from Pillar to Post: a traveller's guide to stuff: the last 5 weeks

I worked for St. Mungo’s for a total of 5 weeks before leaving the country.. A long time I know :P But after a while I got the feeling that I was just not cut out for that particular line of work. And when you are giving less than 100% as a street fundraiser your chance of signing people up drops significantly and then you are essentially being paid by the charity to stand on the street for 8 hours a day doing nothing, which is obviously completely counter-productive. Another reason was that I had been waiting on another Aussie brother-sister travelling duo to make up their minds about whether they wanted to share a triple room with me – rent is ridiculously expensive in London and this would have been a good way to save some money – but they just never came to the party. I did feel quite bad about leaving the charity, though, as they had been grooming me for a team-leading position and it meant that I would be leaving behind some lovely people.
I spent my last 5 weeks staying at two friends’ places, Steven’s and Tom’s. Both of them were great hosts, and I especially want to thank Steven and his lovely girlfriend Jen who took me in for about 4 weeks while I sorted my shit out! I managed to fit in a few more interesting things before I left London too: I went with Steven to see Thrice play in Camden which was awesome; I wrote and recorded my first ever solo song (quite a poor quality recording and lacking a few extra instruments, but the idea is there - if you haven't already, you can listen to it here); I had the chance to (but chose not to) watch Iggy Pop at a festival called Get Loaded In The Park in Clapham South (one of the many Aussie-dominated parts of London); I took some inspiration from Lee's recent purchase and bought myself a small 10" Advent laptop for £280; and the St. Mungo’s street team got down and dirty in one of the charity’s hostels getting taught bricklaying and plastering by some awesome previously-homeless guys that had turned their lives around with the help of St. Mungo’s.

My second-to-last weekend was not spent in London, it wasn't even spent in the UK. Instead I flew to Munich to meet up with Lee during her travels around Europe. All the details in my next post.

For the final weekend, Nic organised to take me up to Nottingham to watch her team, the Sheffield Steelers, and their rivals battle it out in their first clash of the ice hockey season. We met up with her family for some pre-game food and drinks at a nearby pub before heading into the stadium for THE GAME. From what Nic had told me and from what I had already known, ice hockey involves a fair bit of fighting and I had expected to see it at some point in the match. What I didn't expect was that the first and only fight would occur 3 seconds into the game before the ref had even thrown the puck down. I have seen fights before obviously in AFL, but they are always broken up ASAP by the players and umpires. In ice hockey, as I found out, everyone instead lets the players fight for as long as they're both standing - even if they're punching each other directly in the face as I witnessed on this night. A strange anomaly in the evolution of fair-play and sportsmanship if you ask me; but the fans seem to love it so who am I to judge?

Nottingham, although aka'd lovingly as the shooting capital of the UK, seemed quite nice to me in the 24 hours that I spent there. I stayed with a cool CSer, Nick, whom I met up with for a coffee later the next day after checking out the city. The most interesting thing I visited would have to have been Ye Olde Trip To Jerusalem: for one, it is reputedly the "oldest inn in England"; and secondly, it is built into the side of a cliff. Pretty neat.

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