The burden of silence

I don't know what it is about this apartment we're living in that makes it so quiet. Maybe the LACK OF NOISE!? But seriously.
Apart from the chavs that yell and rave at about 5pm on the dot every day. It is so so so sooo quiet. We don't really have a tv arial, so can only watch dvds, which means we rarely have tv playing at night during our "down time".
Now you're probably thinking. That's lovely. "A nice quiet getaway after your London day adventures". Which is true.
BUT! erin and myself are pretty ridiculous people. And we are finding it very hard to deal with eachothers loud eating habits, even water drinking habits AND EVEN the way we breath at times. We have no ambient noise to cover anyyy of these grating sounds from our overly sensitive ears.
I'm actually listening to my ipod as I write this because erin is eating cauliflower and cheese, and let me tell you. The sound of her chewing, makes me want to harm people.
 Erin has actually tapped me while typing this, and told me to pull out my headphones so i can watch her dramatize the way i've been breathing for the past 2minutes. She is in hysterics over it. Aparrently I breathe like  a pug while lying down and typing. .... okay .. hilaaarioous.
the first time she brought it up it was funny, she was aaalll laughs. Now she's got her serious voice on and telling me I need to control my breathing a  little better. She's being polite... kinda through her teeth though? Where you know she just wants to punch me.

We just can't win! Breakfast time doesn't even happen at the same time anymore. We haven't discussed why. But secretly I think we both know.

people and places

Blog tiiiime.

Hey all! This is Erin giving you the gift of London today :D

So at the moment most of our days start by us waking around 9/10am...because why would I want to wake up any earlier...I have my whole working life for them early mornings people! 

We've been busaaye. Our amazing cousin and her male friend have been showing us an awesome side to London. Lots of markets, nice eats and we've been walking to most destinations which is a great way to see the city. I'll post some photos as the end of my rants so you can see the fun things we've been up to!

Before I treat you with that, I have STORIES!

Now...I know it seems there's an underlying theme of transport in most of these blog entries, but really...there is nothing quite like a good transit fuck up to put you in a good mood. This happened about 2 nights ago while Kath and I were heading to Leicester Square to have some cocktails with our friend Vicky and her brother.

Google maps was the first evil in this scenario. Why did I listen to googlemaps? God knows...but we decided we would do the 10min walk from our apartment to the 'Highbury and Islington' station, this 10min walk turned into an hour walk because we had no freaking clue where the station was and google maps is a piece of Shiite.

Anyway...we found Canonbury station instead, yahoo. We looked at the tube map and had a pretty good idea that we needed to catch the Victoria line and then change over to another line to get to where we wanted to be, but just to be sure, we thought we'd double check with the transit information box. I can't even describe how wrong his "help" was and I can't even put it into words. So below is a map of our chaotic tube journey.

 red= our amazing journey         green= how it should have gone down

A trip that should have taken under an hour...took 2. And now we are masters of the tube stations.

Another thing we're starting to notice in our time being out in the big wide world is that odd people exist everywhere...and for those of you at home who are lucky enough to hear a good Jago rant, it usually involves some interaction with a fellow human. And the human is usually a bit out of sorts and/or totally beyond self awareness it hurts.

This great trait of attracting colorful characters has definitely followed us in our journey. I think we must have kind eyes or some kind of jovial banter vibe about us.

The other night kath, myself, cousin Mel and her man Dan  were traveling home on a bus. We hear this loud disorderly voice travel up the stairs to the top level of the bus and he's already locked his eyes on our little "posse". By the end of this interaction I had held a crusty jam jar once filled with beer, Dan had held the mans umbrella for the entirety of our journey and we were each offered multiple sips of beer from this jam jar. Harmless man but annoying man, just sit down crazy man...and let us sit in peace.

Another fun time happened to Kath and myself last night while bussing back to our apartment. This woman and her son waltz onto the bus, crazy drunk...so so drunk, but happy drunk..so it was entertaining to watch. Her son sits on the seat in front of us and then his mother slumps beside him and tilts her head back, so her eyes are now level with our eyes :) YAY! 

She then starts a great old rant about how her husband abandoned their son because he couldn't handle the fact that she, his wife, had left him for another woman and that her son was also gay, she then yells "BUT WE'RE ALL A BIT GAY ANYWAY AREN'T WE?!" At this point I love this woman, she's a champ and THEN some.

 When I thought things could t get any better, she locks eyes with us again and starts singing Dancing Queen by Abba...kath and I actually started to join in, but our singing was just whispers and as we all Stepped off the bus the mother and son team could still be heard singing Abba at the top of their lungs.

I love you mother and son!

So the fact is even though people are odd, sometimes it can be very entertaining - like the mother and son team...and other times it can be frustrating and boring - like holding a drunk man's jam jar.

Now I leave you with photooo's!!

 parker, the curious pooch, somehow creeped into the city farm and caused a ruckus

 I know it's meant to ve a sword. But all we could see was a cameleon vomitting

 Hackney flower markets. people and flowers everywhere!

Beer and Pizza and SUN, at crate. on the canals

London living

WELL, we've been in London for about 5 days now.. and things are great. so many things to see and do! We are staying in Islington which is a pretty great area, nice pubs, good beer, amazing chav neighbours. Our apartment is rather fancy but stands directly next to some lovely council flats. So we get to hear some pretty great conversations. I think it was the second night in that we heard a girl screaming at the top of her lungs. "get off me get away from me!! GET THE FRICK OFF ME!" (worse words were possibly said)Anyyywayyy, we feel we're getting the true londoner experience.

Now. Transport. Erin and I keep saying "we have to get things wrong once to get it right the rest of the time!" this motto helps us keep our cool so we don't murder eachother , it's a good  motto! On the second day we caught our first
ever bus. It was a changeover bus, so the bus drivers were tag teaming eachother, which meant the doors didn't open straight away.
But we're dumb tourists ya see, who did not realise what was occurring.
So when the doors don't open straight away, I naturally start smacking them thinking it's a manual thing that I have to PUSH OPEN. Then I hear the new bus driver yelling " stop STOP JUST A MINUTE! JUST HOLD ON NOW". To which it all kinda starts sinking in. Embarrassing to say the least.
I pulled the "sorry, I'm a dumb tourist" card, which managed to get a smile from him.
But it doesn't stop there....

 After like7 stops the bus terminates and we realise we're going the wrong way, but we aren't too fussed because EVERYDAY IS AN ADVENTURE?  The bus driver seemed more annoyed than us with the whole muddle up. Just calm down? was quite strange. but he was helpful in the end, directed us to the right bus stop.
We finally arrived in oxford circus, did some shopping. Made it back home hellah easily thanks to our motto!


Well that's all I have in me at the moment. Typing a blog on a Samsung galaxy tabLeT IS ACTUALLY THE WORST THING EVER? SEE THAT THERE I DINT MEANT TO PUT CAPSLOCK ON! and I DINT EVEN PUT THAT QUESTION MARK THERE? THIS THING JUST DECIDES TO PUT WORDS AND PUNCTUATION IN WHEREVER IT DEEMS FIT.The amount of words I've had to erase. crikey.I should probably look into it. hopefully there's a way to turn off "smart arse galaxy predictive word mode". Spelling I can deal with. but dont tell me
 what my next word is going to be. It also breaks my paragraphs up in terrible ways without me knowing then i can't undo it. So just DEAL with terrible English most of the time please. thanks.

xoxox Katherine.

In transit TAKE TWO

Alrightyyy. Katherine has kicked off this blog thang. So I feel it only fair that you should all read about the same thing. DEAL WITH IT.

So, yes. Flying just sucks balls. I actually think I managed to sleep for a decent 4hrs which is an improvement to some of my past flying experiences. Even after a solid nap you still feel like shit when you wake up. Half my time in that chair was spent micro nodding like a champ, my poor little neck.

This may sound ridiculous but I actually spent a great deal of time on that flight trying to think of a contraption that could be attached to the seats that would just prop your head up...almost like a really comfy FACE VICE That could contain your head so your brain doesn't have to wake you up every 10min to jolt your head back to a normal upright position. I might draw a picture of this later and post it. I might get rich.

Katherine's blog made me laugh a bit...mainly the part where she mentions that after the flight it looked like her face had been punched. 

I hadn't told her my thoughts on this until just now, while we were both drinking a huge bowl of coffee in Heathrow airport ...I kid you not, I looked at her face and thought "Shit. Katherine looks like she's been punched in the eye socket". And only just now after reading her entry I felt I could share that with her. She's aware of it, and now I can laugh hysterically at that fact. So great.

Ummm, also as I'm flicking through my book of flight highlights...my mind is reminding me of a bizarre yet humorous encounter with a fellow passenger. I will call him....Tony! 

Tony sat directly in front of me during our flight from Singapore to Zurich. He was great because he just sat there, didn't overdo the seat recline and...wait...but he did sneeze so loud that it jolted me out of a deep sleep. God dammit Tony! anywaaaay, as our plane is in "descending" mode he for some reason decides he'll try sneak in another nap, in doing so he wedges his hand between his seat and his wife's seat. So kath and I just see this limp hand jolt through the seats directly infront of us,  and not only that...on second inspection kath and i both realise that this man has only half a thumb and a yellow curly "fingernail" growing from what seemed like his knuckle. Lordy lord, 12 hrs of flying and that is all it took for us to lose my minds.

Please try to envision and understand that I'm not being a nasty bitch...it was just fucking funny.

Well that is all I can manage at this stage.  Currently just red red wine and watching the Office (the original British version of course!)

I'll leave you with these pretty flight faces! Enjoy 

Erin

In Transit

Okay. We have landed. Already spent one day wandering around London. But I feel, before we start talking about this amazing place. We need to discuss.. our flight experiences.

Flying hey? hurts your bum. Sitting down for 15 hours is never a good thing. Trying to sleep for 7 of those hours? Even worse. In the past two days I think erin heard me whinge about how uncomfortable those seats were, at least 6 times.

I will never understand the rush people have, to get onto a plane. Pardon me if this sounds like a seinfeld observation but seriously, everyone... will fit on. Calm down. You've paid for your ticket, you have your seat booked, the planes not going to leave without you. So STOP RUNNING TO THE GATE LIKE YOU'RE GOING TO MISS OUT ON SOMETHING? We actually had a man so close to us in the boarding line that my back pack was scraping his chest. I just kept swaying from side to side.. against his man boobs. At this point it was 1am and i was ready to start a fight. But I kept my cool.

Had two token crying babies on both flights. It's mandatory. they didn't scream for too long. Also quite surprised i haven't caught some disgusting bird flu because the people on our flight who coughed or sneezed all night did not feel the need to cover their mouths.Humans... pfft

I look like shit after any flight. no matter how long. 3 hour flight I look like balls. You can only imagine after 18hrs of flights how i looked, like someone had punched me in the eyes. we kept wondering why everyone else looked so good.Getting
onto our final flight, the boarder security man checked my passport against my shit face, and he says "that's not you!" to which i replied "you got me!" and we laughed lots ... but i look back and think he probably legitimately thinks, you look so bad right now, that your passport photo is actually flattering.

I think that wraps up most of our in transit experience. I'm sure erin will fill in anything i missed.

until next time!
pce

Hello folks

We'll keep this post short and sweet.
SEE YA ION LONDOND