A postcard from the big grumpy wet gherkin (No, I'm not talking about me)

So as Margie said already, here we are in London. And so far so good - we've found ourselves accommodation in a nice place, with nice people, and now we just need to find ourselves nice jobs, so that we can keep up our nice lifestyle. We're doing our best to be frugal in the mean time, but frugal seems to be a bit difficult to do sometimes, because although at first glance everything seems quite reasonably priced, it tends to only be after we've actually handed over our money that we realise the symbol £ infront of the marked price is actually a good 3 times more powerful than the measly $ symbol that comes before all the money in our savings account...

None the less, we're having a good time. It's true that the weather hasn't been fantastic. Unless you like drizzle and overcast skies, in which case it has been absolutely flawless. There has been rain of one variety or another pretty constantly since we arrived here (I only just realised yesterday that it's almost summer - I had just been assuming that it was still the very beginning of spring and that although its wasn't that warm, things would no doubt be warming up some time soon!) Perhaps the thing that had been throwing me most with the weather was that we kept reading everywhere that London is apparently experiencing massive water shortages. (One of the tabloids here used the comparison that there is less water per person here than in Sudan - I'm going to assume they didn't mean clean readily accessible drinking water because I know I haven't had any problems getting out drinking water when I turn on the tap.) The thing that threw me the most was that London was apparently experiencing huge water shortages in the midst of, as far as I could see, non stop drizzle. I wondered how they could possibly hope for more water than we've been getting, but then I found out that it only started raining about a week ago - coincinding pretty well with our arrival in the country.

So I guess my overall impression of London so far is that it is constantly wet and grey. And big. The sheer size of London is only really starting to dawn on me. As it doesn't have much in the way of sky scrapers (save for the giant gherkin- see the pic) the size of the city doesn't slap you in the face upon arrival the way some cities do. The size kind of just creeps up on you gradually after you've been to a number of totally different areas as you begin to realise that every area is just as busy, jam packed and noisy as every other place you've been to.

So London is big, wet and grey. And grumpy. Londoners don't seem to be the happiest people on earth (not that you could blame them after a life time of being exposed to this weather.) Although everyone I've spoken to has been quite helpful and friendly to me, it seems Londoners are quite grumpy to one another. A fair bit of swearing and complaining can be heard on the streets (admittedly all in an accent that I find amusing, so it doesn't really bother me). Perhaps the moment epitomising this fact was when Margie and I were catching a bus and one gentleman, in a quite loud and displeased fashion, accused two other people in the bus of being pickpockets. Profanities, accusations and denials flew back and forth, and then the rest of the bus decided to weigh in on the dispute too. People started calling for the alleged pickpockets to be kicked off the bus. With a smirk, one of the two accused claimed, fairly unconvincingly to "No speak English." Then some other randoms on the bus decided they wanted to get more intimately involved in the dispute and began inquiring as to whether the accused "liked hospital food." It was at about this stage that Margie and I thought it best to take our leave. (Ok, so we were totally disoriented and accidentally got off at the wrong bus stop, but still, it would have been hard to chose a better moment to get off the bus than we opted for.)

In other news, in the type of random event that seems to follow me to nearly every country on the earth, I bumped into a friend from college at a train station about a week ago. It really is a small, small world.

Also, I am driving Margie totally insane in my constant attempt to pick up an English accent, as to me "English accent" means "East London accent". But don' worry guv'. I' ain't 'alf bad.

Thanks to www.copyright-free-pictures.org.uk for the pic of the giant gherkin