The beginning of a new era.
Today is the beginning of my new and exciting life philosophy. Like
the Summer of George, it is a time that will change my life for the
better. A time for action. A time, ladies and gentlemen, that will
bring me happiness, enlightenment, and hopefully some rock-hard abs.
Today, for the first time in my life, I joined a gym. :-o
A real life gym, with a real life monthly membership fee of £63, with
real life intimidating gym eqipment monitored by real life peppy
instructors.
I've done the "I can wuss out at any time by adopting a pay-as-you-go
strategy" trick before, which served me nicely in Sydney and
Marylebone, but my daily commute has once again hit an hour and a half
round trip and I work late (read: old habits die hard, OR I'm a lazy
sod and don't get to work on time so I need to stay back to make it
up), so when I finally get home at 7:30 or 8pm, I'm hungry. The last
thing I want to do is forego dinner to exercise, especially since the
gym near my home is choc full of people all the time. I've walked past
the pool at night and seen lanes shared by up to 8 people. Like,
what?!
Enter: the opening of a new gym near work late last year.
I've heard people at work raving about this gym, so I bit the bullet
today and went to go and visit. This gym is soooo shiny. The change
rooms have wood panelling, are nice and clean and supply you with
endless white fluffy towels, free shampoo and conditioner. There are
HAIR STRAIGHTENERS you can use to style dry your hair before you go
back out into the real world. There's a steam room, a pool, a huge
room of brand new gym equipment, a boxing ring, a golf simulator, and
when the summer comes around there will be a rooftop garden with bar
so you can go and relax in the sun after your workout.
The best bit: because it's so new, there's nobody in there right now.
woohoo! I toured at lunch and there were 4 people in the pool, 10
people in the equipment room and about 8 people in an aerobics class.
I've signed up on an opening special monthly rolling contract, so
technically I haven't actually committed myself to exercising for the
next 12 months, just the next 4 weeks. I bet I'll either be a brand
new gym enthusiast by April, or 10 kilos heavier. Hopefully the
former (with bonus rock hard abs :-)
the green park buskers
London is a very organised city. The transport system in particular is engineered to handle huge people volumes, and it does quite well. I can't express how much more enjoyable and easy it is to get around in London than Sydney. There is
an excellent site to help you manage your ticketing and journey planning, which kills CityRail in comparison. You can expect trains to leave on time here, and tubes to come every 3 or 4 minutes on average. Most bus routes run every 5-10 minutes, so you're rarely waiting around with idle time like you are in Sydney.
The
Transport for London site will find you the quickest route from A to B using all forms of transport, and it's pretty accurate - a mammoth task considering that London has 12 tube lines, hundreds of bus routes, overland train routes and light rail, all of which you'd need to know to get your connections right. When things go pear shaped on any given route, the journey planner will take the stuff-ups into account and calculate you a new route. You can elect to receive daily SMS alerts about line stuffups at a time you nominate (e.g. at 8am) to help you work out how to avoid problems, and you get emails to notify you of line closures on the weekend several days in advance. Handy.
You can also organise all of your ticket purchases online and avoid queues, because your ticket is an RFID card called an
Oyster. I buy weekly or monthly tickets for the tube, but I've also got a random store of cash on the card for "pay as you go" journeys when my ticket has expired or I travel beyond its boundary. It basically means that I don't need to worry about actual paper tickets for any non-standard journeys I make, because the card calculates it for me. How brill is that? The best bit is that I can set my card to automatically top up the random store of cash whenever I fall below a minumum balance, so I actually never need to talk to a human being at a ticket office,
ever. That's seriously hot.
Anyway, I'm digressing from the point of the post, which is this:
Buskers in public transport thoroughfares. This city, bless its little organised heart, has turned busking into a
licensed activity, at least in the tube system. I find it so amusing that London has worked its organisational mojo on a normally haphazard and impromptu event, and turned it into something orderly and regimented.
The basics of it is that there are designated "busking areas" in certain tube stations, carefully placed in out-of-traffic-flow areas, where people who have been auditioned can show off their talents. (I'm not sure how strict the auditioning is these days though.) The busking area is marked by a semi-circle of paint, and you get fined for busking out of these areas - probably because they've worked out the probability of an unruly busker causing major delays on the Circle line by holding up foot traffic in a major thoroughfare. Who knows.
I travel through a major interchange station - Green Park - every day on my commute to and from work. It is notorious for its extremely long corridors to change between lines, which gives it plenty of room for a busker area.
Sometimes (mornings especially) the buskers are unwelcome because they interfere with the music I'm listening to on my iPod. They'll take up half the walkway with their keyboards or guitar amps and force the stream of traffic into a narrower flow, making it difficult to overtake the hordes of tourists with suitcases bound for Heathrow Airport. I'll walk briskly past on the "nuisance" days.
At night however, I'm much more open to the songs they play, and sometimes you get some really awesome and unusual people. Like the guy who was there tonight, singing Italian opera, or trumpet players with some funky jazz numbers. I've had a a bad mood mellowed by a busker who had an accoustic guitar, a beautifully husky voice and a sign at his feet saying 'smile :)' The buskers are an interesting variable in my normal routine, it reminds me of a different lifestyle and activities that are so unlike my current life. I like that the music can sway me one way or another. I've never had a busker put me in a
bad mood (you can always walk away from them!), but I have had ones that make me linger and put a smile on my face. Whatever London is doing with their buskers, it works for me.
