I'M NOT HOMELESS

I found a great place on Friday and moved in on Sunday. It's in Queen's Park (W10) which is a short walk or bus ride from lots of cool things including Portobello Road. Everytime I write or say that I start singing the song from Disney's Bedknobs and Broomsticks: "Portobello Road, Portobello Road..." I love that movie!

I'm living in a townhouse-type place with one other guy. The room is bigger than anything else I looked at, there's a big kitchen and lounge, a garden and the house is clean which I discovered is surprisingly rare in my price range! I looked at so many dumps last week. You'd be surprised at how many places don't have living rooms. In fact, if the ad doesn't specifically mention a living room, you should assume that it's been built in, turned into a bedroom, and stuffed with a smelly French guy who leaves the remains of his breakfast growing bacteria in the kitchen for three days. Five people, one bathroom/toilet, shared kitchen, no lounge seemed to be the norm. Yuck.

So when I found this place I took it right away, even though it's 20 pounds a week over my self-imposed limit. I did check out another place afterwards that was even more expensive and it was the dumpiest dump of all! The kitchen was the size of an Australian toilet, the room was furnished with a double-sized bunk bed that left less than 50cm between the bunk and the ceiling (if I had one of my midnight coughing fits and sat up in bed I'd be knocked unconscious), and there was unsurprisingly no lounge room, one toilet and four flatmates.

So I'm stoked about the new place. The owner is connecting up some Sky tv/phone/broadband package in the next few weeks, so until then I'm still in internet cafes looking for jobs.

Oh crap, it just started belting down with rain outside. I bought a Marie Claire magazine yesterday because it came with a free umbrella. That rain is seriously coming down at a 45 degree angle. Looks a bit scary, but I'm sure it will clear up in a minute.

I'd best head off into the lovely English weather to seek my fortune now, or at least a crappy temp office job.

LIKE THE PHOTOS?

They might be the last ones on here for a while, because I just realised that my digital camera's battery charger is sitting in a box under several hundred kilograms of junk in my storage container in Sydney. I'm a smart cookie.

There's a tiny bit of life left in my battery, and I'm saving it in case I happen to bump into a celebrity doing something (or someone) embarrassing so I can sell it to the London papparazzi for £10,000. Sounds like a very sensible and realistic financial plan to me. In fact, maybe I should stop looking for work and start looking for celebrities full time??

FLATS AND JOBS

Every day now consists of searching the internet for flats and jobs. Flats and jobs. Flats and jobs. This trip has been a series of obsessions. When I was packing up to leave Sydney I was obsessed with finding free boxes. I could spot a good, sturdy packing box at 25 paces, and I even knew which day the businesses in George Street put out their recycling boxes. I did very well on the box front.

My next obsession was luggage. What I placed in my luggage, how much it weighed, how many pieces of baggage there were. On the drive to Queensland, it was spread out all over my car. The Rocky-Sydney flight let me check in two pieces as long as they were lightish, then I had to repack for Sydney-London because they had a heavier weight limit but it had to be in one bag. When I arrived in London on Monday I packed things I need immediately in one bag, and things I don't really need until I have a job in the other one, so I only need to access one regularly. I realise this doesn't make for interesting reading, but these are the thoughts that consumed my every waking moment. Luggage.

Now I'm obsessed with seeking out flats and jobs. I'm not really good at divided attention, so instead of going hard to find one then the other, I'm kind of doing a half-hearted job at both. Still waiting for the perfect flat and job to drop out of the bleak London sky. On that note, it was sunny and relatively warm today. Blue skies in London. I took lots of photos to prove it.

HERE I AM!

I've arrived safe and sound, and the flight wasn't as horrible as it could have been considering the early signs:

1. I had a middle seat, which usually equals sleep deprivation.
2. My row was directly in front of the toilets, which means I couldn't recline the seat very far at all.
3. I was in between two men, one who was a very quiet and attractive British chap, the other a broad-shouldered, aggressive, ignorant Australian bloke.

During the Sydney-Bangkok leg, the Aussie f*wit was trying to engage me in a conversation about the futility of providing aid to countries that have their own armies (because if they can buy guns they can buy food/sanitation etc) and that he believed any country that accepted aid dollars should cede it's sovereignty over decisions on how to spend the money in its Treasury. Whatever, I just wanted to have a nap.

Early on in the 9 hour flight he blew up because someone was in the toilet for longer than two minutes, which he determined to be the optimum time required to perform the tasks at hand. Then a bit later he got extremely abusive and aggressive with the flight attendants because the seat in front of him reclined back further than it should have and knocked over his drink. This was a serious tirade involving lots of short words, I felt really sorry for the cabin crew and also sorry for myself because the flight was full and they couldn't move him.

Thankfully for everyone he was moved for the Bangkok-London leg so when I moved into his terribly defective seat (which not surprisingly, was fine and comfy), the Quiet Englishman and I had one and a half seats each so I could stretch out and snoooooze. I'm typing this blog from my hostel, where I get 30mins of internet free if I'm lucky enough to see a spare computer. I was just walking out the door to look for an internet cafe when this one became free. Lucky days.

The only other eventful thing to mention is my near asphyxiation on the tube from Heathrow. It was the peak-hour morning crowd on the Piccadilly line, and this woman in front of me started violently waving her Metro around and making stinky-poo faces. A quarter of a millisecond later, the smell hit me too. I think the lady was actually wafting it straight into my nostrils. I don't know who it was, but they seriously need their intestines checked out! In what I assume was a typically British response, everyone else pretended not to notice. But there was definitely more coughing and sniffling than two minutes earlier.

Anyway, I learned how to work the ventilator handles on the carriage and slowly became able to breathe through my nose again. Now I'm about to head out and about into the brisk, sunless London morning and start my first day as a resident. Yay!

THE FINAL COUNTDOWN (DA-DA DAH DAH)

It's been almost exactly a week since I packed my Sydney life into a 10 cubic metre storage unit and set off into the wild blue yonder. The wild blue yonder I'm referring to being my little blue Daihatsu Charade. The actually journey was along the Bruce Highway which isn't particularly wild. Or blue.

Anyway, my mum flew into Sydney last Wednesday and we drove up to Port Macquarie, via an essential detour to my storage container to collect some things that were accidentally packed by my dehydrated and stressed brain the day before. It was a really nice drive, and we passed through this gorgeous little place called Lake Cathie which I wouldn't mind having a look at next time I've driving around the north coast of NSW. Mum and I decided to be very classy and eat takeaway chinese in our hotel room, and the meal became even more civilised when we realised they hadn't given us any utensils to eat with. Picture me trying to use two reversed teaspoons as chopsticks. Classy.

The next day we drove up to the Sunshine Coast to my sister's house and I ended up staying there for just over a week. It was very chilled and relaxing. In fact, I don't know how I dragged myself away to complete the final leg of my interstate road trip up to Rockhampton. And here my rant begins: I really don't like this place. It's stinking hot, full of teenage mothers, country hicks, and bored kids wandering the streets looking for something to distract them from the fact that it's the 21st century and they live in a town where everything is closed on a Sunday. Not that there's anything much to do the other six days of the week either.

Rocky has wide streets with no cars on them, empty shopfronts and overflowing pubs, all wrapped up in a cloak of oppressive heat and humidity which saps the will to live. Granted there are some odd quirks to the place that some people may find attractive, like friendly people smiling at you in the street and starting up conversations in shops. As a former Sydney-sider, conversational strangers just freak me out. My sisters and I have tried for years to convince our remaining family members living here to move onto to greener pastures to no avail.

So I'm here in tropical Central Queensland, in the Beef Capital of Australia no less, undertaking my last minute trip planning via my parents' dial up (!!) internet connection and trying to appreciate the time I'm getting to spend with my family in spite of the less than motivating location. On the positive side, the exhausting heat and resultant lethargy is making me look forward to moving over the other side of the world even though I'll be arriving towards the end of a London winter (destined to be words that will haunt me in the near future I'm sure...).