Learners

The problem with the UK's driving license scheme is basically that you can slap a learning plate on a bike and go deliver pizzas in the middle of the night. That's pretty much it.

The thing is that in the UK you don't need formal driving lessons for most cases. The process is as follows: you apply for a provisional license; you're given a provisional license; you can drive with a learned driver on you side; when you feel like it you take a test and you get a full license. I won't elaborate much on my opinion about letting people out on the streets without an instructor with a second pair of pedals by their side, I suppose it's not too hard to guess. But if the system doesn't seem very fit for cars, it's clearly broken when it comes to bikes.

You see, if you don't know how to drive a bike you can't carry someone with you. Which means you can't take a learned driver while you're out. Which in turn means that you can pretty much go out on your own, with little to no strings attached. Which, to finalise, is a gold mine for delivery companies. What's cheaper, a properly licensed driver or a kid eager to earn his first couple of pounds? Well, a simple matter of looking out of the window and counting the L plates on pizza bikes quickly tells you the latter is the correct option.

And now I'm sad I don't have records of accidents involving learning pizza deliverers that I can quote to show this complaint makes sense. What a pity.

Percentages

Today I became part of the 0.2%. Of Londoners that walk to work, that is. To became part of the rich % I'll still probably need a few more decades. Anyhow, the point is that there were lots of movings to do, little time to write, mini blog post it is.

Beware

"Customers beware, pickpockets operating in this station." You know, it's almost an official trade.

Floods

Trains cancelled due to flooded tracks. Apparently British rails are not very good at handling rain. I mean, it's Britain, who would have thought there would be a lot of rain!?

Harrods

"Have you seen one of these?" "Huh..." "And have you seen two of these?" And on he went, multiplying red balls, making things appear in my hands, one neat magic trick after another. Quite a busy place, Harrods's toy world.
Actually, it's quite a busy place overall. Floor after floor, I believe this is the one place where you can find everything. Victorian furniture? Check. £90k pianos? Check. Big meteorites? Check. Too many chocolate kinds to list them all? Check. The good thing, however, is not that they have everything, in so much as that they actively demonstrate what they are selling. One guy is playing a piano, another is showing the latest generation camera. That guy in the beginning was showing off a box set of magic tricks, and making quite a good job of it, may I add, and making for an excellent atmosphere overall.
For once I think I can say I am thoroughly impressed with a place. Now I just need enough money to buy that £8k dinner table they had there and those £1500 chairs that go with it. Simple enough, right? I'll make an update 40 years from now when I buy those. Meanwhile, and just to keep the tone of the rest of the blog, I'll complain about the lack of maps and guides inside the shop. Except for the stairs on one entrance, they're not anywhere. How are rich people supposed to get around like this!?

Lost tourists

Today I gave directions to a tourist. Can I say I'm a Londoner now?

On bakeries

You know, bakeries? Those places where they bake bread and cakes and stuff? I'm glad you know, because they seem to be rather exotic places around here. Most coffee shops do have one form of cakes or another, but they are of the pre-packaged, plastic-y, variety. In house baking remains an illusive concept. And this regarding cakes; with bread it gets much funnier. Bread here seems to come in sliced form or big loafs. Small (normal?) sized bread isn't available in many places, and when it is it's labeled something like "Italian rolls", as if it were something fancy, and costs £0.40 a piece.

Bakeries seem so hard to find strolling down the streets at random that Time Out actually made a guide of the best bakeries in London; leaving that to chance would be a complete no no. But then again I haven't been to Baker Street. Maybe the bakeries are all clustered there and I just haven't noticed. In which case I would perfectly understand why a character like Sherlock Holmes would want to live there. The guy knew what he was doing.

Heads up, lights out!

This may sound awfully trivial, but crossing streets is an essential activity for anyone living in a big city. Therefore, it was with great surprise that I found, or rather failed to find, traffic lights for pedestrians around here.

No, it's not about small crossings in lost suburbia but rather streets and roundabouts at the very heart of the city. Strangely enough, quite a few (a lot? most of them?) of the pedestrian crossings in London don't have signalling lights for people who walk, which pretty much means it's every man for himself. I suppose this could work if the drivers were all nice and stopped, but they aren't and they don't. Which actually makes sense. Since they do have lights for cars, they are expected to move when it's green. How should you be aware of that from the sidewalks is beyond me.

I haven't quite understood what's the logic behind this, but one theory that was put forward to me was that you don't really need lights because you can take a peek at the lights for the cars and see if you can move forward. That is, assuming the light is somewhere you can see and that there aren't cars coming from other unexpected directions. Simple.

All in all, this makes for some rather awkward situations. I may be guilty of often disregarding pedestrian lights back at home, but the lack of them is going to get me killed one of these days.

The Lion King

You know that big guy, with a broad, hairless chest and lion gear on his head called Simba? Now your do.

Jumpers

It's what they call the people who cause "severe delays on the underground line due to a person under the train". Though they manage to say it in such a nonchalant way that I wonder if they've thought about recording that warning too.

Crush hour

Ok, the term is not mine but it certainly is a good description of what happens in the mornings and evenings of weekdays around here.

London has the oldest underground rail system in the world. Obviously it's not running steam locomotives anymore, and obviously many parts were built since the XIX century, but the fact is that it is barely apt to deal with the crowds that flood it every day.
The thing that impressed me the most about the boarding ritual for the Tube carriages is that people don't all enter when the train arrives. In all likelihood there is not enough room available inside, so people queue in front of where the doors will stop. After letting the ones who are leaving out, this amorphous mass of Londoners makes its way inside. Squeezes inside. Or rather pushes inside until all the space is taken. The doors close like the lid of a can and off it goes, leaving the unlucky ones who couldn't enter in place, waiting for the door of the next Tube to come by.
The other peculiar thing about the Underground routine is formed by sentences like "Mind the gap!" and "Mind the doors!" These have already become part of pop culture but what's interesting is that during rush hour they are voiced by actual assistants on the platforms. In fact the mess is so great that some form of guidance is needed to tell people what they should already know and to signal the driver once everyone is finally in place. As inefficient as it may sound, I'm pretty sure that trying to automate this would end in chaos.

So, putting it all together, there really is no way around rush hour for people travelling by Tube during those times. Which basically means I'll remain crushed twice a day for a little while longer.

Half sandwiches

Apparently they can slice your sandwich in two but they can't wrap the parts in two different papers, as for that I'd have to pay for two halves (£6) instead of one full (£5). Or maybe I just visited a very strange place.

An expensive city

You've all heard about how London is an expensive city. But expensive doesn't quite describe it.

The first thing I had to do in order to become a Londoner was finding a place to live.

I quickly learned that here you don't rent apartments: you flatshare. The rents are so insanely high that, unless you want to live at over an hour of commute time to work, you simply can't afford to rent a flat. Even paying for a room eats a nice chunk of your salary. And this is assuming you've got a half-decent job. If it's a McJob, well... Because of this I quickly found out that the flatsharing industry is a thriving one. There are lots of specialised sites that make a living out of this. Some allow you to browse for ads but only to contact an advertiser if either he or you pays a fee. Others only give you contact details after a certain number of days from the posting of the advert unless you're willing to pay, meaning that paying users have greater chances. All in all, I had a hard time navigating through this maze but I found a room. Granted it's not that good (ok, the flat is plain bad) but that's another story.

The problem, however, is that rooms are just the beginning. I was expecting to eat a lot of beef around here.

Fat chance. The famous beefs the British people supposedly eat all the time go for at least £20 in restaurants, and that's not including the drinks. Some cheaper meals can be had for £10, but £5 can buy little more than fast food. This is particularly troublesome at lunch, since I really don't fancy the idea of bringing a home-cooked lunch to work every day. But I guess that at least at night I'll be giving the kitchen a fair bit of use.

The rest of the things follow the same trend. Buying stuff that couldn't have been brought on a plane is a pain. Finding a backpack (I only had a laptop bag) for less than £40 is like looking for a needle in a haystack. (I just found one today!!!) Bedsheets start at about £25 (the crappy ones) and then quickly escalate to over £50. Clothes are expensive at average shops and blow through the roof if you want the cool brands. Paying for the Tube on a daily basis can be as much as £8.40 a day, though that can be mitigated with a monthly travelcard for the modest quantity of £110.

All in all, the saying goes that if you want to buy something and you can't find it in London, it probably can't be bought. That might be true, but it certainly doesn't mean you'd want to buy it here.

Alcohol

In case you're searching for ethyl alcohol to disinfect a wound, forget it, you won't find it. And people at a pharmacy will give you a weird look. I mean, alcohol is to get drunk, right? However, they'll gladly sell you some disinfectant based on methanol. I think that might explain a thing or two about the mental state of people around here.

Croissants

So, the café employee didn't know what a croissant was. That's a new one for me.

Train travel

Apparently trains around here (or at least First Great Western ones) don't let you know at which station they are stopping next. And I mean, why should they? You can perfectly look through the windows to search for signs with names on the platforms, right?

Blackness

3 days in London and you will be sniffling black snot. No, seriously. That's London's air for you.

When I arrived in London ready to start my new job I knew what I was going for. I had read all about the city, the Underground, the famous streets, the cars going on the left, the parks, the museums, the currency, etc. And then, 5 minutes out of the plane, I realised I didn't know a thing. The level of shock about so many things was so great that I couldn't contain myself. I needed to tell people what it was like. I needed to tell the world. And so, here it is, a blog to serve that purpose.

Here you will find my personal ramblings about the idiosyncrasies of the city, its peculiarities and oddities. There will be regular long posts on the weekends and random short posts about anything that might come up in a particular day. Stay tuned!