I had seen a couple of electric car charging stations a short while ago, but that was somewhere near Mayfair, the most expensive stop in Monopoly, and probably home to some of London's frequently absent mega rich. And of course all the charging stations were empty; I don't think there are any electric lamborghinis yet. So a bit of a surprise to see a couple of charging stations in our local suburb. And in use this time. And appropriately enough the car looked a little more modest - I'm not even sure this one in particular would offer me as much leg room as an airline seat.

Nice buzzfeed run down of all the tube lines in London, ranking them in order of usefulness. It's quite kind to most of them but being most familiar with the District recently this about sums things up for me: 8. District Line: ..A slowly trundling caravan of disappointment and crushed ambition.. The Victoria line was much higher until someone flooded a switching room with fast setting concrete the other day. via timeout

Proof positive that London's the most expensive city in the world, as if I really needed any. Interesting to see Sydney is as low as 11th as well. However these sort of infographic's can't be that meaningful if they doesn't even take in to account the average local salary - I think that would skew things even worse for London (and probably better for Sydney too) via Sydney Morning Herald

One evening recently looking out onto passing trains I noticed one of the neighbours from the house next door throwing slices of old bread into the grassy area behind the apartment building. This backs onto a fence which in turn has bushes narrow strip of briars behind it to the train tracks. Who does that, basically emptying food rubbish into someone else's garden!? When I looked out later in the evening some of the bread seemed to have disappeared. But then I noticed right at that moment some of the bread was being taken away by what I thought first was a cat but then noticed was actually much bigger. I've never seen a badger in real life, bar maybe at a zoo, so it was very odd to see one methodically picking up slices of bread, one at a time, from the grass and bring them through the railway fence into the bushes beyond. And I especially didn't think city badgers existed, or at least ones that made a living shoulder to shoulder with foxes in tiny parcels of waste ground.

We'd already decided to move flat a while ago - what with the impossibly high rent and low salary combination we're sporting, and the new family addition - but with the arrival of the St. George magazine in our letterbox it almost felt like we were being told to leave. I had no idea that the apartment complex that we've been living in was aimed at such high rollers. This is a free magazine that advertises only the most luxurious accommodation in the most expensive London boroughs. Kind of the property equivalent of the pretty disgusting Square Mile magazine, it was full of ads for super yachts, private jets and luxury penthouses - perfect investments for those looking to keep large amounts of cash away from prying tax collectors. The cover of this issue features some ugly new apartment tower that's going to be build right on the river in central London, near the Tate modern gallery - a huge blight if there ever was one. Who do they think is actually living in our apartment block?! I guess it's not totally surprising - some of the properties that are worth well over a million pounds around London look drab and crap. Of course everywhere looks drab after 8 months of winter. link

I hate going to the dentist - I've had too many fillings and multiple teeth extracted (thankfully I wasn't awake to experience it) and the waiting room is enough to trigger some Pavlovian response. Except for anything other than getting my teeth cleaned at least - I used to actually enjoy that rumbling sound inside my head like a car wash that was made by the dentist's tooth brush. Now however, this cleaning stuff is done by a dedicated hygienist instead. But still I haven't minded going to one - they're the dentist where you don't need anesthetic, so that's good right? No.. From now on I'm going to be cowering in fear when I have to go to one. It's bad enough when they just use the probe to check things, and it feels like they're sticking a pin in my gums and leaving it there to see how long it takes me to scream. But when they bring out the machine to get rid of the tarter crap I know now I'm entering a world of pain. I wish they'd give me something; oil of cloves or anything. I hate the shaming thing too - you're probably brushing too hard, you're probably not brushing hard enough, you're not flossing correctly, you should use these floss brushes instead.. Thanks so much - It's completely my fault that I'm paying you to put me through agony and spit mouthfuls of blood. Afterwards my clothes were drenched in fear sweat. Lying there in the chair, without any way to wince away from the pain like in any other occasion, just amplifies everything. The hook catching on some gum, yanking it in a direction it was never supposed to go. Ouch

A great map here showing you whether it's actually quicker to walk between two underground stops than it is to take the train. There are a load of stations like this, probably down to the deep tunnels and escalators you need to travel to them. And of course, delays.

The clocks go forward this coming weekend for British summertime. Summertime!!? Everyone is still busy freezing our asses off. It was snowing the other day and I bet this Easter weekend I'll see snow again. Nothing to do but stare out at the bald trees and gray sky. Take me back Sydney, all is forgiven.

For most of 2012 I was commuting to work into Waterloo station, apparently the busiest station in London (and busy enough during rush hour, making that the busiest station in the UK. And that should be pretty busy, given how packed the train and tube network are. So it was pretty revealing to see that there was no UK station in this list of top 51 busiest train stations in the world. As an example, somewhere I'm more than familiar with, Osaka Umeda, gets an annual 820,000,000 passengers per year and it's 4th on the list. First of all, holy crap that's a huge number of people. But compare that with the comparatively puny 82,000,000 per year in Waterloo (according to the Transport for London website). Even my old commuting spot of Sannomiya in Kobe (a city less that a quarter of the size of London) is high on the list at 16 with 240,000,000. It really goes to show how the Japanese train network is on a whole other level to that of practically anywhere in Europe. The highest ranking station in Europe is Paris Gare-du-Nord at 190,000,000. And all but six of the stations on the list are in Japan - number one is Shinjuku, Tokyo with a whopping 1.2 billion passengers a year. Link via Digg.com Update: So there was a further post here with a full list of the busiest 100 stations and Waterloo makes it in at 91. 91!

Despite the huge size of London, there's scant few Japanese restaurants here, and fewer still that are run by actual Japanese people. This must go some way to explaining why I can only ever seem to find "Chicken Gyoza" here. I've never even heard of Chicken gyoza before - why is pork so expensive?

Switching jobs soon means my commute won't involve going into the City anymore. It won't be much shorter, but at least it should be a little less busy. I won't miss this.. or this..

I found out pretty quickly after going to lunch a few times that when places where asking me was I eating in or taking out, it wasn't just so they could offer me a paper cup or a tray. There's 20% VAT on any food just to sit down and have it there! Whether the shop wants to charge you or not - I'm used to the idea of having to pay more to sit in and drink you're coffee, but this is a little ridiculous. Obviously the places selling the food agree. How many times have said I was getting take away and then changed my mind and sat down..

Walking around the medieval streets of ancient London near my office at lunchtimes has given me the chance to come across lots of old buildings with crests or shields outside their doors and occasionally very dressed up people going inside. Some of them look like gentleman's clubs, where one might make a wager to travel around the world in 80 days. I came across one such place called Tallow Chandlers Hall, which sounded vaguely Freemason-y, and which upon googling, turns out to be just such a shadowy mysterious place. Or maybe just somewhere for rich people to dress up in old costumes. The hall belongs to the Worshipful Company of Tallow Chandlers, one of many London guilds surviving from the middle ages. What did they do? - well they chandled tallow of course! ("Chandling" being I guess the art of turning fat into candles). Not to be confused with those completely different Shelbyville-style hangers on, the Wax Chandlers. I can't imagine though, in these days of manufactured products and such, they still sit around making candles from dead animals. There are a whole load of these medieval guilds, or Livery Companies, still surviving (all of which begin with "The Worshipful Company of.."), in one form or another, many with their only Livery Hall in prime central London properties, and no doubt some as gentleman's clubs. And there are plenty more with groovy names like: The Worshipful Company of Cordwainers The Worshipful Company of Loriners The Worshipful Company of Farriers and last but not least, The Worshipful Company of Management Consultants

I'd managed to ignore most of the build up to the olympics (beyond dreading what it was going to do the transport system) and not waste hours online trying to get a lottery-allocated ticket to the Olympic Stadium. So it was a bit of a surprise to find myself on the day after the opening ceremonies in the Olympic park, early on a Saturday morning in a Handball arena along with a thousand other ticket holders whom I wouldn't have been surprised to find out also had, until a week previous, no intentions of getting caught up in the olympic hype. We were all there to see the women's Angola and Russia teams square off, then the South Korean and Spanish teams compete. Aware that almost everyone there that morning probably had no idea of the rules, the MC went through everything during the build up explaining the rules and strategies of the game and trying to get everyone into it. With few people having any idea who to support, the crowd got behind the Angolan's once they were established as the underdogs; the Russian's became the heels and suffered all the boo's. Everyone got in to the atmosphere, but it still wasn't quite enough to stop everyone from dozing off by the end of the second match. We wandered around the park afterwards, grabbing a glimpse of the impressive velodrome and basketball court. The official programme was a fleecing 10 pounds for skinny magazine full of ads, the food was pretty awful, but it was well worth the trip on a cold July (summer!?) morning.

Just in time for the Olympics I got to take part in one of the quintessential experiences of London living by being trapped on the underground in the stagnant heat, between stations, during rush hour for over half an hour. I was lucky to have got on the last car so despite the hour it wasn't completely packed - I can only imagine the cattle car conditions at the front. There is literally no space in the tunnel beyond the tiny train - just pipes and one hundred year old tunnel. After half an hour of updates from the driver as to why we hadn't moved an inch (and increasing scoffs and grumbling from everyone) the train pushed forward a little until the drivers door was at the platform of the next station, whereby we all filed out by the drivers door. As I was leaving they shut the doors to the station, and hordes of irritated commuters stood around looking for a bus and loudly proclaiming - this would never happen in X (replace with your favourite city not holding the Olympics in a few days).

It's really been a surprise the extent to which so many restaurants are franchises here. At least in the outer zone suburbs anyway, I'd imagine most restaurants are chains. I'd always expected chains of fast food and sandwich shops (in "the City" it's practically a sequence of EAT, Pret a Manger, Itsu, and Wasabi repeating every 100 metres), but it gets so repetitive when every suburb you go to (or even town for that matter) is almost guaranteed to have most or all of the following down it's main strip (sorry, High Street) Pizza Express, Carluccio’s, Strada, Zizzi, GBK, Cote, Byron Burger, GBK (and if the retail area is large enough there will be a Wagamama, Giraffe, Jamie's Italian and even pub chain's like All Bar One)... Maybe it's to do with the retail rental prices and the state of the economy but for a country with so many historic towns and so much history, it makes everywhere look and taste surprisingly the same. Sometimes that's reassuring I suppose, and there are always plenty of pubs, but it's not like I get a chance to go to those much. Update: Actually a little serching and I see that a whole load of these restaurants are owned by the same company, which just shows the choice is even less - Pizza Express, Byron and Zizzi are all the same company.

Despite having been to London a few times there are still loads of tourist spots I've never seen (one of the attractive points of coming to live here are that there are just so many). So it seemed appropriate to try another one. We headed to Baker St station on the Bakerloo line, one of the browner-looking old tube lines (but also one I rarely hear of having major delays), and full of Sherlock Holmes tiling, right around the corner from Madame Tussaud's, another tourist spot I've never seen but one I'm not in much of a hurry to see. There was a long enough line snaking out of the Sherlock Holmes museum on 221b Baker St and, being guarded by a period dressed policeman, at this time was full of young Japanese tourists. The museum was pretty good though, full of wax reproductions of famous characters and props from the stories - severed fingers, pistols, blue carbuncle's - and real letters from random people all over the world asking Mr. Holmes for help or mentioning they'd spotted Moriarty on the No. 17 bus just last week. The most surprising thing was actually how small the place was, or really how small the rooms and how low the ceilings. Maybe it's more true to life, but anytime I've seen Sherlock Holmes on TV or in the cinema, his flat always seemed so much more roomy and less cramped. But I guess that's because they need to fit in all the camera equipment and lighting. We also got a chance to see Regent's Park nearby and walk down through Marylebone, one of the nicest neighbourhoods I've seen in London - plenty of nice shops and restaurants, side streets to stroll, and a cool old book shop specialising in travel books - but yet another central area full of the mega rich. Or maybe considering Mayfair was around the corner, only the super rich.

Having finally scored a job and a roof over our heads maybe there's enough time to come back here. I'm in to my second full month in the UK, having arrived in early January job hunting for a few weeks and not enjoying the winter one bit. I spent a couple of weeks in a basement flat with no window going to interviews and cursing the cold and dark. But now we've managed to get a flat in a nicer suburb of London, close to a river and parks but still theoretically close to London proper. I say theoretically because the commute isn't as I'd hoped. I take the drain to work everyday (yes the drain - so called because of all the people being drained from the City, or maybe just cos the Thames keeps leaking in). And filing in and out of the station is like leaving a stadium. I miscalculated the commute time from our apartment, figuring only the travel on the train and not the delays and all the slow shuffling with thousands of others along platforms and narrow corridors. We've had a few bad experiences getting stuff organised for our place - furniture dumped on the side of the road (thank you Home Base), being billed twice, stuff never appearing - none of which makes adjusting to life here any easier. The steel grey winter makes staring out the train at all the rows of terraced housing and bare trees less than uplifting on the way in to work.

The flights back to Sydney were a whole lot better - half empty planes meant that a few times I had a whole centre row where I could stretch out and also, thanks to some pills, catch a little shut eye. Initially leaving London though, with the Air France crash in the back of my mind, I was really unnerved to see a few passengers running down the aisle before we departed, and the pilot subsequently announcing that a few passengers had changed their mind about the flight and that there would be a delay while their baggage was unloaded and a security check was done. I tried to push thoughts of Final Destination from my mind. I would have had the long flight from Dubai back to Sydney with a row all to myself were it not for some interruptions. Not long after taking off a posh, middle aged British lady stopped a flight attendant near my row to say "I'm seated beside an EXTREMELY large man, may I sit somewhere else?". That somewhere else was in my row. I still managed to nap a little bit, scrunched up in some sort of fetal position while still managing to keep my belt fastened. When I woke up though, another passenger tried to grab my attention. This guy turned out to be a 56 year old ganja smoking, professional niteclub dancer in Ibiza, living in Holland but originally Indonesian, with muscles that could only be achieved by a hell of a lot more time in the gym than I devote - who proceeded to give me his life story, including lots of photos of him with his arms around girls young enough to be his daughters. He got off in Bangkok though, on his way to a tour of SE Asia. The rest of us flew on, thankfully uneventfully, to Sydney 10 hours later.