It's dreary outside. Fortunately for me the rain stopped just long enough for me to make a round trip to the post office, which is about 6km away when taking the hidden paths only meant for bicycles. Unfortunately for me that path was flooded and I had to take the long way round. It was a good cycle nevertheless, and I am happy to have gone out.
I should probably write a year-end reflection blogpost or something. Maybe later.
Today was a beautiful day so I decided to head north to Watford, which turned out to be real close by. I didn't take a lot of photos along the way, and I think that's because I'm not familiar enough with the area yet. But I had an 'aha' moment today where two distinct areas of roads suddenly linked up in my mind, completing another part of the puzzle that is greater London's road network. I made the mistake of remembering things wrongly the first time I came here, and it's still hurting me. But I'm getting over it.
This is rapidly becoming my favorite path.
I found something interesting today. I ended up in Watford city center, took a wrong turn and drove across a hospital parking lot in the wrong direction, then ended up on a big road that was closed for traffic because it was filled with football supporters and food and drinks stands. The policeman kindly informed me that I could just barge right through there with my bicycle, so I slowly cycled through the crowd, looking around. I guess a football match is the UK's version of Japan's festival. Hm, cute Japanese girls in kimonos or rowdy football fans with weird accents. I think I know which one I prefer.
The canals. For lack of a nicer place, quite nice.
I can tell that my new bicycle doesn't really like to be on non-asphalty roads, even more so than the old one. The tires are just that tad bit too thin and smooth for muddy roads, and the lack of front suspension makes almost any off-road path around here a very bumpy ride. Or perhaps I just haven't cycled enough lately and need to get used to it again. In any case, after leaving the muddy paths behind and finding some open asphalt it really felt great. The bike's made to do asphalt, so I should do a bit more of that next time, just to see how far I can go in a day.
A random park. Behind me were screaming children.
This is what I do in weekends. I've somehow forgotten this after two years of not being in Japan, but this is what I do, and I like it. I cycle somewhere random, take photos along the way and sometimes find interesting things. Then I head home, tired and exhausted, and enjoy a nice movie in the evening while eating snack food from the convenience store. Ah, what a life.
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Today was perhaps the first time I really went out and 'cyclographed' in the UK. It's a bit hard to define why today felt like cyclographing and all my previous trips on my old bike near London didn't feel like it. Mostly it's the environment, I guess. There's less busy streets here, less traffic lights, less buildings everywhere. The roads are winding and you can go a long way without having to stop for anything. At the same time there's those interesting junctions that make you wonder where a road will lead to, unlike closer to the city where everything's square and everything ends up in the same places. And finally, there's the hills.
There's so many hills here, way more than around Atsugi actually. Cycling here is going to make me a lot stronger. There's no mountains though, nor are there massive landmarks that you can use to orientate yourself. I always found comfort in relating my position to some distant mountain or tower, but there's no such thing here. I still have to get used to that.
The bike is good. Everything is working as expected. The weather is getting worse but I don't want to let that stop me. Even though today was massively windy and quite cold, I brought the right clothes and managed to settle into a sustainable pace. I hope I can keep my motivation up through the winter. Then, perhaps in the spring, I can start thinking about the next big cycling trip :)
This is a large group of people asking out to please limit freedom of speech. The protest is supposed to be peaceful, but the underlying threat is clear. If this many people can gather around just for a peaceful protest, then how many will show up next time when it turns to violence? Because it will turn to that next time, due to the small group of radicals inside the large group. And then a small group of stupid white trash chavs will retaliate. And all this because the muslims couldn't target the real offender: the people who made the movie. And by that I mean the people who corrupted it onto something hateful, not the actors.
Free speech offends people. Deal with it.
Travelling around with English people, I am often surprised at the expressions coming out of their mouths. I consider myself reasonably well versed in English, and I will recognize a lot of cultural references or can usually infer from the context what a person means. Because non-native English speakers tend to be less capable, they speak in easier words and are therefore easier for me to understand, since I've gone through a phase myself where I would search for similar words. Different continents fall back on different patterns, eg. Spanish and Chinese people not differentiating between he or she, Italians and Polish people forgetting the 'the', and so on.
Americans are a whole other story. There's a lot of Americans that, even if they did go out and visit the world, hardly have experience talking to non-native/non-capable English speakers. So they tend to include a lot of slang, complicated words and weird expressions into the conversation that only an American or someone who lived in the US would understand. I find that Americans are almost always like this towards me when they detect that I can speak and understand English. Sometimes they suddenly worry that I'm not able to follow and try to clarify what the word 'douchebag' means after a long conversation about memes, American Football, Ice Hockey and other things Americans like.
But Brits, don't get me started on them. Their English is terrible. No one in the world understands the English of the English. You'd better speak The Queen's English damn proper, and moderate your vocabulary a lot to be understood by non-native English speakers. There's a fair bit of accents here in the UK, and all of them differ from each other quite strongly. Compare cockney versus queen's versus Scottish accent versus Welsh accent. Good luck with that, non-native person just arrived in the UK.
Accents are not the main issue though, since after a while you get used to them. What I found the most difficult to adjust to here in the UK is the huge amount of words and expressions that only someone who's lived in the UK all their lives would know about. In the case of American English some commonly used colloquialisms tend to make their way into International English, but that's not the case at all when it comes to UK English.
My girlfriend regularly throws out phrases that I cannot even begin to fathom the meaning of, even knowing exactly what the current topic is or what she's looking at.For example, the other day we saw a bunch of student hikers fully packed with backpacks, sleeping mats etc. My girlfriend's response: "Oh, they're D of E!".
..
..WHAT? What is D of E and why do you expect me to understand what that means? Speak proper English like the rest of the world! She clarified: "Duke of Edinburgh". Uh, ok? They're all Duke of Edinburgh? Then she explained that young kids in the UK do some kind of group bonding exercise thing that they get points for or whatever, and this program is named after the Duke of Edinburgh who first invented it. Right.
That's just one example, but there's tons. Here's another one: what's the connection between these words: Bap, Hoagie, Sarnie, Butty, Doorstop and Club? Answer: they're all a kind of bread dish. In Dutch we call them all bread. Eskimos and snow, I guess.
I'd talk about Bric-a-brac here too but the wiki page says enough. All this inserting strange words into a conversation is quite a palava and has left my brain in a higgledy piggledy state..
(published in the morning, written the previous evening)
Everything went better than expected.
As I blogged before, finding an apartment in London is easy. Finding a decent apartment with someone who does not try to rip you off is practically impossible. Yet I managed it somehow, and it only took two weeks. I'm honestly rather pleased with myself. It took less than a day between finding the place online, arranging a viewing and signing the contract.
The part I am most happy about is that this is a private renter. No hassle with fucking estate agents, no triple credit personality security credentials checks before you can rent the apartment, no hidden clauses designed to maximize profit for the middle man. No, this is plain and simple: someone has an apartment they're not using and they offer it for money. Everything else is common sense, decency and good will. Estate agents are supposed to protect you against entering into an agreement with dodgy figures, help find you the cheapest deals etc. etc. But the fact that they're in the middle means that both renter and rentee have to jump through a fuckton of hoops to actually get a contract going, and even then the estate agent causes the price to go up since it will have to take a slice of the pie as well.
Of the people that do private rental I would categorize them into three groups: those that are obviously looking to profit/scam you, those that are doing private rentals in a less official way to get around tax or government regulations, and those that just don't want the hassle of estate agents and believe they can do without them. The person I am renting from now undoubtedly belongs in the third category. I think with this I finally managed to shake the estate agent trauma of last year. I've proven to myself that I don't need them.
The moving process was largely painless, thanks to the help of my chauffeuring girlfriend. I managed to get all of my stuff out of storage and cancel my contract at the same time. The Big Yellow counter person told me that was no problem at all and that they'll charge me 45GBP back to my account. If this really works out like he said then that's the easily the most comfortable contract termination I've ever had. Bonus points for Big Yellow. Next up was a quick visit to my airbnb family to pick up the last of my stuff and to let them know I was leaving early, and off we went to the new place.
The new place is brilliant. As someone might say, it "ticks all my boxes". I wanted someplace closer to nature than my previous place, and a bit more countryside-like as well. This is absolutely such a place. There's forests everywhere, hills, roads that I can't wait to cycle on, and some larger areas full of nature less than 5km away. And it's not much further from central London than my previous place, with a train station at reasonable distance.
At the same time it's quirky: the apartment is pretty much a converted garage, the shower cabin is just plonked inside the room next to the kitchen and the toilet is outside. Let me clarify: the toilet is a heated tiny room available for my use only, but I have to go outside, and walk 2 meters towards the main house to get there. It's something I find quirky and interesting at the moment, but I wonder if it'll still be funny when it's freezing winter. We'll see. I think I can live with it.
There's lots to do. I got my desk set up but I don't have a desk chair. Tomorrow I'll go around exploring the area, maybe looking for a new bicycle. Now that I've moved into my final resting place it's time I got active. Time to start living!
(random brainfarts)
Today I stayed at work for about 10 hours. Why? No particular reason, other than that I couldn't think of what else to do with my day. Which is ridiculous because the day before I was very excited when I came home because I knew I had so many cool movies to watch, interesting articles to read and fun games to play. This must be the first sign of something bad. I've taken steps to fix it. Tomorrow I'll be working from home for a couple of hours and then I'll go out. I don't know where yet, I don't know what I'll do. It's possible that it'll be rainy and shitty, but then I'll go to a café somewhere. Otherwise, I'll go for a nice long walk. Sometimes I forgot to do this. Hopefully I won't forget again.
I'm still looking for an apartment. The search for a two-bedroom for me and my friend has become exhausting to the point that I'm ready to give up without even having viewed a single apartment. None of them are good. It's not a matter of quality. I could live perfectly well in a shitty apartment, and god knows I've seen a lot of them while searching online. But it's the price that people ask for it. I just don't want to have to pay shitloads of money to live in shit. I realize that bargains (low price, high quality) can't be found, but at the very least I must be able to find a low-price-low-quality place or a medium-price-medium-quality place, right? This week will be the last of the two-bedroom searches. Next week I'll move on to studios.
Yesterday I blogged about how it was yet another beautiful day. Today.. Today is just one of those days.. It's gray, dark and raining. I am sitting in the only non-dodgy cafe in south harrow looking out at an 'Ali halal' butchers shop while sad looking people with umbrellas pass by in front of me. I just spent over an hour scouring the Internet for an affordable 2-bedroom apartment in the outskirts of London. Without success.
If it were the me from before my summer refresh, I would probably be annoyed right now. I truth, I was annoyed before I left the house. But a change of environment does wonders, even if said environment has a view of Ali halal butchers shop. I am indeed not in the best of situations right now, but I know where I'm headed. Good things are waiting for me, all I have to do is jump society's silly hurdles so get there. I am arrogant enough to consider myself much more competent than the average person around here, so all I have to do is find my way and rise above them. (insert xkcd sheep cartoon here).
I will get an apartment first. Then, a bicycle. Then, a startup. Also, money would be nice. Please give me money.
