Hi everyone.
Life in London has been good. It is an interesting place, with always heaps going on. Most of my London time has been spent working and organizing places to live. I have been learning to make do with what I have. For example I discovered that hair wax makes a good shoe polish.
Mel arrived in London which gave me a good excuse to take some time off work and head over to Ireland with her for a one-week-trip.
We flew from London Heathrow to Dublin on a Sunday afternoon after a 4am visit to a London hospital emergency room earlier that day to get Mel some medicine as she was not feeling very well. That was quite an adventure.
Dublin is a largely tourist oriented city, but our first night there was largely uneventful. In our backpackers hostel Mel rested and I did laundry. But the fun started bright and early the next day when we met our Irish tour leader and jumped on the Paddywagon and headed off to Northern Ireland.
In Northern Ireland we visited the cities of Belfast and Derry. Northern Ireland is of course the part of Ireland still controlled by the UK, where until recently there has been much violence between the Irish nationalists and the British loyalists (also referred to as the Catholics and Protestants respectively). I never realised quite how segregated the communities were in these places, with actual walls and gates separating the cities in half. The police cars look like armoured personnel carriers and the police stations look like maximum security prisons, except instead of keeping prisoners in, they are designed to keep the IRA out. I learned a lot about human nature in those couple of days and some of it was quite sad. Despite all this, the locals were very friendly and we had fun visiting the local pubs.
We left the troubles of Northern Ireland behind as we headed South back into the Republic, where we saw amazing beaches that even we as Australians would be proud of: sandy beaches that unlike Aussie beaches were abounded by rolling vibrant grassy hills of fields separated by rock walls.
We bathed in seaweed baths, explored various castles and ruins, strolled down the streets of numerous pleasant towns and looked at magnificent gardens, including from a horse-pulled carriage. And of course visited many a pub to sample some Irish whiskey and Irish beers; and not just Guinness. At the risk of sounding a bit girly, I did prefer the Baby Guiness (a shot of Tia Maria topped with Baileys) to a real Guiness.
When Mel and I returned to Dublin on a busy Saturday night at the conclusion of our tour, we struggled to find accommodation for less than €100 for the night. In the end we booked nice a suburban hotel for a discounted price on good old wotif.com (I have put that website to very good use over the past few weeks).
We headed to Dublin Airport the next day, said goodbye to each other and headed our own ways. I back to London, and Mel off to Paris.
I moved in with a colleague's boyfriend for a week in the inner Eastern suburbs of London but on the Saturday just gone I finally moved into my own flat, sharing with Rachel and Stevo. No more sleeping in a different bed every few nights - very exciting! I finally got to unpack my huge suitcase and don't plan on using it again until later this year.
London is looking great. Everything is very green and there are flowers everywhere. The weather has improved and I have worn T-shirts without jumpers a couple of times now.
To everyone back in Australia, I hope you are surviving autumn. I hear it's been cold.
I'll write again next time I have some developments. At the moment I am contemplating a long-weekend trip to Amsterdam at the end of the month and a trip to Munich for a World Cup soccer game (Australia vs. Brazil) in mid June. So hopefully both of these trips will eventuate, as well as a visit to a European rock festival. Wish me good luck and sufficient funds in organising these little side-trips.
