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.
