It’s been officially 8 months since I left home and settled down in greyish London, although the sun has been bright these days.
A typical week for me in London
A typical week involves making sure I get my gradschool work done, which is mostly just writing papers which are due over the next few weeks, thinking what to eat or cook for dinner, anticipating the next meetup with friends (usually coursemates, occasionally Malaysian friends who now live here, and sometimes industry people from the user experience community), or working on web development at my part-time job.
Now that just seems mundane, but I find it a novelty to wake up every morning in my tiny studio (which about the size of my previous bedroom in KL) in Islington (Holloway Road, not posh Upper Street), make myself a meal in my tiny kitchen, surf the web and see what’s happening on twitter, get dressed and head to campus to get some work done in the Main library. I don’t do this every day, of course… to avoid the mundane cycle.
Sometimes I just stay at home and write my papers there. I like to get work done at night so sometimes I work all night and sleep through the day.
Recently, on Fridays and Saturdays, I’ll hop on the 91 bus and take it to Crouch End, to Nathan’s (the guy who hired me), and Rey (the front-end developer), Sonia (the graphic artist), Nathan and I will all sit around his kitchen table and hack away at the system for a good day, with the sun overpowering our laptop screens through the big kitchen skylight.
I’m familiar with numbers like 29, 253, 254, and 91 – all buses which ferry me back and forth from home to the tube stations or school. 12 is common for the price we’d pay per person per meal in £ for dinner at Pizza Express. 592.70 for the amount of take-home pay I get after 2 weeks of coding part-time.
Life in the in-betweens
Life in London involves little pockets of activities during the in-betweens. In-between paper writing, libraries, buses, tubes, code, lunch, weekends and weekdays, and seasons.
I don’t know how we did it with my crazy random schedule, but my wife and I have managed a day out at Hampstead Heath, sips of coffee at Monmouth, several trips to Pizza Express, and occasional shopping along the high streets. It all happens in the in-betweens.
Like when a core group of my coursemates decide to head to the Duck n’ Dive for a pint or two. And cheap pizza at Icco’s, or grabbing a quick cheapy indian takeaway lunch from Poppadoms.
It happens sporadically.
Like back in KL?
It’s quite like it was back in KL. Except that it involved a lot of eating – often in different places. It was always a different place. You never went back to the same place the next day, unless you were desperate.
And instead of walking everywhere and taking the bus and the tube, we always went everywhere by car. It would’ve been almost impossible otherwise. Imagine walking all the way from Midvalley to Brickfields in the hot sun.
And I didn’t drink as much beer and alcohol back in KL. I liked my Kilkenny on tap at La Bodega, but it was expensive so I could only afford one per visit.
Nights out with my good friends in KL were a lot more fun, maybe because we had a lot of good old stories to tell, and there was interesting stuff happening with each of us. It was like a support group, except that you’d get teased and joked about and told off when you were being a gnat.
There was really nothing much happening at work then. The offices were dull. Occasionally there would be interesting projects. But I’d tend to forget than remember them. The only ones I really enjoyed was the ones outside of the office, like the DTAC project that took me to Thailand for three weeks.
The common numbers were 7, which is about the time I leave the office in the evening; 3 for the number of dishes I’d order for my wife and I for taichow on a typical weekday dinner out; 2000 for the average amount of ringgit I’d spend every time I visit Bali; 1.5 for the price of a teh si peng, which is by far my most ordered drink; 83 for the average amount of ringgit I’d spend on a full tank for my Alfa Romeo 146; 2 for the time I usually go to bed in the a.m.
Yes this post was pretty pointless, but at least you get a sense of where things haven’t changed.
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