Some things that happened in london

Thanks, no doubt, to the wicked machinations of Europe's evil winter queen and her ploy to ruin Christmas, Til's flight to London from Australia was delayed so that she arrived on Christmas Day. As a result, our London stay was significantly shortened, and I'm going to have to wring and squeeze it just to evince a few measly drops for your ravenous, quavering mouths. Here they are in dot-points form, as is befitting of their moietic length and significance:

• I met a squirrel. 

• I spent at least an hour when I checked in being lectured by a particularly loquacious Burmese man with whom I was supposed to cohabitate for the night. Seriously, I slipped my keycard into the door the wrong way, and in the time it took me to remove it and turn it around the right way, he must've leapt from wherever in the room he was languishing, just waiting for someone to enter so he could sermonise at them, pulled open the door and started talking, and did. Not. Stop. I can't for the life of me remember what he was babbling about. At one point, perhaps forty-five minutes in, I found myself wishing I could commit his ramblings to memory so that I could use them for a character in a story. It then occurred to me that I could record him on my iPod, and then transcribe a portion here for everyone's enjoyment, but unfortunately I didn't press the button right. He mentioned Thatcher, Obama, 'the soldiers', coming through the back door, the Chinese women in the room who didn't speak good English, and so, so much more. I later met some people in the common room and mentioned that I was afraid to go back to my room because there was a crazy Burmese guy in there and they all exploded with laughter, saying some among them had encountered him. After their horror stories, I made sure Til and I got different room.
• We saw all the touristy things.

 

• Christmas night, Til and I went to this crappy little diner that was the only place open and I paid 4 pounds for a gross slice of pizza.
• The same night there was a car accident right outside our hostel.

• We had dinner with Iris and Brenton at this Indian joint with two-storey booths, and got sick and threw up from the chicken tikka masala. 

 

• Our Russian or possibly Brazilian roomates gave us a suspiciously transparent (vodka-like) bottle of white wine.
• We went to the Boxing Day sales, which were MADNESS. You couldn't move in Topshop. 

• We bought a DSLR, for photos that're automatically cool, so no more of the crap  that you see in this blog post! Although it came at great cost, health-wise, not fiscally - the reason we got it was that it was, bafflingly, about three hundred dollars cheaper here than in Australia. The dodgy Indian had done some serious damage to my stomach and, surprise surprise, wandering the frosty streets of London in search of a Jessops with my 25 kilo bag on my back wasn't the most salubrious of enterprises!