London for a second time

ah, the joys of not catching a bus or a train. i caught a plane from Amsterdam to London Gatwick and the flight took a little under an hour and was pretty much hassle free, except i had to get to the airport quite early.

having done most of the touristy things around London last time i was here (click here if you want to read about what i got up to) pretty much, this time i just enjoyed walking around checking out shops and stuff. the only real touristy things i did were go to the British Museum which has an amazing collection, from Eygptian stuff to Native American, a bit of everything really, they even had a section on clocks! the Natural History Museum which had a whole section on dinosaurs, i remembered back to when i was a kid and the movie 'Jurassic Park' came out and was really into them. both were interesting buildings just to walk through. while i was walking around town i did a fair bit of people watching and now i totally understand why the Kinks sang songs about eccentric people and where the guys from the TV show 'Little Britain' got the inspiration for there characters. there are a lot of strange looking people around, well, there are strange people everywhere i guess, but there seems to be a lot more weird types breeding here.

My friend Sarah's whose been living and working here in London for a little under a year has decided to head back home to Melbourne so she had her going away drinks and dinner in Brick Lane with a few friends from work and a couple other people thats she met traveling, people like Marc and Jack who are simply hilarious, when they get together theyre like a comedy duo. we got on really well, mainly because we would poke a bit of fun at Sarah. also we had a brilliant tube ride home with Marc and I breaking into an amazing rendition of the Elton John classic 'Don't Let the Sun Go Down On Me', the people on the train loved it, so much so we got an applause at the end. the guy who was sitting next to me said to us as he got off, 'whatever you guys are doing now is wasted, you need to pursue a career in show business'.

While i was here i once again got Sarah's house to myself. Sarah and her housemate Deanna went to Poland for the weekend with Jack and Marc, but i still had plenty of catching up to do. Flick and Jess, who i used to work with, had moved to London since i had been here last so i had a lovely boozy afternoon with them at a number of bars and pubs in Soho, so it was nice to catch up with them to see what they'd been up too, and talk about old times.

Something i wanted to do while i was here was checked out a West End play. so i got a ticket for one called 'Avenue Q' that i had heard about it a few months back from a couple of other travellers that i'd met so i decided i should go and see it because they raved about it so much. i guess you could say the show is loosly based on the kids TV show 'Sesame Street' with the majority of the characters in the show being puppets, who couldnt afford to live on Sesame Street so they live on Avenue Q. but its not as innocent as you might think, they sings songs like 'Everybodys a little bit racist sometimes' and 'The Internet Is for Porn' (click here to here it for yourself) there was even a puppet sex scene! i love cheeky humour so really enjoyed it, but i wasnt the only one the audience was roaring with laughter. its was really well put together, come to think of it i dont know why i dont see more live theater, i remember when my Mum took me to see 'Cats' when i was a little kid i thought it was amazing, so much so when we got a cat i named him 'Magic' after 'Mr. Mistoffelees'.

the weather here has been quite good really but one of the days i was here was glorious so i decided to do a trip up to Cambridge. Cambridge is a really pretty town and it was a lot smaller than i thought it was going to be. a couple of the sights are the little river that runs through it which is quite nice to walk along, they even have gondala-like things you can float down it on and they have a really old round church, supposidly theres only meant to be 4 or 5 of them. but of course, Cambridge is probably best known for its University. is really old, infact its the second oldest in the english speaking world, being founded somewhere in the 1200's but i never realised that Cambrige University was actually started by Oxford to escape the hostile townspeople of Oxford. something i noticed while i was there is that one stretch of road would change names a number of times. the reason being that the road is named after the college thats in front of it.
there are a number of Colleges that make up Cambridge University but probably the most famous is Trinity which originally was made up of a couple of colleges but the King combined them. a statue of the King holding a sword sits above the gate as you walk into it. as as you can imagine, students being students, they get up to a bit of mischief, one day some one noticed that the sword in the Kings hand had been replaced with a chair leg! supposidly the University has replaced the sword a couple of times but he always ends up with a wooden chair leg, which i thought was quite funny.
there are lots of amazing buildings in the University some of them hundreds and hundreds of years old in many different styles of Architecture. but probably the most epic of all the buildings is King's College Chapel, as the name suggests it was built because of the King, but it was built in a few different stages due to Kings dying and the next in line to the throne changing his mind about how the chapel should look. the leadlighting in the chapel is incredible and during WWII to make sure it wouldnt be destroyed it was numbered and removed then reassembled after the war had finished. its also meant to have a pretty kick-arse choir, even though the acoutics in the church are brillant, i think i would rather punch myself in the bollocks then listen to them.
something strange is in the colleges there are grassy areas in the squares, or courts as they call them, but only the 'fellows' (which i think are the teachers that work there) can walk on the grass. i've noticed that you can't walk on grass in a lot of places while i've been traveling, i find that so strange coming for Australia. i love laying on grass its probably one of the best things in life, since when has it been for the elite few? and another thing was women weren't allowed to study at Cambridge until 1869 with the openning of the girls college, they were allowed to sit exam etc but the University didnt give out degrees to women until 1947! how ridiculous is that!
the university has had a number of notable alumni over the years; Princes, Poets, Nobel Prize winners (something like 83 of them have come from here) and Prime Ministers but probably the most famous is Mr Isaac Newton, who was also a fellow here. Of course he was the clever fella that figured out gravity by seeing an apple drop from a tree, something i liked was, out side of the window of the room he lived in while he was here was an apple tree which was grown from the roots of the original apple tree.
Cambridge is such an amazing spot, it oozes with history and tradition, i had a really enjoyable day there.

something i thought it was quite funny that i heard when i was here last time but didnt mention. The mayor of London is a guy called Boris Johnson, to most British hes rather embarrassing, he always sort of looks disheveled and he bumbles around, quite funny. anyway he found this old law saying that you were allowed to drink on the tube and he wanted to ban it. English laws are generally quite funny, there so old and strange at times, mainly becuase something probably happened once so they thought they'd better put something in place so it wouldnt happen again. anyway, hardly anyone knew that you could legally get drunk there. so on the night before the new law was put into place, everyone threw a huge party on the tube!

something i noticed that i thought was pretty nifty was you can use certain ATM's here to top up your phone credit, when you think about it, its a brilliant idea, i'm pretty sure they don't have that back home, why not? the phone companies are pretty much all the same.

Newspapers here are generally pretty horrible, theres this girl in the news at the moment called Jade Goody, she became a minor celebrity over here for being on Big Brother a few years back, i believe she said something racist to another constestant on the show and all hell broke loose. anyway, unfortuately Jade is dying of cervical cancer and doctors have only given her days to live. the thing that makes me sick is the ways its been played out in the media. as far as i'm meant to believe she has been doing interviews and she got married to her boyfriend (who sounds like a real tool by the way) and sold the pictures to the papers for X amount money so that she can save up a nest egg for her 2 children. to some extent i can understand that, i dont think its something that i would do but i suppose if i had kids i would do what i could to protect them finacially. anyway, theres a huge media storm about it all, my friend Sarah was working at a doctors where Jade was getting treatment, she was telling me that the media would call up pretending to be doctors from other hospitals to find out her progress. which made me think, are people really that sick and twisted that they will do ANYTHING for personal gain? this poor woman is DYING, give her and her family some respect. it really made me sick to see how dog eat dog the world is. but who do you blame? the journo's for pestering or the readers for buying the newspapers? though i shouldn't get on my high horse, Australian papers are just as bad.

once again i had a really good time in London, its always handy when you have friends in a place. its so nice of Sarah and Deanna to let me stay with them, i really apprieciated it, its so nice to have the creature comforts of a home for a bit, living in a hostel for a while gets a little bit tiring after a while.
Sarah gave me a couple of books for the rest of my journey. the first being George Orwells 'Nineteen Eighty Four' which was on my 'to do' list so i was really greatful at that, but then she gave a book titled 'Marley & Me' i looked on the back cover and it read 'Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog' i'm sure i would've had a really perplexed look on my face when she gave it to me. somehow i dont think i'm going to get around to reading that one.
i think now that Sarah's not going to be here next time i'm back in London i think its going to be a different experience, but i'll have new friends in the form of Deanna, Marc and Jack. next stop is Bath, to re-educate myself the importance of cleaning behind my ears, or so i imagine. more when i get there.