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London is…

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View from the Shard

I’ve been thinking a lot about my time in London, now that I’ve lived here for over four years.  And it got me thinking: how could I possibly begin to describe the wonderful roller-coaster that is the expat experience?

Here’s a starter for ten, at any rate. To me, living in London is…

  • Busy and lonely all at the same time
  • Equal parts filthy and elegant
  • It’s dancing in the middle of the road with a kebab in hand
  • Making friends on the night bus…
  • …and convincing 10 strangers on said night bus to play charades with you
  • Not having time to read that magazine you bought a month ago intending to have some ‘down time’ to read it
  • Crying on the tube about some boy who wasn’t even worth it…
  • …and not even giving a shit what the other passengers think as you snotball into your tissues
  • Then remembering that moment, fondly, years later
  • It’s fine dining and swanky bars
  • Followed by dirty chicken at 2am
  • It’s underground nightclub raves
  • It’s breathtaking art right on your doorstep
  • It’s illegal art-squat-parties-in-abandoned-office-blocks (sponsored by that dodgy cider brand you can’t recall)
  • There’s creativity beyond anything you’ve ever seen
  • There’s all those amazing weekend jaunts to Europe
  • Landing in Gatwick at 730am on a Monday and rocking up to work fresh from an Amsterdam bender, suitcase in hand
  • Trips to the countryside
  • The dodgy shingle beaches
  • The cream teas, cottage pies, eton messes, and many a full English – mmm
  • The many Be At One cocktail bars, dangerously close at all times
  • The realising you’ve tried most of the cocktails on the Be At One list, mostly due to their 2-4-1 offer
  • It’s rudeness beyond anything you’ve ever seen
  • And kindness that exceeds all expectations
  • Constant, exhausting, exhilarating change
  • Where you’ll learn to hate and then love the NHS
  • Where you’ll meet the most interesting people with the most interesting jobs
  • Where you’ll realise that what you thought you wanted maybe wasn’t what you wanted after all
  • It’s a place where someone always wants something from you: be it your money, your time or your ass
  • It’s de-humanising and re-humanising at the same time
  • It’s the fizzing, gleeful delight when summer rolls around and you can picnic in Hyde Park again
  • It’s the simple joy of lazy afternoons in London Fields, followed by insane nights out at The Dolphin on Mare Street – if you’ve never seen a lady swing a bar stool wildly over her head, you haven’t lived
  • It’s buying your entire summer wardrobe in Primark for £60
  • It’s an endless, always-changing cycle of wonderful new friends  and colleagues
  • Plus the solid crew who’ll always have your back
  • It’s nights on the sofa watching back-to-back episodes of Orange Is The New Black because you can’t afford to go out
  • It’s rice-and-bisto for dinner when you really can’t afford to go out
  • It’s champagne and oysters when you can
  • And on the topic of oysters. If the world’s your oyster then surely  London’s the pearl
  • She’ll win you over whether you want her to or not
  • And she’s definitely a lady. A crafty, bonkers, wonderful, brutal lady
  • She’s your boss
  • She’ll make you her bitch
  • And then one day you’ll fight back like you never fought before
  • You’ll win her respect
  • You’ll win your own respect
  • And everything gets a little easier
  • Because, when it all comes down to it, London is life

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Peanut Slab’s big day out

Since the dawn of time (well, not really, but for quite a while) New Zealanders have found a way to recognise Waitangi Day in London. Someone, somewhere, decided a few years back that a London-based pub crawl around the Circle Line would be the most respectful method for expats to express their love for a wee island nation. Every year since, enthusiastic Kiwis have dressed up in costumes representing some aspect of the homeland before getting mightily pissed.

And somehow the London police not only tolerate this occasion – they look forward to it! As long as crawl-goers follow the unwritten rule of ‘don’t be a dick’ then the London police force allows us one day a year to drink cans of beer in public and wander merrily, dressed like lunatics. It’s worth noting at this point that Waitangi Day celebrations from within New Zealand are very different. I have never, ever gone on a Waitangi Day pub crawl in New Zealand and nor do I ever expect to. This is a London-only oddity.

This was my fourth year on the crawl and like other years, I dressed up and had a lot of fun. In my first year I was a member of the ‘Crazy Horses’ gang. Year two I wore a newspaper-covered boiler suit adorned with pictures of ‘Fush & Chups’. For the last two crawls my boyfriend and I have pooled our brainpower and creativity towards a hardcore-handmade-matching-costumes-approach: we were L&P cans for 2013 and Whittaker’s Peanut Slabs for 2014.

While the novelty of drinking a beer in public has has worn off over the years, the best part of the crawl is chatting to other insane Kiwis. A good costume is guaranteed to get ‘mad props’. We were the only Peanut Slabs I saw on the crawl so were pretty popular for photo-ops. The only downside was that we were also magnets for obnoxious drunk people. I don’t know what it is about wearing a giant cardboard box but I may as well have worn a sign saying ‘punch me really hard’ because that’s exactly what kept happening…Needless to say I started to get pretty annoyed and started telling people in a patronising fashion: “If you punch me I will not be nice to you OR pose for a photo with you, because you were rude. Yes I am serious. Go away.”

Rant over. For the most part people were fun and friendly.

So, I reckon we single-handedly boosted online orders of Whittaker’s chocolate this weekend…wonder what that’s worth to a hungry homesick Kiwi? 😉