Tag: london living

Dentist review

This is a bit weird but I feel the need to share my most recent experiences at the dentist.

In the past month, I’ve had a check up and a filling. I am halfway through my treatment to get a crown (cap) for one tooth. I hastily wish to explain that the current spate in dental work is due to me finally finishing some treatment that I had more than 10 years ago. These days, I take excellent care of my teeth and gums.

Anyway, back to my review. I feel like the whole clinic has really gotten behind the concept of ‘patient care’. The dentist himself is reassuring and friendly, giving the impression of being deeply competent. He takes photos of my teeth and explains what he is doing and why. He makes sure that I have local anaesthetic on my tooth and my gums so I don’t feel even pressure, let alone pain. He gives me information about my treatment options and I can call back after I’ve had a few days to make a decision about expensive dental work. There’s been no hard sell.

The dental nurse smiles at me and asks if I’m all right. She anticipates what I might need — a tissue here, a playdough mould for a temporary crown there.

The magazines in the waiting room a really good — I’ve read National Geographic, Harper’s Bazaar and Smart Life. The clinic play nice happy music in the waiting areas and in treatment rooms.

There are always at least two reception staff, sometimes three, so I never have to wait for someone to get off the phone. They call me the day before my visit to remind me to come in.

I have been telling people how great my dentist is. You know, I think I might even be enjoying getting my teeth done.

Morning showers

On my way to work, there is a section of road where rain water creates a puddle so large, that cars have to swerve to get around it.

One morning, as I walked toward this section, I heard a shriek. A truck had decided not to dodge the puddle. In hurtling through it, the poor girl walking in front of me was drenched.

I stopped. There was no way I was walking past that puddle while cars zoomed by. I looked back to get my timing right. When I spotted a break in the traffic, I sprinted into, through and past the splash zone. I was safe.

Drowned Joanrat

It started on Friday night. I went to a nice quiet bar with my team mates to bid farewell to our team leader, who is leaving for hotter and more lucrative shores. At 11pm, the quiet bar turned into a thumping night club. So I checked my bag and jacket into the cloak room and boogied past the time that Tube trains stop running.

When I stepped out of the bar/club to take a night bus home, I discovered that my Oyster card was no longer in my coat pocket. I ran back to the bar but now that it had turned into a club, there were four burly bouncers at the door and a line of people waiting to get in. I was locked out.

To get home, I had to pay more than twice the normal bus fare by buying a fare from a ticket machine. Okay, fine, I deserved to be punished for being careless. But — I had no coins in my red wallet to feed the ticket machine! For a few minutes, I contemplated having to walk for 90 minutes in the middle of the night to get home.

I had an idea. If I could find a shop open, I could buy something to get some coins for change! Then I could get a bus ticket.

McDonald’s saved the day. I bought chips (yum!) and then had the coins I needed.

The next day, I bought a new Oyster card and loaded it up with a couple of pounds. After a weekend of travelling around London with friends, my Oyster card balance was £2.70 — enough for one more Tube trip.

I slept badly on Sunday night. I woke up at 3am because my feet were really cold. I got out of bed to put on two pairs of socks and still my feet were icy. I curled up in a ball and hung onto my feet. They must have warmed up because I eventually fell asleep.

Being tired the next day probably affected my thinking. I used up £1.50 of my Oyster credit to get to work. This meant that there was £1.20 credit left, not enough money to get back home but I planned to call Transport for London to transfer the £20 on my lost card to my new card. This they did for me — but it will only be available tomorrow. That was okay. I would top up my card with the 30 pence I needed to travel home.

Today, winter began in earnest, and rain bucketed down. I stayed in the office until 6:40pm. Monday is my dance lesson night. I had to get to Covent Garden for 7pm.

I packed up my desk, changed into my t-shirt and shorts, then stepped out into the night. Only there, standing at the front of the building, did I realise that there was no umbrella in my bag. I had left my umbrella in my weekend bag. Being tired this morning meant that I had forgotten to transfer things between bags.

Having missed my dance lesson last week, I was determined to make it this week. It was only 15 minutes walk. A little rain never killed anyone. So I headed off, grabbing the first free newspaper offered to me by a street spruiker, and held the paper over my face.

By the time I got to the dance studio, the paper was soaked through and my hair was dripping. At the reception, I reached into my bag to get out £4 for entry fee. My purse wasn’t in its usual place. I suddenly got a mental picture of my red purse next to my green umbrella at home. I knew it was fruitless but I dug around in my wallet some more while I thought about what to do.

I admitted to myself that I couldn’t go dancing today. So I ventured out back into the rain, unconvincingly batting away raindrops with my rapidly disintegrating free newspaper.

I very quickly realised I had another problem. The £1.20 on my Oyster card would not get me home on the Tube. I didn’t have even 30 pence to top it up.

I thought about begging.

Well, really, I was lucky I had enough for a 90 pence bus fare. Imagine if I hadn’t! I would have had to walk an hour through the rain with my bare legs sticking out from under my brown woollen coat to get home! Now though, I just needed to walk 10 minutes in the rain to get the bus, then another 10 minutes in the rain once I got off the bus.

By the time I reached home, my shoes were soaked wet. I was a drowned Joanrat and my feet were cold again.

Dodging homelessness

Last week, our landlord gave us a month’s notice to vacate the house. It was a bit of a shock. Although he had been talking about selling the place, considering how sickly the housing market was doing, I figured we had a while yet before eviction.

I’ve spent a week obsessing over house ads on Gumtree and Moveflat. In a week, I visited five potential houseshares and flatshares. I’ve been trying to move within walking distance of work. For a place near work, I am willing to pay:

  • £80/month, due to travel cost savings
  • £40/month, to save 10 hours commuting time
  • £15/month, to avoid the vagaries and germ-spreading of the Tube (although, really, I love the Tube and its glorious convenience)

At the end of Saturday, I found a place in north London. It’s a new neighbourhood for me, having lived in south London since last November.

It’s 20 minutes walk from work and 10 minutes walk from Regent’s Park. I’ll be living in a maisonette with a couple (I think they own the place).

I was first a bit worried that it was too expensive for me. After some pondering, I now think it’s probably worth pay the £10 a week premium for the niceness of the flat, the size of the room, the fact I won’t be sharing it with a zoo of people, the lack of long-term contract (I will pay month by month), the interesting neighbourhood, and, of course, the location.

English spider

‘There’s a giant spider in my room,’ I said conversationally. Damjan and I were talking to each other on the phone.

‘Oh! Are you going to kill it?’ Damjan asked.

‘I can’t. When I came in, I saw something black rush across the floor. I just caught a look at a massive hairy spider before it scurried under my chest of drawers. I can’t get to it now.’

‘You’re just going to leave it there?’ said Damjan.

‘I don’t really mind, as long as it doesn’t bother me. But if it comes out, it will be sorry. YOU HEAR?’ I shouted at my chest of drawers. ‘IF YOU COME OUT YOU’LL BE SORRY!’

Damjan laughed. ‘My sister would be terrified. She wouldn’t be able to sleep in the same room with a spider.’

‘Well, it’s not like it’s an Australian spider. It’s just a piddy English spider.’

Loitering with cheese

With Damjan back in Melbourne, I have been left to entertain myself on the weekends. There is a little Saturday farmers market near my house, which I had not yet visited during my first nine months of living here. I finally got around to it and was really pleased with all the yummy food stalls.

One of the stalls was selling goat’s cheese. They had around 10 different samples to try. I am a sucker for food samples. I first tried the black pepper goat’s cheese. Then, the chilli goat’s cheese. Then a piece of cheese that looked like chocolate, which turned out to be chocolate, planted there to occupy children while their parents tried the more sophisticated cheese samples.

‘Hmm,’ I murmured. ‘Yum!’ I nodded approvingly.

And then, without realising it, I had gone beyond the ‘acceptable time period one can loiter in front of a food stall without buying something’. So sheepishly (haha), I bought a round of garlic and herb goat’s cheese. I also ended up buying a giant slice of almond orange cake and a round of sourdough.

Although the cheese round wasn’t large, I did not think I could consume it within the two days, as recommended by the stall holder. Luckily, my favourite cook book of 101 one-pot dishes came to the rescue with ‘Chicken with Goat’s Cheese’.

I went to Sainsbury’s to buy chicken, tarragon and vine-ripened tomatoes. I was lucky. Vine-ripened tomatoes were half price.

I was less fortunate with the chicken. A few days before, I had resolved to buy free range chicken only. All my ethical friends did this, and I wanted to be ethical too! Alas, the ‘normal’ battery caged chicken meat was on sale and it was a sixth of the price of the free range meat. I could not bring myself to pay that much extra. It was a lot of money. I felt pained. So I bought the remains of the sad chickens.

(I have since gotten back on the free range chicken bandwagon but that is another story.)

Now that I’ve done ‘Chicken with Goat’s Cheese’, I am now 15% through the 101 recipes.

An evening at Trafalgar Square

On Friday evening, I said goodbye to my colleagues, who were staying behind to enjoy the rest of happy hour at a wine bar. I was going to walk home. The walk takes about an hour so I left while there was still light.

My walking route takes me past Trafalgar Square. A giant screen has been set up there so that people watch the BBC coverage of the Olympics.

As I walked by the Square, people were watching the women’s football quarter final and I started thinking. What was I walking home to? At home, I would probably eat leftovers for dinner and spend the evening (alone) watching the Olympics on TV.

The night was warm and there was a Tesco grocery store near the Square. So I decided to buy my dinner and sit with the crowd of strangers to find out whether or not China could equalise with a goal against Japan.

This is the kind of spontaneous decision that in the past I have not been able to make. I find that living by myself (albeit with housemates) has made it very easy for me to do whatever occurs to me.

It was very relaxing, watching football on a giant screen. I didn’t mind the couple sitting beside me making cow eyes at each other, and didn’t mind that tourists took turns blocking my view by standing in front of me.

At 9 PM, I was surprised to find out that there would be two live performances as part of the Trafalgar Square Festival. Aqua involved circus performers rolling around in the Trafalgar Square fountains and contorting their bodies on a trapeze. To be honest, that probably sounds more interesting than it actually was.

I really enjoyed the second performance, Toolie Oolie Doolie by ZooNation Dance Company. They danced a combination of hip hop and lindy hop. The show was to reflect the last time London hosted the Olympics (1948) and the upcoming Games (2012). Hip hop and lindy hop are, of course, two of my favourite dance styles. My favourite part of the performance was a particularly funny and expressive sequence showing a boxing match.

People often ask me if I like living in London. This is a difficult question for me to answer.

Some people like living in London because they earn a lot of money. I don’t because I’m not a contractor in the finance or IT industry.

Lots of people love the fact that London is a springboard to other parts of Europe. As you know, I don’t like travelling so this aspect of London/UK is not particularly interesting to me.

Other people love clubbing, shopping, eating out, meeting people, being in the middle of it all. I’m not a party girl. I don’t buy things a lot. I think the food in Melbourne is as good food in London. I meet people no matter where I’m living. I like being with friends and friends are not specific to London.

What I do like about London are:

My unplanned community-oriented, cultural and sporting evening at Trafalgar Square made me like London a bit more than I did the day before.

Being Chinese

From my photo, you can tell that I am ethnically Chinese. Being Chinese is not something I think about too much. I moved from Taiwan to Australia when I was three years old. I don’t usually affiliate myself with the Chinese culture except that I love the cuisine and I’ve had done some years of Chinese language classes.

I could write a lot about why this is, how I’ve met lots of non-Chinese people who are fascinated with China and how this perplexes me.

But.

I won’t.

Not now, anyway. I feel something similar to shame on this topic, which I need to analyse before I can explain myself.

I do, however, have three Chinese-related thoughts I’d like to share now, on the cusp of the Beijing Olympics.

Firstly, as I’ve explained to a few people recently, the only time I’ve been harassed in my ‘dangerous‘ neighbourhood was when two black kids, a little girl and a little boy, started shouting ‘Ching chong! Ching chong!’ at me as I walked home. To which I could shouted back, ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying!’

Secondly, I was struck by a lightning bolt of understanding a few months ago. I like accents. I like hearing English spoken by people from South Africa, France, Germany, America… Yet, I cringe a little when I hear Chinese spoken with an accent. I couldn’t figure out why I have this double standard. My mum once said to me I spoke Chinese with an Australian accent — and this was not a good thing.

Finally, I figured it out. Chinese is a tonal language. Each syllable can be said in four ways, so even small variations in pitch changes the meaning of a word. Speaking Chinese with accent sounds ‘wāi wāi’ （歪歪）, which means ‘wonky’.

Vietnamese has five tones and Cantonese has six tones!

My final Chinese thought — I have just watched a Chinese man, Ming Yun, pitch for a cash investment on the TV show, Dragon’s Den. Inside me, I really wanted him to do well. For some reason, even though I am not very Chinese and I don’t know many very Chinese people, I identify with them more strongly than I think I should. When I read about Chinese people who can’t afford to buy the right spectacles, I feel like crying. When I see a Chinese baby, I smile. A few months ago, I watched a film in which a father and mother in China were used and neglected by their children, who wanted to live Western lives in the city. It was very distressing and, of course, made me cry.

I think it’s because I can imagine Chinese people as my parents, my brother, my grandparents, my aunts and my uncles. Therefore, I am very vulnerable to tears when I hear about the suffering of a Chinese person.

Dancing in the light

On this sunny day, I walked from my home in south London to Notting Hill. It took about 75 minutes and I plotted a lovely route through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. London is full of gorgeous parks, and these are two of the biggest and best.

At Notting Hill, I had dinner with Liezel and Judy. Liezel and Judy are friends from primary school. After 14 years of zero contact, through Facebook we discovered we were all in London. Today was a little reunion.

On my walk back from Notting Hill, I did something a little bit crazy, perhaps. As I said in my last post, I’ve been feeling frustrated at not being able to dance to my current favourite song. Actually, an even greater source of dance frustration is that I now live in a room/house without any space for dancing. I was very spoiled back home in Melbourne. We had a huge recreation room with a wooden floor downstairs. The room was even big enough for me to have private dance lessons with my Latin American dance teacher.

In Kensington Gardens, between the picnickers, soccer players, people doing yoga, and frisbee games, there was green space for me to dance. Dancing in a public park is something I’ve done before, so after a short hesitation, I walked over to a patch of warm sunshine and dropped my backpack.

I clicked ‘Górecki’ on my MP3 player and started spinning. I was happy — I had so much space! But, sadly, I was self-conscious. I also confirmed that I had no repertoire and could not last the six minutes of the song. Sigh.

After that track, I switched to my hip hop playlist and immediately had a larger bank of moves! I loosened up and started really to enjoy myself.

Halfway through the first hip hop track, a man and woman wandered into my grassy patch and smiled at me. I paused, uncertain. They shook their heads, gave me thumbs up and continued walking by.

I danced this way for about 10 minutes. I don’t know how silly I looked, this girl doing hip hop on the grass of Kensington Gardens to music no one else could hear.

In the end, I enjoyed it a lot because that grassy patch was the only space that I’ve had access to for a long time. However, self-consciousness limited my pleasure. I wish I had some private space somewhere to dance.

No go zone

I don’t live in a posh part of London, like Knightsbridge or West Hampstead. In fact, it would be accurate to say that I live in one of the poorest boroughs in London. Still, it ain’t that bad! I feel completely safe, walking home from the Tube station at night time.

However, Domino’s Pizza is less enlightened and has declared our street a ‘no go zone’.

It means that whenever we order pizza, the delivery person calls us when he arrives and we have to meet him on the main street, which is 10 metres from our front door. This is the closest that Domino’s employees can get without fear of mortal harm. I don’t know where they get their information from.

Richard, whose love of tandoori hot pizza requires pizza delivery boys to risk life and limb.

See? It even says ‘NO GO ZONE’ on the box!