Last weekend I experienced a pretty idyllic Sunday morning, or at least I did after multiple delays, due to myself getting up late (as always)+ deciding to walk through central London instead of travelling beneath it) .
Showing posts with label London. Show all posts
Showing posts with label London. Show all posts
One of the things I've been looking forward to most this year is FriendsFest! An annual (it seems!) mini festival celebrating one of TV's most iconic and most beloved series - Friends!
For it's sophomore year the festival toured around England and Wales, ending in Clissold Park, London, which is where Amy and I had a look!
The event was sold out far in advance of the actual event, tickets cost around £25 a pop for entry and a set tour...a price which is kinda overpriced, but you gotta let that nostalgia factor run wild.
This post is rather overdue, I've lived here for over 7 months now. We'll roll with it though won't we.
So in this 'X a Londoner' series I discuss my thoughts and feelings about this great city from the perspective of someone who's only lived here for X amount of time.
Ramen is so good, just so good! London is a surprisingly amazing city to get yourself a bowl of ramen, you're spoiled for choice. Coming from Liverpool, which doesn't have the biggest Japanese food scene, this was almost overwhelming.
But never fear, I'm here today to talk about three great ramen chains dotted all over the city.
B O N E D A D D I E S
A true safe space for freedom of expression, for love, for creativity and for just having a grand old time.
That's exactly what the world needs right now. Mighty Hoopla provided just that in Victoria Park last weekend.
Today we have a bit of a mini-post on an amazing place I visited last weekend (whilst it was 24 degrees, bloody scorcher) on Brick Lane in Shoreditch.
Brick Lane is known for it's mass amount of quirky and fun restaurants and cafes, and I think I've found my favourite one.
Here's a complete list of every post on places I've visited around the world:
B U D A P E S T // H U N G A R Y
T O K Y O // J A P A N
O S A K A // J A P A N
K Y O T O // J A P A N
H I R O S H I M A // J A P A N
O S L O // N O R W A Y
S T O C K H O L M // S W E D E N
L I V E R P O O L // U N I T E D K I N G D O M
ExDirectory | Liverpool's Secret Bar
Docks by night
OH ME OH MY // GOODNESS GRACIOUS
Staycation #1
Staycation #2
Staycation #3
Yard Bird
The Liverpool Guide: Views
L O N D O N // U N I T E D K I N G D O M
Best Ramen in London
Crosstown Doughnuts
P A R I S // F R A N C E
M I L A N // I T A L Y
DUOMO DI MILANO - PART 1
DUOMO DI MILANO - PART 2
NAVIGLI CANALS
TERAZZA APEROL
BAR LUCE
L A K E C O M O // I T A L Y
COMO
COMING LATER THIS YEAR:
H E L S I N K I / / F I N L A N D
T A L L I N N / / E S T O N I A
R I G A / / L A T V I A
S I A U L I A I / / L I T H U A N I A
V I L N I U S / / L I T H U A N I A
DUOMO DI MILANO - PART 1
DUOMO DI MILANO - PART 2
NAVIGLI CANALS
TERAZZA APEROL
BAR LUCE
L A K E C O M O // I T A L Y
COMO
T H E E D E N P R O J E C T / / U N I T E D K I N G D O M
S K E L L I G M I C H A E L / / R E P U B L I C O F I R E L A N D
COMING LATER THIS YEAR:
H E L S I N K I / / F I N L A N D
T A L L I N N / / E S T O N I A
R I G A / / L A T V I A
S I A U L I A I / / L I T H U A N I A
V I L N I U S / / L I T H U A N I A
Another addition to 'X a Londoner'
Catch up on the other's here:
Once again with this series, I've been a Londoner for longer than the title suggests, but we got a blog schedule to keep here! I've lived here now for closer to 7/8 weeks, but I haven't touched this post in a while, so it's *close* to being a true month a Londoner post!
My London scowl has been perfected. How is it that resting bitch face becomes the norm?
I've sussed out the local pubs, one sells pints for normal Northern prices, A.K.A cheap London prices.
Franco Manca has both my heart and my patronage.
I've survived a Tube Strike unscathed. Scratch that, two Tube strikes.
Snow only disrupted my travel slightly, and by snow I mean 10 minutes of snow and hours of regular rain.
No celebrity sightings yet but there is a major movie filming a stone's throw from my house.
I went to a chicken shop, and didn't get chicken. I'm still a failure in that department.
I said the word 'bruv' in normal conversation the other day...it has began.
No one has questioned the use of me describing things as 'boss' or asking if anyone wants a 'bev/bevvie'. Maybe Scouse slang is better known in London than I thought?
Still though, why do you have so many Prets?! No one, NO ONE, needs that many Prets and it's so expensive.
All I do is complain about rent prices, in work, with friends, is this what we do for the rest of our lives, or until the market somehow fixes itself?!
Walked into a non-descript bar to get out of the rain and it turned out to be an amazing underground cocktail place located in a former illegal strip club. Amazing.
I left London for a little bit, the air is so clean elsewhere. There aren't as many people. There's room on trains. I forgot about this life.
My London scowl has been perfected. How is it that resting bitch face becomes the norm?
I've sussed out the local pubs, one sells pints for normal Northern prices, A.K.A cheap London prices.
Franco Manca has both my heart and my patronage.
I've survived a Tube Strike unscathed. Scratch that, two Tube strikes.
Snow only disrupted my travel slightly, and by snow I mean 10 minutes of snow and hours of regular rain.
No celebrity sightings yet but there is a major movie filming a stone's throw from my house.
I went to a chicken shop, and didn't get chicken. I'm still a failure in that department.
I said the word 'bruv' in normal conversation the other day...it has began.
No one has questioned the use of me describing things as 'boss' or asking if anyone wants a 'bev/bevvie'. Maybe Scouse slang is better known in London than I thought?
Still though, why do you have so many Prets?! No one, NO ONE, needs that many Prets and it's so expensive.
All I do is complain about rent prices, in work, with friends, is this what we do for the rest of our lives, or until the market somehow fixes itself?!
Walked into a non-descript bar to get out of the rain and it turned out to be an amazing underground cocktail place located in a former illegal strip club. Amazing.
I left London for a little bit, the air is so clean elsewhere. There aren't as many people. There's room on trains. I forgot about this life.
Living in South London, I have to visit Greenwich Park. Partly for a respite from the hustle and bustle of the city, although the park is very busy for an open space, but mainly for the incredible view from the top of the hill.
Well by the time this is posted I'll have been a Londoner for much more than a week, but ho hey I have a blog schedule to keep and this didn't fit in right away!
Continuing swiftly on from last time:
The Tube costs more than I thought. I am constantly topping up my Oyster.
Still so convenient though, damn.
Sirens, sirens everywhere.
Chicken shops, chicken shops everywhere.
Hilarity had with the DLR conductor telling us all to get a nice lunch. Banter appreciated.
Trying to get into a cafe in a particularly touristy part of London on New Year's Day?? Not happening bruv.
Ok so can people hear what I'm playing out of my headphones on the tube? I'm listening to podcasts and I don't want people to hear.
We are all mad because train fare went up and London runs on trains. This is bad. To be fair this is bad anywhere and I was already pissed off because up North I rely on trains too. Just not quite as much.
I bumped into my housemate on the Tube. Same train, same carriage, only separated by the doors. Small world indeed.
London is sort of like any other city, at the same time it feels so much different.
Either way, London feels like home already.
Hello!
I've moved to London now. Over 200 miles from home to a city I love filled with ten million people, of which I know about 15 in total. One of the most expensive cities on Earth whilst working an entry level job. It's going to be fun, interesting, scary all at the same time.
That's also the reason there's been a bit of a silence on my blog, I've been busy moving and it's also been Christmas too. A very busy week if I've ever had one.
I want to start a series with a post every now and then collating my thoughts on feelings as I learn to live in this city, starting with my first 24 hours here:
- Everything is expensive and I fear for its price
- The snap filters are the local ones instead of the 'London' ones and I care about this far too much
- God, drinks are expensive here. So is food. Why does being in the capital mean that your food costs more???
- An hour and a half to get across the city? Normal. You can get from central Liverpool to central Manchester way quicker.
- Buses are so convenient. Tap your Oyster/card and be done with it.
- There's plague victim burial sites still about. I don't know how I feel about that.
- If Google Maps says the supermarket is a superstore, prepare for it to be tiny because it's London and there's no room for supermarkets everywhere.
- Unless they put them on plague burial sites, or is that unhygienic?
- The Tube is so convenient, being able to leave the house without checking train times and working around them?! Revolutionary.
- This city is so full of culture and history, yet I sit here playing Pokemon Go.
- A famous actor/scriptwriter once owned the house I live in, may he rest in peace, but please don't haunt me here.
- This city is expensive, I've spent so much today just travelling around. But then again I did go to zone 6 for the first time ever.
- I wonder if I'll ever not be completely giddy when I see One Canada Square and the Shard.
There's my first 24 hours, well more like 30 hours, of thoughts summed up in one neat bundle. I don't know when the next post will be, but it will assuredly be soon.
Posts on London are about to become more frequent with me moving there in two weeks time, so let's kick these off with a post on an amazing attraction, the Sky Garden.
I'm moving to London soon, probably by the end of the month, to work in social media and online content for a charity.
It doesn't feel very real even though I've been working towards moving to London for a social media role since I graduated University a few months ago, as I've been volunteering in online content creation, working alongside companies and bloggers as well as interviewing for roles in London, as that's truly where the best opportunities for these types of jobs are!
I'm mega excited, and I'll be even more excited once I've got a place to live sorted. That's my major stress right now, however I'm down in London for a couple days next week, so I'll hopefully leave with a place to live. I'm still not sure on which area I want to live in, though I'm increasingly leaning towards south London for some reason.
It's going to be a massive change, but the last few months have been about adjusting to life back at home, and now it'll be about adjusting to life elsewhere. I've questioned myself a million times over about why I want to be moving to somewhere so busy, expensive and far away, but every time I still want to go. I want to challenge myself by living so far from the North West where I've spent my entire life, I want to try something completely new and submerge myself in a completely different life and environment for a little bit. I love London, I'm beginning to know it pretty well, and I loved nothing more than living in a city. I miss living with friends and people my own age. Living at home is fine, I like seeing my family a lot, it's a hell of a lot cheaper, but it's not something you can easily go back to after living independently.
I'm going to miss my home life a great deal, I'll miss seeing my friends regularly, seeing my family all the time, and I'll just generally miss Liverpool. However, if I don't do this now I never will, right now I'm not arsed about living in a shoebox sharing with people I don't know, I don't have many commitments nor ties here, and a bunch of my friends are scattered all over the country now university is over, so I'm already getting used to people important to me being far away. For about four years I've been toying with the idea of living in London, and it's probably only been in the last two that I have taken it as a serious idea. It's something I know I have to do or will regret for the rest of my life.
Maybe I'll absolutely hate it and want to move home, maybe I'll love it more than I've loved anything in my entire life! By choosing to move out, and to somewhere so expensive, I'm choosing to give up a lot of disposable income, and by that I mean travelling. Travelling is sort of my main aim in life, but this is something I need to do now and will be putting that on hold for a while. I've had a good couple of years, I've seen a fair bit of Europe and spent a month in Japan! Plus I'm sure I can still make some short trips happen somehow. Maybe. Who knows.
I'm grateful to have started this blog, I can't wait to document the next step on here, the good and the bad. There's a series I've had in mind for a long time that I can finally start soon. I'm glad I'll be able to look back and follow my life from mid-2014 to whenever I stop doing this, hopefully never.
It's surprisingly how much our opinions and aims change, I remember as telling a friend at 13/14 that I'd be happy to stay in our hometown forever, but I left at 19 for university and hated coming back to it. At 16 my aim was to become a physicist and do shit with space, I dunno what, I realised I'm not great at science and it all left my head. A teacher at school wrote in my leaver's book that even though she thought I could excel at a career involving English/writing that I'd probably go down the science path.
Jokes on you Mrs Cassin, English is probably the most relevant subject we studied to my career goals and personal interests!! Or the jokes on me there, as I spent a while thinking I could do science, I'm proving now that I can't 'do science' by using the phrasing 'do science'.
Anyway, to sum up I'm moving to the big smoke, I'm probably gonna be tired, poor, and grumbly all the time, but it's gonna be wicked.
