Arriving in London – The London Adventures, Part 1

Sep 19, 2007 by Justin Wayne

19/9/07
jwa

So many of you may be wondering (or just Mom) what became of us after we arrived and met our delightful rooomm… oh there I go again…. flatmates and got settled. TONS!! And we’ve only been here a week. Let’s start with day one.

Day One:
We’re starting with day one because I said we would. So here we go.

Day One:
(Was that joke funny?) We arrived and everything was peachy-keen; they even provided us a bed, with bedding, a desk, and there were shelves already installed in the room, so we were pretty much sittin’ pretty. (rimshot?)

We decided to try and get on a bus – there’s a bus stop in both directions right at the top of our street. If you want to check out our little area, look up Lea Bridge Road and where it intersects with Perth Road in Waltham Forest, London. That’s where our little neighborhood is.

So, down the street we went and were once again reminded that traffic travels, I would say, twice as fast as I have ever been used to crossing a road with, and so we crossed at the light and got to the Newsagent. These are brilliant, they sell everything from bus passes, to adding money (topping up) your pay-as-you-go cell phone, to stamps… pretty much any day-to-day things and they’re all over. Literally. At least one per block, even out here which isn’t too deep in the city.

We did buy a weekly bus pass and got Oyster cards. These are little cards that you can pre pay on (topping up, again) and bus and train travel is cheaper. We paid for a weeks worth of travel on the bus and went home, figuring that was good enough for the day, and we were tired. We stayed up until 9 pm and fell fast asleep for 15 hours.

The next day, after waking up around noon, we actually took the bus. Taking it towards a shopping mall in Walthamstow, we arrived at a big bus station, entered the mall and almost got hit by bikers. Yes, bikers… in the Mall?!?! WTF!?!? That’s all I have to say about that.

After this first bus ride, we began to feel a bit more confident with the bus system and it’s been going well now. The only kink was one day, we went up to this same mall and on the way back we were trying to meet up with our flatmates to head downtown and the bus was hit by a car! It wasn’t bumped either, we were hit hard. The bus didn’t flinch all that much but we all had to get off and ride a different one.

More about the weekend and downtown London tomorrow, we’ve got some exploring to do today!

Best wishes back home. Let us know how you’re doing. Email me: justin.arndt@gmail.com

Much Love,