Welcome to the hotel Kensington

Such a lovely place,
Such a lovely place.

Well, if you like your hostels to be annoying and have the odd weird shit going on.

Ooo; show and tell time:

The jug in the kitchen doesn't work. I boil a pot of water to drink tea every day.
There isnt a single fork in the kitchen here. I cooked spaghetti and ate it with a spoon.
I could hear people nextdoor having sex last night. Interesting considering its a 4 person dorm...
My bunkmates doing lines with their mates, apparently not put off by me being in the room.
The fucking shift and ctrl keys dont work on this keyboard (the most annoying of all).

So, yeah... interesting times.

It occurs to me that my run-down on the trip to Bristol neglected to mention our trip to the Walkabout - a chain of antipodean-targetted booze joints fairly akin to generic pubs back home. For a particularly in-depth look at our drunken evening see a post by Mr Squirk (Rob).

For those of you who read his whole blog, yes its true... we did let him use 'Camwhore'.

Lastly, I still havent shaved since I left NZ. Here's a (bad) artist's impression of what it looks like:



Well, I thought it was funny..

Tabloids are surely for stupid people..

And I would like to add the following 'shocking' headline to the mounting evidence:

'ROCK STAR DRUG ADDICTION'

(and your point being...?)

This is almost as silly as the signs around London that cheerfully state:

"Think lips. Think Pink".

(Apologies for being fairly dirty here, but please; who is screening these things)

(I am still struggling to find something to top the 'Sacs and Such' dabacle, tho)

The Vince creature still lives

Only he now pretends to be called 'Michael'.

So yeah, just completed a bit of the ol' visit to Bristol, to see Vince for his 25th. A small amount of mooching off him and Jess and I'm back in London again.

Not a great deal to report on Bristol. 1st stop was a pub called 'the Reckless Engineer' (named after someone who used different rail track gauge to everyone else. Winner), so that's prolly worth a mention.

I went and spent an afternoon in Portishead, which was a placing rocking to the point of not actually having a sign bearing their town's name. Way to spoil a good photo op, you useless bastards. Still, managed to improvise with a half-obscured 'Co-op' sign. Perhaps not quite the same, tho.

In other news, have finally sampled the Mogwai that I stole from Jon, and it's done alright for a 1st listen. Might manage a few more at some point.

More on Cardiff Nightlife

was my last night in Cardiff and, having ruled out the local metal place as being a valid place to spend saturday night, I was a little unsure as to where to head. I was initially just going to get a few drinks at the hostel bar.

But, a better solution presented itself:

Check out the local gay bar with a random Lesbian chick from the hostel.

Was actually a pretty fun night, to be honest. Perhaps not something I'll make a habit of, but pretty good. The best thing is easily the lack of any kind of sexual tension at all, in that you don't have to worry about actually persuing any young ladies (or, more likely in my case -bein lame for not having done so). Also, somehow I think people understood/knew I wasn't gay (perhaps the lack of dress sense and personal presentation skills gave it away), which was handy.

Met a couple of fellas (look, traditional Welsh slang there, I believe) there who seemed fairly hard case, and worth a good yarn. Was kinda time to bale when the people I was with started to pair up and disappear for the evening, though.

After the expesnses of the weekend, I'm thinking I might need to get a job soon. Also, I don't think I'm adjusting hugely well to not actually having a home. Doing ok, but starting to get sick of not having my own bed/room/anything.

Plus, using net Cafes is annoying, mostly because they all use bloody IE when, of couse, they should be using firefox. As well as being crappy, it seems to make my blog look stupid and not arranged properly.

One final note: my ankle is playing up. I'm hoping I haven't done anything silly like that young Joel once did (ie: a broken ankle). But Meh, I think an x-ray will cost too much (especially while I could be drinking with that money). Will just try to rest up and hopefully she'll be sweet.

Welsh National Snoring Contest

Well, at least some of the dudes in my bunkroom seem to think so.

Yeah, I'm over in Cardiff at the moment. It's not bad over here; reminds me of NZ a little, but then you try and talk to people and the accent kinda snaps you back. Still get these dreaded 'Coronation Street' style flashbacks, which is weird. Oh, also, I walk past a big castle-type thing on what I think is the main street every day...

I'm at a Hostel that has a bar in the bottom floor which, incidently; seems to stay open typical New Zealand-style hours, which is late for most pubs over here. Dangerously convenient, actually. Apparently there was someone puking in our room on the first night I was here (and it wasn't me, woo!), although I was pretty shaky by the time I hit bed as well.

I also manged to go out to a club for the first time since I arrived in the UK. First went to see some indie-folk gunk with some other dudes from the hostel. Not my style, but one of the dudes had an amusing voice and a particularly frantic stage-presence (well, floor area-presence, really). Proved to be entertaining enough for those reasons, I guess.

But, I baled fairly quickly to the local 'metal club' (which I had previosly researched for such an occasion). Weirdly enough, their big metal night is a wednesday, and I had to make do with crappy pop-rock bollucks, which was actually quite disappointing. Strangely enough, the DJ wasn't so amenable to half-cut Kiwi demanding he play Sepultura. Common enough scenario for me, so not really phased, though.

Locals proved to be super-friendly (may want to swap in 'drunk' there actually, but same thing, I suppose) and had a few intesting yarns over the course of the night.

Such as:

"Ah, you're from NZ, huh? Cool. NZers are always welcome here 'cause you guys have to endure the same fecking sheep shaggin' jokes that we get from the bloody English"

Also managed my first discussion about Fantomas with a random. I was shocked when he was just kinda "eeh, it's ok" about 'The Directors Cut'.

Looking at club genres around here is pretty depressing too. Soo much Indie going on. I blame the Arctic fucking Monkies for that (at least to a certain extent anyways). Bloody 'fashionable' music.

Oh yeah, went and saw a castle. Was big; made of stone. That kind of stuff. The end.

Coz - get a new shower, and a curtain, too.

Well; the flight is done, and my body hasn't quite broken down entirely.

Yeah, the trip, combined with a full 12 hours of lugging my pack around heathrow and then Hyde Park by myself ,was fairly... grueling.

I did have the dubious pleasure of spreading my generally filthy and knackered bodliy...uh... aura through one of the poshest McDonalds I've ever been in, when I got into london. The Maccers in Kensington has live piano, by the way. There were 'looks', from other patrons.

And London is, well; pretty big, actually - kinda annoyingly so. I'm already irritated by having to spend extended periods on trains to get where you need to go, not to mention the costs. I also have this bloody idiot tendancy to keep multiplying everything by 3, just to keep it in some lunatic 'perspective', or something. It seems to be offending my general tight-arse sensibilities no end.

Otherwise I have been entertaining people (Coz's flatties, other people on the underground, for example) by coughing, blowing my nose and just generally advertising the fact that I am an unwell individual, and likely affected with something fun and CONTAGIOUS. I'm fairly sure its just a wee cold, but as far as other people know it could be the begginings of TB, or something. If you're going to make other people uncomfortable about being in a close proximity to you, you might as well have a little fun with it, I suppose.

Also, I somehow seem to have difficulty actually understanding some people here. Apparently NZ english branched off from our common root a lot longer ago than I really ever appreciated. There are so many other languages floating around here, if I overhear someone talking, I often have to listen for a few seconds just to verify that it's English. Hmm, perhaps I'm exaggerating a wee bit, but some people are bloody hard to understand.

One final thing I've noticed, is that all english men of around 40+ seem to have aquired exactly the same laugh. Well, cackle, is more appropriate, I think. Quite odd.

Oh, and Coz has a weird hand-held shower thing that I dont like. In fact, I just decided that I dont like it enough to make it the subject heading, hah!