My London Experiences So Far

So. It has been so very very long since I have done a blog entry for a number of reasons. First and foremost is probably because I’m too lazy and irritable to attempt to do it on my phone or tablet, and up until now they were the only means available (I wasn't going to pay money to go to an internet café! Don’t be daft!). The idea of writing up a few hundred words online only to have my phone screw up and delete everything (I can’t save it online with my phone) was not one I was readily jumping at. There has also been the fact that I've been pretty busy adjusting to life, working, meeting people, blah blah blah. However with my mother and sister coming over here and bringing me my oh so beautiful laptop and with me settling in nicely, it makes my countless ideas (3) for blog entries a reality.

There are a lot of things which I can and want to write about, but each one will need it’s own entry, and so I will start my re-blogging experience with this first post which is basically a summary of everything that has happened to me in the past few months.

The last time I wrote a blog entry was April the 9th, which means there is almost four months of drama, delight and deliciousness which has yet to be documented. I have spent the majority of the last four months working and living in London. I work at a frozen yoghurt store called SNOG in the centre of SOHO (which is the gay area of London). I will write a different blog entry which goes into much more detail about this, probably something entitled: WORKING IN SOHO – or something equally creative. It’s been a good experience working there, and I’ve met a lot of interesting characters on the way. This is a photo of the shop:

London in general is a pretty nice place to live, except for the ridiculous costs associated with it. The price for rent and for transport is mind-boggling, and it is what eats up about 90% of my pay every fortnight. Admittedly I could be getting rent A LOT cheaper because I am living in an expensive area of London and I did not get the best deal, but at the time I was sick of living in hostels and searching for houses while trying to work five shifts a week. I live in an area called Bayswater, it is slightly west of the city centre and south west of Paddington. The area itself has everything that you’d need; McDonalds, bars, Burger King, Subway, cinema. As well as a bunch of other things you might occasionally visit such as supermarkets and laundrettes. I’ve been living here for exactly two months now, and I am leaving here in exactly a week. I pay a whopping 175 a week for a single room in a house with a tiny kitchen, a bathroom, and three other people – as I said, super expensive for not a whole lot of anything. I live with a 32 year old Italian guy and his 26 year old Italian girlfriend as well as a 25 year old French girl. They are all reasonably nice but we barely see each other because I usually work night shifts (5-12) and they work during the day. I should probably include pictures of the house, but I can’t be bothered taking any of the kitchen or bathroom so I’ll just let you know that the kitchen is about HALF of my bedrooms size:

My Bedroom's Window and Desk

My Bed - SILKY SMOOTH

The other single biggest expense is the transport. I need to catch the tube to get to work every day – I catch the Central Line from Queensway for four stops and get off at Oxford Circus (takes about 10 minutes), then I change to the Bakerloo Line for one stop and get off at Piccadilly Circus and walk to work from there (takes about 5 minutes). It’s amazing being only fifteen minutes from work, because many people I work with take at least an hour to make the trip, and screw doing that twice a day every day. Here's a map of the underground so you can see:

My house is literally next to Bayswater Station and just 5min walk from Queensway

Despite the little distance that I need to travel and the fact that my house is in Zone 1 (Centre of City) it still costs me the same amount as it would if I was living in Zone 2 and it took me 50 minutes to get to work. The CHEAPEST way to travel is to buy a monthly travel card for Zone 1+2 (they don’t sell it for just Zone 1) which is £130. This averages out to roughly £26 a week for travel, which is almost $45 AUD. A weekly travel pass is £30 a week ($52) and if you do the ‘pay as you go’ option I found I was spending almost £40 a week ($68). Here is a photo of my travel card holder, because it's awesome:

AAAAAAADVENTURE TIME!!!

To put it into perspective – on the shitty £6.19 minimum wage I am on, I need to work for almost five hours just to pay for my travel. Now if I calculate my weeks rent into hours worked it equates to about 30. So in summary, I need to work 35 hours a week (almost full-time hours) just to pay my bills and get to work. Add in the other five hours work for full-time hours and that leaves me with a little over £30 a week for food and EVERYTHING else – hardly much to enjoy life with. Needless to say I’ve dipped into my Australian savings several times over and splashed out to go watch theatre, movies (I go to the cinema a lot, but more about my THEATRE AND CINEMA EXPERIENCES later!) and to enjoy a night on the town (Or not? More about my ‘HORROR NIGHT’ in another post!).

Overall London is a great place to live – if you have the money. If I didn’t have my savings I would have found it very hard indeed, and it amazes me that people come here and work so hard for so little. My manager works close to 50 hours a week at SNOG and he has a bartending job which he works about three times a week, meaning he works almost 70 hours a week. Plus it takes him almost an hour to get in and out of the city back home… ergh. Definitely not my kind of lifestyle. But I’m glad I’m here to witness it and to learn that it really isn’t my thing. I may  not know what I want to do as a career when I get older, but I’m learning bit by bit the lifestyle that I want it to allow me.  

So what is next? Well that I am not 100% sure of. I am going to the Reading Festival in about two weeks’ time and after that will be travelling through Germany and France catching up with mates. I then have about ten weeks before the rest of my family arrive from Australia. I may come back to London, I may continue travelling, who knows? The only certainty is that nothing is certain at all.