London days 11 - 21

Hi all,

We've got a lot of ground to cover as we've fallen behind with the blogging, thankfully the last week and a half has consisted of a lot of boring job hunting stuff which we won't post much about. So rather than go on a day-by-day basis as we have previously done I'll just go through a series of random observations starting with.........

NEWSPAPERS: Anyone who has been to London before will know immediately what I'm talking about here. Newspapers are basically either complete trash which I wouldn't even wipe my arse with or very high brow and intelligent - with nothing in between! In the trash newspapers (yes I'm ashamed to say I've read them - just out of pure curiosity!) stories vary from the latest shopping purchase made by Victoria Beckham and the other football WAGS (abb. for Wives and Girlfriends) to stories where they carry on like pork chops about wanting harsher sentencing for criminals.
In addition to this we have the Page 3 girls. The second we arrived in London, Patrick made a beeline for The Sun newspaper and proceeded to grizzle when he saw that the Page 3 girl was not actually topless - she was wearing a bikini. But there is some hope for him - we've been told by a fellow Adelaidean that the Daily Sport is full of a lot of, erm, "sport" so I'm sure he'll be checking that one out soon.

MASSIVE WINE GLASSES: "£4.50 for a glass of Jacob's Creek or crappy Chilean wine?", you cry. "That's bloody ridiculous!!!!". Ah, but every cloud does indeed have a silver lining, as that £4.50 will get you a monstrous 250ml glass! The only danger is when you feel really quite drunk and are thinking to yourself "but I've only had 3 glasses!". Then you realise that you've actually consumed an entire bottle in the first half of the football match and oh bugger, someone's just bought another round.

BLOODY AUSSIES: I've met about 10 of them for every English person I've met. In fact, the first non-Aussie/Kiwi I met was an Irishman at the pub during the Australia - Italy match. I didn't actually meet any English people until 2 days ago (with the exception of a friend we met up with who I actually met in New Zealand).

DISPOSABLE BBQs: What the? Apparantly it doesn't get hot here often enough to warrant purchase of a real BBQ, so all the supermarkets sell these dodgy disposable contraptions consisting of what looks like some bits of alfoil and some coals. So you use them once and throw them away!

I'm going to hand over to Patrick now to allow him to defend what I've written re: his love of Page 3 Girls.

Megan

Howdy all,

In all fairness I've heard so much about Page 3 girls that I think I'm entitled to be a bit disappointed when they haven't lived up to their billing, but it's still early days...

Anyways, London so far has been pretty cool. We started off by staying at the Hyatt in London, which was about as flash as a rat with a gold tooth, for 3 nights and we were supposed to be going to Bath for a week after that to stay with Megan's cousin. Unfortunately, his girlfriend went into labour 5 weeks early (and as far as we know is still in labour - it's known as silent labour, ouch!) so after some frantic web surfing we managed to get a room in a hostel in Acton. Leaving the plush 5-star surroundings at the Hyatt was pretty tough and it was made even tougher by the general poorness of the hostel - suffice to say that we won't be going back any time soon. We then dossed (thanks for the definition Alex - I owe you a beer!) at Waz's place for 3 nights - cheers Waz! and are now staying in a sharehouse in Sheppards Bush with 3 other Aussie couples. Nothing like travelling halfway across the world and staying with your own ;p)

As usual this post is getting a bit long so adios amigos!

Patrick