Life is Healthy

After all the walking and chatting we did on Saturday, you would have thought we would have had a quiet Sunday, but no, I decided I wanted to investigate what other rooms to rent London had to offer, in an effort to cut my costs once Dade has flown off to sunny (or not) Spain….

I had arranged 3 viewings from ads on Gumtree, all with in a good price range and with positive points going for all of them. Unfortunately none of them were particularly near to each other, and no one was available a consecutive times so we had time and distance to fill in between viewings…I went to the first one on my own as the 11am appointment time, meant leaving before Dade considered it reasonable to be up on a Sunday! The room was nice enough and the two housemates I meet seemed sane, but with no communal area other than a galley kitchen I had the feeling things could get a bit claustrophobic. Dade then joined me to walk to the second appointment for 1pm – I thought it was A LOT closer to ours than it turned out to be so made us walk…. And when we got in site of the place we kept on walking as the area was rotten and the black bin bags in the windows didn’t fill me with great desire to live there! So, having put in the walked 45mins we didn’t really feel like just turning around and going home again, even though our next viewing wasn’t till 6.30pm.

So we headed into Leicester Square and went in search of the National Gallery, as Dade had seen a poster advertising a dinosaur exhibition that he fancied seeing. On finding the gallery, centrally located on Trafalgar Square we could see no sign of any dinosaurs and didn’t really think it seems the right place… So Dade racked his brains to remember where it was he saw it advertised and on seeing a brochure for the British Museum discarded on the floor decided that’s where it actually was! So after Dade got a free hug from a guy giving them out in Trafalgar Square, off we walked in the opposite direction back thru Leicester Square, to the British Museum, up off Bloomsbury Avenue. This one seemed more likely to be hosting an exhibition on Dinosaurs than a gallery full on portraits! But on arriving, again we saw no sign of them, so Dade asked, after a moment or twos confusion was told it was actually the Natural History Museum that was playing host to the prehistoric monsters! (Side note: Later, on looking up the Natural History Museum in our trusty A-Z we discovered it was in fact right next door to the V&A museum, no where near where we were today!). Never mind, we decided to browse the British Museum anyway and saw some interesting sites from Egypt before deciding the V&A Museum from Saturday was far more interesting, and far less crowded. By this point I was also suffering considerably from an aching foot, with pain slowly creeping up my leg. No idea why, as can’t remember having done anything to it at all! So we headed off again and found a nice grassy patch of sunshine to lie in for a while and just let London pass on by, before heading out to Camden Town, to full in a the last hour or so before viewing the last room. After waiting on the door step for ½ an hour, thinking karma was getting us back for standing up our previous appointment, a friendly Turkish girl arrived and showed us the room in question. It was large, very large, and had 2 beds in it… but something seemed a miss… it turns out she was actually looking for someone to share not only the flat with her, but the actual room as well!

So all in all the day involved a lot of walking (or hobbling, in my case) and not a lot of luck room wise. But it wasn’t a complete waste of a day - we did discover more parts of central London that we’d not seen before and spent a lovely last Sunday in London together.

As far as rooms go, I’ve decide to stick it out where I am, as at least I know the score there, and its close and convenient to most things I do…