And so I'm back in London Town!
The move in was chaos from the beginning. Because the London tube refuses to make all stations luggage or wheelchair friendly, we ended up lugging our bags up and down endless flights of stairs. My mother's smaller suitcase didn't like this too much, exhibited by one of it's wheels falling off, meaning we had to scrape it along the road from the station to my flat. I laughed at us the whole way home.
First impressions:
The 'U' in the 'Bucklebury' sign to our building was missing. Hmm... Ghetto much? Security to the building is pretty good though, I was impressed by that. The next thing I saw upon entering the building were the elevators. I have taken to describing our two elevators as ovens, which is the most apt description I can find considering they are small, entirely metal, with no windows or mirrors. The grossest thing I have found so far on the elevator floor is a well gnawed chicken bone. So yes, not a fan. I do however admittedly prefer a 30 second ride in those things to a five minute heaving and panting trek up the 18 flights of stairs it takes to reach the apartment, which I had to endure yesterday when the lifts were briefly out of function.
But anyway! I love our apartment. It is in no way a luxurious modern flat, but it's a very good size, we have a living room, two toilets and one bath, 5 bedrooms out of which I have taken a medium sized one and which I adored from the beginning, and of course we have a fantastic view over the city. (So good in fact, that for one split second when I saw a tower shaped building in the distance, I thought to myself 'omg, we're so high we can see the Eiffel Tower from here!' ... Yeah, no.)
We have also been left several interesting gifts by previous tenants. These include: Bongos, a few VHS tapes about the Quaran, a speech stand (people buy those?!), a million crappy clothes hangers, and three left footed shoes. Thanx guyz!
So one of the first things I had to do was transport all my junk over from C's house, where I stored half of it, and Connaught Hall, where I stored the rest of it because it couldn't all fit in the taxi. This was part of my supposedly brilliant plan to save money by not paying for a storage company, but which backfired supremely when the taxi fee turned out to be higher than the cost of the storage of one box for the summer. I'm just convincing myself that I still saved money because I would have had to pay for two boxes.
But anyway. LORD that was difficult. The first attempt at retrieving my stuff from C's house failed because after an hour of cramped commuting via bus where our very inappropriate discussions either highly amused or irritated people around us, we got there too late and the porter had left. (Yeah, did I mention she lives in High Street Kensington, Porterville). The next day we succeeded, finally, but only with a total of three more hours of commuting.
Getting my stuff from Connaught was also a serious mission, involving batting my eyelids at a builder in order to get him to help me excavate my storage box from the very back of the storage room, under a horrific ton of other boxes and bags. We managed to do this and pile all my stuff into two suitcases in only twenty minutes, my achievement of the week! Because it apparently costs 25 fucking pounds to get a taxi to drive me and two suitcases 1 km, which I obviously refused because that would have been even more of a fail in terms of saving money, I then slowly but surely lugged it back to the flat. Jesus Christ. Next year I am NOT doing that.
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And now I'm on a four hour coach ride to Devon to visit my dearest H for a few days. I can't wait to get there!
Quotes of the week:
'I prefer hard, with a small head!' - I, concerning her preference of toothbrush.
Oh, and, a couple days later on the bus from C's place:
Me (after having laughed at the toothbrush quote, then continuing an earlier conversation about men's body types): Do you want to know what I like?
T: Uh, no, you don't have to tell me.
Me: Why not? Uum, I like O's. His is really good.
T (awkwardly): I don't wanna know
Me: What? Why not? I like yours too actually.
T (mortified): What!?
Me: What?
T: Are you talking about my toothbrush?!
Me: What? NO!!!
*Uncontrollable laughter*
