Strolling in London

For the first few days of our new little adventure, we had decided to stay in a nice B&B. Katherine spend a good deal of time researching, and came up with 30 King Henry’s Road. This turned out to be an absolutely brilliant find, as the B&B, a beautiful four-storey mansionesque house with heaps of character, was located in one of London’s most desirable suburbs, Primrose Hill, just a couple minutes walk from Primrose Hill itself and a few more minutes from the amazing Regent’s Park. What’s more, it was just a couple minutes from Chalk Farm tube station, so getting around was a piece of cake. A side note: The London public transport system’s ‘Oyster’ card thing is just brilliant — no mucking about with coins, trying to figure out zones and time limits, just ‘touch in’ at the station, and touch out at the end, charging up the card every now and then. Nice.

Carol and Ted, the owners, were just lovely and kept us company over our quite spectacular breakfasts (exciting-looking fruit salad, hot croissants, toasted home-made bread, tea and coffee), and made us feel instantly welcome.

I seemed to have developed an amusing case of swine flu-related hypochondria after all the attention paid to it on the flight over (our home state of Victoria is on the UK’s ‘do not visit’ list due to risk of infection! It’s just the same old flu thing that happens every year, c’mon!), and kept catching myself checking for symptoms I didn’t have. This has got to stop!

We had a lovely first day strolling through Regent’s Park, an immense expanse of beautiful gardens, lakes and wooded areas, although we got quite sunburned in the process, and ended up with very sore feet. We were amused to come across a rowdy game of Aussie rules footy, and excited to see our first squirrel and fuzzy bumblebee. I was struck by how green everything smelt — Katherine commented that it smelt a bit like Belgrave, the beautiful forested suburb where I grew up, and where Katherine and I lived for a few months last year, but there was definitely a unique Englishness about it. The ambient bird noises are all different too, of course – they seem more musical.

That night we met up with Tiff at the London Eye (which actually works, unlike the Melbourne eye – it turns out, putting cretins in charge isn’t always the best way to do things, Australia), and took a self-guided night walk through London that took us past the main sights – Big Ben, Downing Street, Trafalgar Square, through Soho, etc. By the end, our feet were just bloodied stumps, and we were very glad to get into bed that night. By that time, my throat was quite sore from London’s particular variety of air with extra goodies – ouch.

The following morning — throat still a bit sore, and hypochondria still in place (oh no! Is the sore throat swine flu??) — we headed out to Camden market (“I bought some really nice trousers from Camden, they is well hardcore with all pockets and shit“), the goods at which gave Katherine her ‘love/anguish’ face:

We set ourselves up with 3 mobile, which gave me much satisfaction and comfort — omniscient again, with the Internets back in my iPhone — and had rather disappointing Indian for lunch (d’oh).

Next was a ‘Inspiration behind Harry Potter’ walking tour that was a present for Katherine’s birthday from Tiff, which the three of us did — quite busy, and a little ‘kiddie’, but the company was good and there were pyrotechnics. Everybody likes pyrotechnics. By that time the feet were absolutely crippled again, so we limped home.

I was greeted the next day by a full-blown cold, so, not so much the hypochondria. A cold! The nerve. Anyway, I stocked up on tissues, and we caught the tube to Trafalgar Square and spent an hour or two at the National Gallery looking at exquisitely rendered goodies from the 12-to-something’th centuries (Da Vinci’s Madonna on the rocks was on holiday, boo). Some of those dudes could draw a mean photorealistic flowing robe. Also, amused by the insanely disproportionate number of paintings with topless or naked women. Those painter guys loved the boobies.

On a recommendation from Carol, we caught a bright red double-decker bus — we sat on the top, of course — to Hampstead Heath (is that not the most brilliant British name??), a very picturesque town with a large wooded park. I found that there was a moment of adjustment required before I could fully appreciate the beauty of the woods — growing up in the Dandenong Ranges, I’m conditioned to see ivy and blackberries (brambles, I mean) as disgusting weeds. Anyway, with that adjustment out of the way, it was fantastic — the green was almost overwhelming in its intensity

Finally, it was time to leave, load ourselves up with all our earthly belongings and catch the bus to Tiff’s place in Islington. Tussling with our bags on a relatively crowded bus was an interesting exercise in geometry, especially with pure brine pouring out of my burning nasal passages, but we made it in one piece without offending anyone too much (following our progress on Maps on my iPhone to give us warning for when we had to get off), and had a satisfyingly frugal dinner of baked beans on toast with Tiff. Sleeping in the best room in the house — unlike the other sweltering rooms, a nice cool breeze coming through the lounge room window keeps the temperature down.

Flying metal tubes

After all that preparation and anticipation, the time’s finally arrived to leave this fair land of ours and join the apparent majority of Australia’s young adult population in London (side note: At least four people we know are in London or will be within a couple weeks of us, and more are coming shortly after)!

A surprisingly frenetic final evening’s work, despite all our earlier preparation, and a couple of hours of atrocious sleep later, we were up and stumbling around blearily ticking off a few final to-do items. My most generous and wonderful parents, who had braved the small hours to see us off, pulled up outside and carried us and our satisfyingly minimal baggage off to the airport. A fairly emotional farewell and it was just Katherine and I, and our shared phobia of missing flights or discovering we’d forgotten some critical thing.

Phobias put to rest, we made it onto the plane with no hassles.

Lots of people on the plane wore face masks, leaving me torn between feeling like maybe there’s something they knew that I didn’t, and feeling like a dirty, filthy potential swine flu carrier. Every sneeze or nose-blow and I was sure I was going to be Quarantined. We were presented with a ‘health questionnaire’ and asked to identify ourselves, our seat number, and put a check mark beside any symptoms we have experienced. I ticked ‘runny nose/sneezing’ and instantly regretted it, envisioning being rugby-tackled out of the disembarking queue and locked up, so I scrawled a hasty explanation (“Hay fever!! This is normal for me!! I promise!“).

11 hours of scrunched-up-ness later, with a very no-frills flight – we were deprived of West Wing after the lappy’s batteries ran out – we arrived in Incheon airport, Seoul, South Korea. My imagined dramatic swine-flu-based forced exile from society didn’t come to pass, and we instead took an hour bus ride to our rather swank hotel and headed up to our allotted room in the crowded, over-cheerful ‘glad to be of service‘ elevator.

Food vouchers in hand, we wandered into the hotel’s restaurant and were baffled to be presented with a plate of limp pasta smeared with tomato sauce. Unsatisfied, we ventured forth into the soupy Seoul air and wandered up and down the street in search of a cultural culinary experience, oscillating between chastely not touching in the fear of offending someone in our cultural ignorance (remembering Thailand), and throwing caution to the winds and just holding hands as usual. With my only international experience being Thailand, it was funny to later realise how different and modern South Korea really is. The whole city gave the impression of having sprung up almost overnight – the oldest building appeared to be only a decade or so old, and everything seemed highly organised (not a birds nest of overhead electrical cables to be seen).

Anyway, 11 hours of sitting in a flying metal tube having caught up with us, plus having a hard time finding anything beside Italian cafés and restaurants (I guess South Koreans are into Italian cuisine in a big way, unless it’s just there for us chicken Westerners), we grabbed a promising looking Italian breadstuff from a friendly local café and retired for the night, in our twin single beds.

The next day, we headed down for breakfast. Katherine went the gutsy route and ordered the ‘Korean breakfast’, complete with salted fish and seaweed soup; I chickened out in the guise of providing Katherine with a backup plan in case the Korean stuff fell through, and ordered the ‘American breakfast’ with the eggs. I think Katherine’s was the safer bet, actually – having been regaled by Sarah about the terrifying sugar-laden American cuisine, I was fascinated to be presented with bread that tasted like cake, ‘egg food product’ in a vol-au-vont and yoghurt that tasted exactly like Nerds. Katherine did well, there was some somewhat scary-looking stuff in front of her, but infinitely healthier than mine.

Then we were off again on the bus, and back at the airport. Some last-minute admin, calling the Victorian Ambulance over Skype on the airport wi-fi to cancel my membership, and a little time-killing (I looked up how to say ‘Hello’ in Korean and used it on a few people, and checked my news feeds using my fancy new feed reader software, Fever), then we were back in another flying metal tube heading out over China, Mongolia and Russia.

Another 11 hours, and much buttock-soreness later, we were dropping altitude over a patchwork of fields and sweeping rows of identical little tiled-roofs, and touched down on English tarmac. A surprisingly long trek through the airport to the dreaded Immigration area, followed by a surprisingly short and friendly immigration experience, and we were in London!

Our good friend Tiff, in her infinite generosity and kindness, joined us at the airport (although we missed each other at first, and it took a pay-phone call to find each other!) and herded us onto the train. Being able to just follow Tiff without having to navigate the system ourselves was brilliant, so we could just concentrate on not collapsing under the weight of our luggage, one big hiking pack each on our backs and a smaller (but still heavy!) day pack hanging off our fronts. Turning often required a six-point manoeuvre, and the tube was fairly packed so we were standing for the whole trip. Whew!

We made it eventually to the B&B in the beautiful Primrose Hill area, although by the end I was down to one shaky step every few seconds, or so it felt. We met Carol and Ted, the owners of the beautiful four-storey house, freaking her our slightly when she saw there were three of us (before we explained). So, we dropped our bags in our room upstairs and ordered Dominos delivered. Oh, yeah, that’s the stuff.