My First Year in London: A Busy Week

I can’t believe it’s time to write another of these already - I’ve been pretty busy this week and it’s just flown!

Where to start… well, work has been steadily getting busier and busier to the point where on Friday I seemed to be running around seeing lots of people and at 2.30pm squeezing in a meeting over at the North Greenwich office – and all of a sudden it’s pub o’clock!

As I mentioned in the last post, my manager and I set a few things for me to work towards over this placement until I leave at the end of December / January. One of the targets is to keep the budget up to date and accurate which resulted in me staring at the same spread sheets ALL DAY on Thursday, not so much fun. Other things at work are all going well, still meeting lots of people and getting involved in lots of thing in the whole department, not just my team… so that’s really good.

After work Thursday I met up with a few of the graduates. It’s nice for us all to have the chance to meet up and hear what everyone is up to – everyone is doing such different things! Some grads had their first weeks in stations and on Monday morning as I walked into Canning Town station I saw one of the other grads making the announcements about the next trains arriving/leaving the station – weird!

Great seats.

After Pub O’clock on Friday a group of us headed to Leicester Square for dinner and on to The Leicester Square Theatre to see Tom Stade. A totally hilarious Canadian comedian and highly recommended! Definitely one to YouTube but be warned – he’s not PC, he’s unnecessarily sweary (my fave!) and tells the same ‘Meat Joke’ at the end of every show. Pizza, beer and comedy – a bloody good Friday evening only slightly tainted by a chance run-in with the Food-Thief Housemate on the DLR home.

The British Museum

This weekend I really didn’t have any plans – at all. Well, other than teary goodbyes with the BFF before she jets off around the world for 18months on Wednesday morning… but I can’t talk about that right now... I’m enjoying being in denial a while longer.

So after the two (massively disappointing) rugby matches on Saturday morning I decided to head to The British Museum – inspiration courtesy of the Time Out London app – to have a wander round and see some cool stuff. If I’m totally honest I expected more cool stuff than there was (The Natural History Museum is pretty hard to beat), but some of the highlights included the Ancient Egyptian section which included some mummies – and I know most of them were replicas/restorations but a few looked particularly real and VERY freaky:

Mummies

120 black balloons for 120 months.

After the BM I headed towards Trafalgar Square with the intention of going to the National Portrait Gallery (another of my faves) – are you getting the theme?... I’m filling my weekend with anything that is FREE - and I can not wait to be paid properly for the first time!

Countdown!

But I never did get to the NPG…I got side tracked when I saw a rally at Nelson’s Column…and a big one at that. It was an anti-war rally and I listened to some interesting people and was passed a range of interesting flyers... an hour later (and once the excitement of spotting the Olympic countdown clock had passed) I was hungry and cold and decided it was wiser to jump on the tube and DLR home. I got side tracked (again) and ended up in Beckton (at the very end of one of the DLR lines) just ‘cos I wanted to see what was gwaanin that far out East. It’s very pretty down by the dock and it was cool to see all the BA planes at City airport right next to the water. The University of East London has an awesome campus out there too.

Finally made it home for Strictly and XFactor (don’t judge me). Current fave, Sophie Habibis who absolutely smashed Teenage Dream and that guy who they’ve put on a diet...can’t remember his name – probably not a good sign.

Sunday I did pretty much NOTHING all day. I watched the F1 and a few films (The Adjustment Bureau was really good!) all from the comfort of my bed. I headed up to the BFF’s for about 6pm to assist in list making/bag packing. We watched XFactor and Downton and finally said our teary goodbyes. I’m going to fugging miss her.