I hate travelling. I hate looking for flights, I hate looking for accommodation I can afford. I especially hate trying to pack for a trip. I hate the way I try to take the bare essentials because I hate lugging a heavy bag around, and I hate myself more for realising that something I considered a luxury while packing is actually something necessary when I’m already at my destination.
I hate sitting in a plane for hours, I hate the fact that I might develop a blood clot in my leg that could kill me (this one’s a bit of drama; I’m so short that any economy class seat on any airline feels like I’ve got business class leg room) and most of all, I HATE the way I look rubbish in all my holiday photos because I lacked the essentials that I considered too luxurious to pack.
I love being in new places, though. I love sightseeing and taking pictures of stuff, captions all formed in my head. I love observing people do what they do best and I love gobbling down local cuisine.
This winter hols, I decided to get off my wobbly butt and leave Moscow for a week. My friends chose all sorts of exotic places where you’d need visas and a phrasebook. I’m a lazy git, so I chose London.
Well, that’s only half true. I chose to go to London during my final winter break because I wanted to be around people who speak a language I know well and I wanted to see people I’d been dying to meet, like my cousin who I’d not seen for almost 11 years and friends from Twitterland.
I could do the whole day-by-day thing and bore you to death, but I’m nice so I’ll write stuff worth mentioning. And you’ll be happy about it because if I write everything I remember, you might get fired for spending your entire work day reading a shitty blog post about a place so many people have been to before.
Best Place I Visited
Hands down, this was the ZSL London Zoo. Okay, I admit I have a great fondness for animals and to be perfectly honest, the zoo was the only place I really planned on visiting. You could throw me any map of London and I’d be able to spot it.
It was worth all that anticipation. I spent four hours gaping at all the animals and taking crappy pictures. The crappiest of the lot was a picture of a cockroach which cemented once and for all that not even a glass enclosure was going to calm my feeble katsaridaphobic heart. Look:
The Best Picture I Could Take With Shaky Hands
And this is a picture of a tarantula I took right after:
The Insect I Wouldn't Even Mind As A Pet
To top it all off, the weather was great and I managed to take a nice long walk through Regent’s Park and saw a squirrel making friends/ harassing a baby in a stroller.
Best Purchase
The closest to a souvenir from London that I bought is probably the fridge magnet and postcard from, yup, you guessed it, the zoo.
Of course, if you knew me well enough, you’d know that I’m in heaven when surrounded by books. I attacked bookstores with a passion and probably would’ve bought enough books to wipe out a rain forest if I didn’t have a tiny-ass bag. I may have bought a gorgeous evening dress, Jamaican cock flavoured soup mix and a hairbrush in London, but this book is the BEST thing I own at the moment:
Source Of Joy
I was so excited about this book that I started on it even before I was done with Cat’s Cradle. The only reason I stopped reading it was because people at the airport were looking at me funny when I kept laughing out loud.
Strangest Thing Heard In Public
“Shut up, you fucking Christian whore!”
This was on a bus, said by a guy who bumped into a woman with groceries. Why was this strange to me, you ask? Fine, you didn’t ask, but I’m going to tell you anyway.
I have no fucking idea.
