefully tomorrow will yield someone with a hair drier or a camera shop where I can buy a lens blower.



It's a relief to hear that everyone who was in hospital is now on the mend.

Jersey

Well I've now had a day to soak in Jersey, and I have to say it's been wonderful. The weather when I arrived was amazing and sunny - a stark contrast from drizzling London I'd left not more than 30mins earlier. After catching the bus into the main town (in fact the only one on the island) of St Helier, the first task was to ditch the bag, 3 pounds (I can't decide whether i'm missing the English keyboard or not...) later and that was sorted. Then it was time for my usual behavior when presented with new surroundings - get absolutely lost and try to find my way back. This lead to my first revelation about Jersey, it has massive tides. When I left the marina was dry, there was a billboard on the exit displaying an exit of 0.0m. After getting lost for probably only an hour, it was already at 2.7m. Apparently the tidal variation is about 13m, which in some places turns low tide's total beach desert into waves crashing over the 5m ocean wall.


The Island is dotted with forts and castles who have used the island as a strong hold. It's quite amazing that the brits held it so well when it was so much closer to France - yesterday on an exploration round the island welcome to France on a remote tip where apparently i got better reception from France.

Camden Town

Well I had my first case of being denied entry to a pub last night, for improper dress. Karl and I had ventured to camden town looking for a nice place to have a drink and catch up. Karl was also in the market to buy a belt, but thats another story. Once the attempt to buy a belt had failed (it was 9pm) we started looking for a pub. We went upto the first one we saw.


The bouncer politely told us we didn't meet their dress code. After we both looked down and saw we had shoes and and button up shirts on, we gave a confused look. Apparently it was goth and alternative only and we weren't welcome. From the outside it just looked like a typical english pub.


So eventually we found somewhere that wasn't obnoxiously loud, we were allowed into, and had beer. It was called "The Good Mixer". I forget which english beer I had, but it was exactly how Karl had described it, like a milkshake - very smooth and creamy, but quite pleasent despite that.


Just after midnight we called it a night because we were all scared of the underground closing and being caught in camden town rather than our respective places that we were meant to be. It was probably a good time, because any later and I would have missed my last tube line. Though at least this time I wasn't falling asleep every second station like my first late night tube adventure.


Well its been over a week since I left melbourne. I'm really pretty settled into the nomadic thing. I'm trying to plan where to go in the uk after I get back from Jersey. I have a week to go somewhere before we start renting the house in cambridge.

Time

It occured to me I'm a time geek. At CTI an aspect of the system I was working on was to handle input, addition, subtraction and other operations on times - including the fact that they could be in different timezones. At Melbourne uni one of the main projects I worked on was time synchronisation for computers. And at Intelliguard there was a fair amount of trying to merge events (with times) from various sources. So its fair to say a large chunk of my professional carrier has been concerened with time.

With that in mind I was well overdue for a visit to greenwhich. At my grandfathers wonderful email advice i caught the DLR to Greenwich. Though I may add there was a slight diversion to flat white in soho for the first passable coffee since i left Melbourne - not quite as good as my usual kerekere brew, but pretty good all the same and for £2.3 i'd be spitting tacks if it wasn't.

So with coffee digested i arrived in Greenwich - I was planning to alight at the cutty shark station and begin my journey there. But in a cruel twist of irony that station was closed due to a fire alarm. The driver assured as that it was only a 100m walk from greenwhich station however. The brits sure haven't adapted to metric yet, it was atleast a km - though later i would find out that the non adaption was to spite the french after they agreed to adopt Greenwich if the brits would go metric.

The cutty sark was just a white marque - couldn't even do the disaster tourist thing and stare at the burnt out remains. So with that minor disappointment I continued to the Royal observatory and fulfilled my time geek dreams for a good few hours.

After that It was lunch on the hill overlooking london. I was sucked into the suasage stand and payed a whole £3 for a single sausage, but atleast it was a little more interesting than the bread and butter I'd packed.

Then I was off to the maritime museum to learn all about Nelson. Like salvador dali I can't say i knew much going in, but now have a wealth of information, including the names, professions, and history of all those who surrounded him as he died in the hull of the Victory.

Well the machine tells me I only have 5 more minutes, So I guess it's time to wrap it up. I've been room juggled again and am now back in my original room. Tomorrow I'm off to jersey!

Tate Modern

Well if yesterday was museum nerd day, today was art snob.




I went to the Tate Modern via a detour to St Pauls. After checking out the standard exhibitions (read free) which included the likes of pollock and picasso, i was left with the hard decision of whether to hand over £13 to see the other parts. After my delicious lunch of brie and baguette, I decided it was only money and this was the only chance to see this stuff.




The main exhibition was Salvador Dali. I can't say i knew much about him going in, just that he did the crazy clock melting painting. But what a treat it was - He had all sorts of bizarre and strange paintings, films and a very impressive moustache. The highlight was probably the completed version of the once abandoned Destino short film. It featured many of his iconic motifs and ideas in an animated short. Disney scrapped it in the 60's but it recently was finished and escaped! Its a bit sad that it happened in the first place - The cobbler and the theif also got ruined by Disney in a similar maneuver. The last thing in the gallery was a collection of photos of he posed for with his moustache, Its amazing how many shapes he could bend it into for comical effect. Though I think in the end it was more inspiration to continue shaving than not.

Whole foods market

While it never was, and still doesn't seem to be my plan, i've been scoping out london to see if its somewhere i could live. Thus far it's been alright, but nothing to write home about - I still miss melbourne! However yesterday I found one thing london has going for it.


The whole food market. It's the most amazing supermarket i've encountered - it trounced the pants off harrods food section and certainly puts total and utter shame to anything australia can offer. It's like taking everything good that the Vic markets has, adding even more good stuff and then packaging it into convient supermarket form.


Sadly though, in comformation with my last post on money all i oculd really do was look. While the prices didn't seem out of whack with other supermarkets, it was certainly out of my league while spending AUD. I had to walk past the isle dedicated to dark chocolate - they had 100% pure dark chocolate, but at near £4 a block, i guess i'll just have to stick to the memory lindt 85%. They even had coopers pale ale - though again at £2.80 a bottle, I'll just have to wait till my return.


I did come away with a french loaf and a tiny wheel of brie for £2.60 - it lasted 2 meals so definitly good value.

Money

Now that i'm a few days in, I decided it was finally time to draw up a budget. It's my first time travelling with tight resources, every other time has always been short and without currency issues.


So the plan:

$15k AUD for the whole trip


To work out what this amounts to for daily spending, I figure that it will cost me about $1kAUD for misc things like suncream, replacing lost things, buying new things, etc. $4k for travelling within europe - this works out to $300 a week (ignoring the month for walking across spain where i really hope my feet can do all the travelling!) .


So that's 10k for food, entertainment and bedding. $83 a day - or £34. Yarrg. The hostel is £18 only leaving £16 for other things a day.


So thats the plan, now lets see if i can stick to it

Well i've done some more exploring, I've seen the tower bridge, I've seen harrods and I've been a musem nerd and seen the science musem. Harrods was just a fancier but more cramped version of Myers. The tower bridge is disappointingly painted an ugly blue colour and the science musem was mostly full of kids.

There was a few interesting things at the science musem though - a full scale replica of the crashed beagle rover, a 1979 cray super computer that upon first glace looked more like designer furniture and a prototype artifical lung.

I have more photos to post, but sadly this new internet cafe at my new bayswater hostel lacks cameralike plugability, most of the photos i've taken lately were of the passing thunderstorm anyway, despite taking many photos i managed to completley miss the specatular lightening every time.

I just had dinner in china town which was also a little disappointing everything there was expensive, nothing like the near free meals that you can get in the Melbourne equilivelent.

I worked out the secret today though of getting cheap lunches - Finding the food places where there are guys in line wearing hard hats todays lunch was a sausage and egg roll with a can of coke for a mere £2. I wouldn't say it was the best lunch i've had, and certainly far from the healthiest, but at £2 it hardly seems relevent.

While it seems I have a lot to whinge about, I'm still having a great time. I'm feeling more settled into the travel lifestyle and starting to think ahead to what i'm going to do with my remaining time.

A Number and everything.

Well now i have a sim card for my phone, You should be able to reach me on +44 7511235580. My attempts to be able to roam with my Australian number were yet again a complete failure. Mostly because I was far too late to get the number transferred back into my name from the company.

Nothing too exciting has happened since my last post, I went back to my hostel and in my 2 hours absence the room had fulled up. As part of the 'it's a small world syndrome', 3 of my new roommates went to the same high school as I did. As part of the 'it turns out I'm really old now' disease they only started after I'd already left. With my new number in hand I contacted some of the friends I had here. Turned out there was a bbq on at a friend of a friend's house. A few tube rides and 35 mins later and I was surrounded by kiwis sitting round a small smouldering charcoal bbq.

Around 11pm I finally started to crash, the being up for 19 hours straight was started to affect me, between that and the trains closing up around midnight I set off back to the hostel. I was lucky i didn't leave any later and also that hammersmith is an end of line stop for the line i was on.

I had a quick look for the other roommates in the bar thinking one last drink might be nice. We'd had a bet that the 18-19 year old kiwis would be out late and making a bunch of noise as they came in. It turned out to be the opposite as when I got into the room at midnight they were sound asleep.

I slept soundly till being awoken at 5am by my fellow ex-HHSers getting up to checkout, but managed to get to sleep again despite it being very light outside until the more reasonable 8:30.

I'm a total convert to the breakfast being the most important meal of the day idea now. I can see the real value in a meal that is all you can eat and provided free by the hostel. Lunch and dinner just can't compete with such an offer, not when the currency is pounds anyway.

Not really sure what's on the cards for today. I have to check into my new hostel at some point in bayswater.

Well I'm here, and I'm mostly awake. I'm convinced my hektek schedule before my departure was actually a huge boon in that i seem to magically already be more or less on UK time. The entire 24 hours of transit just completly messed up my clock and sleep patterns, and the 3 hours of sleep i got before i left meant that i wasn't so tired that i had to sleep, but was tired enough that i could sleep if i wanted to. Once I hit KL I swapped my ipod over to UK time and used that as a guide for when to sleep on the plane.

Arrived at heathrow at 6am. Clearing customs was amazingly simple. Someone had warned me that I might have problems since I had no ticket out of the UK, so I was prepared for touble. But they seemed happy when i told them I still held a job in Australia.

Caught the underground to hammersmith and dumped my luggage and began my exploration.

Hammersmith was dead, not a person to be seen. I decided to make for the thames and had a nice morning walk along the river for a good hour to Putney. After much random walking and a truely awful coffee I happened across the Brompton Cemetary. One thing I love is exploring old overgrown cemetrys, see the photostream above for some of the photos I took there. I may post even more later if i find a cafe that has basic photo editing capabilities.

After being chased by squirrels out of the cemetry, i caught the train into the inner city. I had no idea but apparently the Tour de France actually starts in London to some degree and with my wonderings I accidently found myself on the inside of their warm up track kind of stuck watching the parade. It was good fun, but was a real maze to get out of it. After that I checked in properly, had my first shower in god knows how long (and for the record I even shaved - not sure how long this habbit will last) and now here i am catching up on being a geek.

I feel quite comfortable in London in a lot of ways, It may have something to do with having spent almost all my life living in cities with a dirty river running through the middle of it (Wellington being the only exception). Having mastered the trains in Sydney and Melbourne the underground also seems pretty managable. I guess what confuses me is that I'm yet to find the CBD. All my explorings so far have either found the historicalish precincts or sururbs, no congregation of towering office blocks. Also need to find a real coffee.

19 useful hours and counting.

Well I have 19 hours left until i have to checkin, and still a gigantic list of stuff to do. I'm blogging this purely so i can keep track of it.

• Pack
  
• Move stuff into storage
• Move other stuff to nuwan's house
• Finish up last thing i'm working on for IntelliGuard IT.
• Leave
• Sleep
• Put more music on IPod
• Charge batteries on phone, iPod, camera
• check passport and ticket
• say goodbye to the remaining close friends i haven't done so yet
• Setup internet to work in my absense
• Try to cancel contents insurance
• Ensure i have receipts to get tourist refund scheme
• Work out directions to hostel in london
• Confirm with friends where i'm stayin
• Send out emails to friends i haven't told about this here blog yet.
• Stay sane.

That's the list for now.

• Sort out roaming on phone that may or may not be in my name now.