After a busy couple of weeks I was due to chill out on this long bank holiday weekend and relax. An impromptu meetup with some more of the aforementioned reddit.com nerds came up on Friday, so after work I headed down to Barrio in Soho, just off Oxford Street.

I hadn’t been into this part of London yet and found myself physically expressing my frustration at some of the people wandering down the street that evening. As Europe’s busiest shopping street it’s certainly got a reputation for being busy, but that didn’t excuse random groups of people seemingly attempting to block as many people as possible from walking past by standing stock-still in the middle of the pavement.

But I digress (as usual). Once at the bar things were slightly less busy and I was able to grab a drink and meet people.

After we’d all had a beer or two, several things happened:

• A woman wearing a Vedett (fancy Belgian beer) tshirt came over with a camera and took photos of each of us individually
• The same woman returned minutes later with Vedett keyrings with our faces printed on them
• One of the guys bought a tray of shots for everyone

In the confusion I ended up being given one of the two leftover shots. A few more beers later and the Vedett woman was back. This time she took the photos, and literally 10 seconds after leaving the table, a guy came over clutching half a dozen bottles of Vedett, also with our faces printed on them. Free! That’s good (and logistically impressive) marketing.

Another tray of shots followed. You can see where this is going. Again, some were leftover, and we drew keyrings to see who would have them. I won (lost?), bringing my total to 4 shots, 1 free Vedett (almost 6% ABV) and several bottles of beer.

I’m hardly a heavyweight drinker and this was more than enough for me. On an empty stomach I began to feel that dreaded sensation where you pass from heady drunkenness and into the clouding nausea of being, well, battered.

Needless to say I was soon getting acquainted with the toilets of the bar. After performing a technicolour yawn or two I managed to stumble out, instruct my just-arrived girlfriend to grab my stuff for me, and staggered my way up the stairs and back onto the street.

I felt so rough that I just wanted to sit and sober up, but Maddy (the long-suffering girlfriend) wanted us to get home. I was in no state for the tube and instead she suggested a taxi. Barely aware of my surroundings I managed to wobble my way into a taxi and hang out of the window trying to avoid soiling the cab. I know, I know, I’m the classiest guy alive.

I have no further recollections about the night but can only assume we got home okay. I woke up this morning feeling horrific, but before I get to that, let’s talk about travelling late at night in the capital.

Back in Leeds I was able to walk pretty much everywhere. The city is compact enough that most places are near to each other, and even a late night missed-the-last-bus encounter could be solved if you didn’t mind a mile or two on foot. London’s not quite the same. It’s one thing wandering it by day and discovering hidden corners of interest, but quite another walking its underlit streets at nighttime when its citizens descend upon it in droves. People litter the streets everywhere and there’s music and traffic and, well, everything, going on all around you. Not to mention that any city gets scarier after dark, especially one you’re still getting used to.

The tube, of course, makes this easier, but most lines tend to end around midnight or just after, so I’m told. If you want to stay out on a late night bender (I didn’t), the night buses are your friends. Keeping conscious is the trick though – an unfortunate friend of mine nodded off on one recently and was pulled half-awake off the bus as some guys stole his phone.

And so we come back to the taxi. We’d made the controversial decision to try to get a taxi “south of the river” – the fabled land of crime and gangs that taxi drivers are famed for avoiding. Ours seemed happy enough to drive us there (about 3 miles), but charged us a kingly £30 for the privilege. Yes, that’s £30, three-zero. One benefit to my being absolutely out of it: Maddy paid.

Now obviously some of that was the driver’s salesman instincts: he could clearly see that I was going nowhere otherwise and that I needed to get home – we would have paid anything really. It was probably also apparent that we’re still new to London, so perhaps a more seasoned local could have got a much fairer price on the trip. Still, that’s what this blog is all about… I’ve learned my lesson.

After staggering out of bed this morning, still uncertain on my feet, I realised we had to head down to the nearest Post Office depot to collect a package. Cue Maddy and I attempting to grab a bus down there. “This one goes down the Old Kent Road, but the map doesn’t say where it goes after that”, Maddy told me as a bus approached. We got on, paid £2 each for some reason, then three stops later were unceremoniously ejected. It turned out that the map didn’t say where it went next because it terminated there. Oops.

As we walked into the industrial park where the depot was, both grey-faced and still nauseous from hangovers, we caught the unmistakable whiff of fish. Rounding the corner we passed some sort of fish storage depot, with vans pulling up to unload the day’s catch.

As we fought to keep our breakfasts down and tried to forget about the £30 hole in our wallets, one thought kept me positive: At least I’d have a new lesson learned in London to blog about.

The philosopher Janet Jackson taught the world many things, but foremost amongst her lessons was this gem:

Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone

With that in mind, we arrive at our sixth lesson: getting out of London for a bit.

It’s been hard for me to stand back and admire London, a bit like a new portrait on your living room wall. This is partly due to being ‘in’ London constantly – imagine standing directly in front of your new Van Gogh and staring at the paintwork. Sometimes you have to step back a bit and look at, well, the bigger picture.

Slightly forced analogies aside, what I’m getting at is that it’s good to get away for a while to contextualise everything. I was invited to a wedding back in Leeds over the weekend, although before that, I was busy attending Bletchley Park – the site of the World War 2 Enigma machine codebreakers – on a work day out. This involved boarding a northbound train and passing through the exotically-named environs of Hemel Hempstead and Leighton Buzzard. It was almost disconcerting seeing London’s tower blocks and stonework replace itself with fields and grassy plains, barely twenty minutes out of the centre.

The park/museum itself was fantastic for computer nerds, but I digress. The rest of the weekend was spent back in Leeds. It felt a little odd disembarking from the coach into the city I’d moved out of less than a month before, but it hadn’t changed much and it felt quite ‘safe’ to be back. We knew everywhere and getting around was faster and simpler. That said, it also felt a bit ‘junior’ – like a kind of “my first city” children’s toy. While it was quite a breath of fresh air to walk down streets that weren’t teeming with people (particularly the slow-walking variety), it also felt frustratingly quiet and inactive by comparison.

Still, all this brings me back to my earlier point: arriving back in London at the end of the weekend felt completely right. Crawling alongside Hyde Park and Marble Arch in a National Express coach saw me pressing my nose to the window with the kind of eagerness that London filled me with upon visiting it before moving there. A few days away was all it took for it to fill me with curiosity and excitement all over again.

Today’s lesson? Get away from it all for a bit; get a feel for the world outside of the 24 hour city again. But then come back to London and be thankful that all the shops here don’t close at 4pm on a Sunday.

A few people have asked about ways to keep updated with this blog. If you’re too old-fashioned for an RSS feed, then I’ve set up a handy page where you can just enter your email address and you’ll be emailed when I add a new entry! Technology, eh.

Anyway, if you’d like to add yourself to this list, click the ‘subscribe’ link at the top of every page – simple. If you decide you don’t want to be notified, you can unsubscribe at any time. Could it be any simpler?!

So after the struggles of finding somewhere to live in London, the trials and tribulations of commuting to work by tube and by bike, and figuring out the tourist hotspots and cultural arena, I came to a realisation of sorts: firstly, that I could use the first sentence of this blog entry to handily sum up everything I’ve posted so far, and secondly,  I needed some friends.

Sure, my long-suffering girlfriend Maddy is good company, but occasionally I yearn for the nerdy discussions and obscure internet meme references that she just can’t provide me with (I still love you, Maddy). This is where the magic of the internet steps in.

Obviously it goes without saying that I already had friends in London before committing to moving. Everybody knows somebody who lives in the capital, and in my case I knew quite a few – either university friends originally from London, or people who had since migrated down here already. But, as someone famous probably once said, you can never have too many friends.

But I digress: the internet. You may have heard of the “social news” aggregator, reddit (it’s like Digg, but better). I’ve been a member for almost three years and it’s one of my most-visited sites. It has sections (or ‘subreddits’), and of course, it has one for London.

Browsing the site one evening I saw an optimistically-titled thread discussing the prospects of London “redditors” meeting up for a pint. I was initially wary – I’d already been to one reddit meetup back in Leeds which ended up just being me and one other (admittedly cool) guy. Drinking on an empty stomach, and downing expensive and very strong Belgian beers, I managed to finish the evening spending an hour hugging the toilets in the bar. Stay classy, Matt.

Vowing to handle myself a little better this time, I headed off to the agreed rendezvous point to meet my fellow London internet geeks.

Sean, our illustrious organiser, was stood outside the meeting spot (a Sam Smith’s pub, hooray) clutching a paper printout of reddit’s alien mascot logo, like a kind of nerd equivalent of the Bat signal. Like moths to a flame, we converged upon him, and soon there were six of us pondering where to go.

At this point I’d better stop to reassure those of you who have their doubts about the safety of meeting strangers from the internet (hi mum!): it’s all pretty safe stuff, really. There’s obviously a few minutes of awkward small talk as you first meet and acknowledge the fact that you’re all stood on a public street clustered around a drawing of an alien. But once you’re over the initial nerves, and you’ve had a bit of alcohol inside you, everything warms up and suddenly it’s like you’ve all known each other forever. Obviously it helped having the common ground of reddit as our unifying feature, but we were were all around the same age and were either current or former students, so there was lots of common ground.

I also should acknowledge that posting on mildly obscure geek-oriented websites isn’t for everyone, either. That’s where Meetup.com comes in. It’s useful for finding people into your obscure hobby, passion or fetish (probably). If you don’t fancy committing to something like reddit, where people can mercilessly “upvote” or “downvote” everything you say and do, then this probably a friendlier route.

Still not sure about the prospect of sitting down with weird beardy geeks off the internet? Let me leave you with the knowledge that after our initial meetup that night, we all got on so well we agreed to do it all again the second night. Wandering along London’s South Bank with people who were strangers 24 hours previously felt really great – London is a place to meet new people, try new things and experience a different lifestyle. I’m confident the guys (and girl!) from reddit will be people I’ll be seeing again – as long as my own weird beardy geekiness didn’t put them off, that is.

Today’s lesson? Have a go at meeting new people. Once you’re out of university, your chances of bumping into random strangers at parties and gatherings is massively reduced. Unless you’re lucky enough to have an enormous social circle in London already, or you don’t mind only socialising with your work colleagues, or indeed, you don’t need friends, then don’t rule it out. What’s that old proverb? Strangers are just friends you haven’t met yet, right? Or possibly deranged, murderous, internet psychopaths, but come on. Live dangerously.

This one is easy. You’re living in the UK’s biggest city; arguably Europe’s capital for sheer variety of events, groups, museums and exhibitions. Paris might have the art, Italy the food, Germany the… okay, I’ve exhausted my reserves of pretending-to-know-anything-about-culture. But in any case, London is pretty damn exciting.

Markets

With that in mind, it can be a bit daunting knowing where to start. A quick glance over the pages of Time Out reveal almost too many things to do. In last week’s edition alone there was a bar that sold thermodynamically cooled ice cream and an exhibit of art made by penguins with paintbrushes strapped to their beaks. (I may have made one of the latter items up, but I wouldn’t be surprised).

Like anything else, the best thing to do is get out and try some of it.

Elephant & Castle boasts a ‘weekend market’, occupying the same spot that the day traders use surrounding the local shopping centre. This normally consists of a jaunty hat store, some suspect-quality fruit ‘n’ veg, and an apologetically-titled “ETHIOPAN [sic] COFFEE” store. It was with mild trepidation that I headed over there on a Saturday morning to see what was going on.

Culturally, it was, well, half-hearted. There were a few more exciting stalls, namely a Hungarian ‘deli’ (some dusty looking cooked meats) and a table of Caribbean foods including plantains and saltfish. The rest was slightly less inspiring, with one bloke sitting on the ground alongside his wares, which consisted of ancient-looking hifis and LPs that Oxfam would have rejected. So it goes.

Just a mile up the road is the world-famous Borough Market, the high-quality but highly-priced menagerie of fancy cakes, pastries, cheeses, meats, fish, fruit, vegetables, and everything else in between. It’s a food nerd’s paradise, but a costly one. It’s also extremely busy, but well worth the crowds. I queued for almost 20 minutes to spend £5 on a cajun prawn/cod tortilla wrap, but the fish was incredible and well worth the price.

Eating Out / Curries

Next up on my culture trail was a visit to the East End, in the shape of a curry on Brick Lane. This street features a huge majority of London’s Asian businesses and is famous for its curry restaurants. Wandering along the street was an experience in street marketing, with eager waiters and door staff attempting to enticing us into their venues. Apparently it’s common practice to haggle and agree deals before entering – our well-informed friends who met us at Monsoon has agreed a deal that got us any starter, any main, rice, a naan bread and 2 beers – all for £8. Of course, this was very no-frills: a waiter came over and swiftly removed my side portion of rice upon noticing that I’d ordered a biriani (which contains rice), telling me I didn’t need it. Probably true, but more upmarket venues wouldn’t do this. Still, for £8 I wasn’t complaining.

Theatre & Stage

London’s theatre industry is something that a more well-versed blogger could tell you more about, but from my limited perspective there’s still an enormous amount on offer. Shakespeare’s famous Globe theatre on the South Bank sells a limited number of tickets for just £5 (although these are standing only), and we managed to get near-front row seats at the Old Vic to see As You Like It for just £10. If you’re lucky enough to be under 26 then the Arts Council are running a promotion for young people to see plays for free – check it out.

Arts & Green Space

The aforementioned South Bank has already seen several visits from us since moving to London: it’s a short walk from the flat and features the famous London Eye if you’re that way inclined, along with a variety of street performers (some of whom literally beg for money, particularly embarrassingly, before performing their final acts). There’s even a regular book market with a huge collection of heaving tables laden with second hand books – I still haven’t given this its proper attention yet. Further along the Thames is the Royal Festival Hall with its free art and performances, and the Tate Modern. Just wandering along here once I was lucky enough to stumble upon a free exhibit of the work of Storm Thorgerson, the artist behind famous album covers for Pink Floyd, The Mars Volta, Biffy Clyro, Muse, and tons more.

We also visited Battersea Park, which although situated in a rather ugly bit of South London, was absolutely gorgeous inside. We checked out a free comic exhibition that was genuinely interesting and moving, and watched a Greek/Turkish band play jazz fusion outside the picnic area. Kids were cycling round on those crazy recumbent bikes and people rented out pedal boats for £8/hour on the big lake. London might be an enormous, monolithic city, but it has plenty of green space when compared to other British cities.

In conclusion…

So what’s the lesson here? Mainly that I’ve barely scratched the surface of what London has to offer culturally. Expect more posts on this topic as I expand my palate! But in my new-to-the-city notes, the definite conclusion is to try as much as you can and to keep active. London’s critics moan about its high prices, crowded streets and moody citizens. Prove them wrong and find the free stuff – Time Out has a great list – connect with people, look at interesting, strange things. You’re in the right place for it.

Just like being an alcoholic, the first step to tourism in London is to accept you’re a tourist in London. Unlike being an alcoholic, however, being a tourist in London means that you’ll be short of friends for a while.

Tourism in London is something else. Every meaningless nook and cranny is prime photography fodder for excitable Japanese visitors or over-eager Americans keen to document every park bench that’s older than their country (that’s probably quite a lot). They’re everywhere and always will be in London, and moaning about them and huffing and puffing about how they get in the way is a pointless waste of breath.

It was with this in mind that I decided to adopt that classic aphorism: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Let me backtrack a little here: at no point did I don inappropriate footwear, ill-advised headgear and enormously-sized photography equipment before taking to the streets of London. I made an effort not to stand in busy public spaces and tried hard not to get lost in the vicinity of famous landmarks and exposing my ignorance to my fellow Londoners by asking for directions. What I did do, though, was stop worrying and enjoyed myself.

First up was the British Museum. It’s amongst the most beautiful buildings I’ve seen thus far in London, and its reputation is well-deserved. The big attraction is the famed Rosetta Stone, occupying a prominent spot as you enter the museum proper.

Somewhat depressingly, I could barely get near the thing for the crowd of fellow tourists hungrily stretching their arms towards it. For a second I thought I’d stumbled upon some strangely-dressed Muslims embarking on a localised version of Hajj before I realised that they weren’t reaching out to touch the stone, but to take photos of it using their phones.

Sure, all very 21st century. But I couldn’t help notice that a fair proportion of them, once they’d taken their sweatily-framed shot, immediately backed out of the crowd and wandered off in the direction of the Elgin Marbles. Was that it, then? No need to actually look at the priceless artefact on display, as long as you’ve grabbed a blurry snapshot of it? I was bemused.

Still, being a tourist wasn’t so bad. People gave me a wide berth, noting my backpack and distinct lack of ‘local’ appearance. Normally pushy salespeople avoided my eyes for once, possibly afraid I’d corner them to ask where the Alaskan ice floe exhibit was. My fellow tourists even avoided me, jealously guarding the exhibits they thought were best from my prying eyes. It was actually quite fun.

More of the same followed as I visited other places: the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Imperial War Museum. All were the same. However, when leaving the safe surroundings of London’s museums, I was on my own. Wandering London’s ancient streets and gazing up starry-eyed at famous buildings and epic monuments wouldn’t cut it with London’s citizens. The capital is a fast city and it has no time for romantics (or at least, not romantics stood gazing up at Grosvenor Place as travellers bustle past to Victoria).

How long can you keep it up, though, before you become an authentic, tourist-hating Londoner? I’m two weeks in and already finding myself internalising frustrated thoughts at the crowds of people milling around, apparently ignorant of my need to walk past them. How dare they get in my way?! I’m a Londoner! Maybe today’s lesson should be something zen: respect those around you and cherish the experience they’re having, remembering that you too were once a naive, rosy-cheeked London virgin. Just try to avoid Covent Garden on a Saturday though, because it’s fucking mental.

Welcome to Lessons Learned in London – let’s keep this short and sweet. My name’s Matt, and I’ll be your blogger.

Cheesy introductions aside, this project is a space for me to a) keep my friends and family informed on my life in London, and b) offer some advice (or perhaps examples of ‘how not to do it’) on living in the capital.

A little background on me: after graduating from Leeds University in 2008 and sticking around for a couple of years working for a small media/publishing company, I decided to make the big trip down south and take a new job in London. I’ve moved in with Maddy, my girlfriend of two and a half years, in a little flat in Elephant & Castle.

This blog is going to feature tidbits about the day-to-day processes of settling in and living in London. I’m calling it ‘Lessons Learned’ to imply that I’m most definitely not claiming to be an expert – quite the opposite. I’m essentially hoping that other people thinking of making the transition to the capital might be able to figure out better solutions to some of the problems and challenges they’ll face along the way, hopefully by learning from my (inevitable) mistakes. Also, it offers the opportunity for me to self deprecate at my typical displays of social awkwardness and misunderstanding. Probably.

Anyway, enjoy the blog, and let me know what you think – I’m always up for recommendations, advice, local knowledge and hints. Or, you know, just laughing at me too.