The last two weeks I’ve been spending a bit of time working for a client down in Poole, Dorset, a town located a couple of hours by train south west of London. It is best described as a quaint English seaside town, the sort that you tend to see in many English shows and movies. It apparently has one of the better beaches in England, though you probably need to be in the peak of summer to use it, assuming that is you can wade through the swarms of people covering the sand to actually get to it.

If you actually see people in Poole (Monday nights are completely dead around town) you will find yourself surrounded by two sorts of people, the elderly and bikers (yes, you read correctly).

Understanding Poole is a pleasant place for people to retire and you’ll find yourself constantly surrounded, be it in the shopping centre, around town or in the pubs, with loads of people with white hair. During summer, early on Tuesday evenings, you’ll find the second crowd congregates by the Quay-side where the “biggest and best weekly” motorcycle event in the UK is held (well at least as described in the brochure). Police shut down the entire wharf side as bikes of all sorts including vintage, home-made, standard and premium ones are lined up one after the other. Of course because it is a school night, you’ll find the entire evening finishes early and most of the crowd has dispersed by about 9 at night.

So what do you do if you ever find yourself in Poole? Your best bet during the day is to take a cruise around the harbour or a ferry to the Brownsea Island which apparently has a number of great walking tracks. In the town the biggest attractions are the waterfront museum describing the town’s history, a pottery factory and a historic walking trail lasting for about an hour an half around town called the Cockle Trail. If you find yourself here at night, there are enough restaurants and take away stores to suit any budget and enough bars and pubs to do the same.

Poole is one of those places that, if you’re looking for a place to relax and avoid the hustle of London, you will enjoy for a weekend and I do not recommend it as a destination if you want a week filled with things to do.

After several weeks of intense house hunting, I finally have a place that I can call home in London. Accommodation over here is severely skewed towards a renter’s market, with so many students, professionals and tourists flocking here that there is such an excess in demand over supply. In looking for my more permanent place to live, I have managed to cover a fair bit of London, at least what is covered by the tube, and seemingly a lot more than what many other people who live here have been to. You find that your standards in the home you want tend to slip fairly quickly as you pay extravagant prices for such a small place. My experience was probably even more difficult, looking for a flatshare with total strangers in totally unknown places. It was effectively the combination between the job hunt and the house hunt bundled as a lovely package (not!)

Over the four weeks that I was looking, I looked at just over 30 different units, houses and flats all over London. The overwhelming part of London is that there are so many areas to live and it is difficult to work out where you should live. A good third of the properties I saw were really dedicated to discovering more the different areas more so than really trying to find a place to live. It seems that the south west parts are dominated by Antipodeans and was highly recommended to me, but most of my workmates live in the North (a.ka. Islington and Camden). In the several weeks I was looking, I saw places all over including Paddington, Maida Vale, Notting Hill, Bayswater, Putney, Fulham, Hammersmith, Islington, Camden, Clapham North, Clapham Common, Brixton, West Kensington, and Earl’s Court.

Fortunately as time went by, I discovered a small talent in being able to filter out properties that just weren’t up to scratch so I wouldn’t have to waste time actually visiting the place, only to reject it later. In all of the places that I visited there were about five out of the thirty-plus that I actually wanted to stay in. Unfortunately many of the early ones came off the market (i.e. housemate didn’t end up moving, or a mate who was so-so about moving in ended up moving in). The important thing though is that I now have a place I can call home.

Read on if you are interested in a few tips from me about finding a place in London: Read more “The Hunt for a Home In London”

Seems to consist of… Read more “A Typical London Outfit”

Before the show last night, we were walking around Lecister Square which was hosting a filming of an epsiode of some TV show. I had no idea what it was so I went up and had a chat with one of the security guards manning the fencing surrounding the filming. He said, ‘It’s called ‘How to start your own Country’ but I don’t think it’s very good. I don’t recommend watching it’. Ha! How funny.

Hundreds of thousands of people in the street, a parade of floats, and groups of police patrolling the streets of London can only mean one thing… the Notting Hill Carnival. This weekend, London put on its best and brightest weather to welcome at least one million people over two days to the streets of the Notting Hill district. Five words probably best encompass the essence of the carnival – People, Music, Food, Drink and Rubbish.

The carnival originally started as a way for the Afro-Caribbean community to celebrate and promote its roots and continues to grow each year. Reggae music plays a major part in the carnival, with plenty of the floats blasting it into the crowd, but the variety of music reaches far beyond it today. These days dozens of stalls and stages host people and DJs playing a wide variety of R&B, Hip Hop, Breaks, House and Drum ‘N’ Bass (at least from what I saw). Pictures cannot capture the madness in the streets, with the closest thing I have seen being Halloween on the streets of San Francisco.

Once you push (or get pushed) past the crowds of people and have some breathing space, you might find yourself in veils of smoke. Besides the obvious kind you find at most festivals, it also could mean you stumbled across the many food stalls lined up all over the place. “Jerk”-style food is abundant with BBQs in a barrel on almost every corner. You can also find a number of other food vendors there, serving other traditional and not-so-traditional Caribbean food. Even the bars and clubs get in on the act, with outdoor bars set up just outside building premises. With all this food and drink being consumed, you might expect quite a lot of rubbish and you wouldn’t be wrong. Bins are hard to find these days in safety-conscious London, resulting in giant piles of rubbish. Add, to that, the traffic and wind that blows through the streets and you can imagine what the streets look like at the end of the day.

All in all it is an amazing atmosphere to just walk around but you’ll find that getting into the heart of the carnival is actually the easy part. It is at the end of the day when the tube remains closed and the swarms of people return to wherever they came from, where you really have to fight your way out. Be prepared for a long walk, or least a long queue if you don’t leave early.