Definitely one of the most interesting videos by these guys. It goes to show you that often the supposed restrictions that we are told we have to follow, are not quite as they seem. Here we see how Charlie, armed with some knowledge of the law manages to escape giving his address details, submitting to a search or consenting to ruther questioning by the police.
To go along with this, here’s a link to the Metropolitan Police website with their guidelines for taking photos of police and public buildings. Yes, you CAN take photos of whatever/whomever you like. As long as you’re not using it for terrorist purposes.
On Saturday we leave for the Camino de Santiago, starting in St Jean Pied de Port in France and ending up in Santiago de Compostela in Spain. There are different ways to Santiago, but this particular route is called the Camino Frances, for obvious reasons.
The Camino de Santiago translates into the Way of St James and has been a Christian pilgrimage for over 1000 years. Tradition has it that the remains of St James the Apostle are contained within the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela after being transported here from Jerusalem. Thousands of pilgrims both Christian and otherwise walk the Camino every year, and this year should include even higher numbers due to it being a holy year. This means that St James’s day falls on a Sunday.
It is also said that this route was used in pre-Christian times as a walk to death, as it’s only a few days walk past Santiago de Compostela that you hit the Atlantic Coast, and the end of the earth.
Everyone that starts the Camino is called a pilgrim and is issued with a Pilgrim’s Passport, allowing them to stay in the subsidised Pilgrims Hostels along the route. Most people will also wear a scallop shell on their backpacks, displaying their pilgrim status.
Nearly everyone that walks the Camino says that it was a life altering experience. We’ve met a few people that have walked it and all have said that it’s a time that you will never forget. We’ve been thinking for years about how we could find the time needed to complete the trek in one go and now we have it.
The first half of the trip, up to Burgos, we will be walking with our friend Nati who unfortunately has to return to London at that point, leaving us to complete the journey on our own.
The Camino Frances is about 769km and should take us between 25 and 32 days. We’ve got 35 days set aside, so weather and sore feet permitting, we should finish on time.
For a bit of background on the Camino, check here.
Well that didn’t take long. After being back in the UK for about a year and a half, Michaela and I have decided to embark on another world tour. The plan was for us to come back to London and to settle down, or at least to come up with a plan to settle down here or in some other place. We cut back, downsized and saved an awful lot of money over the past few months, in hopes of getting enough cash together to buy a place somewhere. At least that was the idea. However in recent times, the plan has changed somewhat, and we’ve decided that we’re not quite ready to settle down and that we still haven’t gotten over the travel bug.
On the 6th of March, we are flying over to Biaritz in France and then heading straight into Spain to walk the famous Camino de Santiago for one month. This will take us nearly 800kms across to the west coast of Spain. On the 11th of April we will be flying back to London to swap our light walking packs for the big backpacks and from there we will fly to Syria via the eastern part of Turkey. After Syria we hope to visit Iran, then back to India, China, and the bits of Southeast Asia that we missed on our last trip. The trip is very much a work in progress and the itinerary is a rough one.
We don’t have a timetable for our return or if we will return to London at all. We both have a feeling that it might be time to move on to pastures new, and we are thinking of moving to Canada afterwards. Or Argentina, or Costa Rica, Portugal or maybe India. Who knows… It’s a bit pointless thinking too much about it because a lot can happen over the next few months, so we don’t want to commit to anything just yet. Wherever we choose, be it some other place or a return to London, our possessions are ready to go. Our flat is just about packed up and is almost ready to be sent off to live in a storage container for while.
We have lived a great life for the last year and a half and we have very little to complain about. Life is pretty good. Our jobs are good, we have great friends and a nice flat. It seems strange to throw everything to the wind and to hit the road again, but that’s what we feel we have to do.
Needless to say, this website will be making the conversion to travel blog very shortly, so please check back regularly, or sign up for updates on the top right corner of this page. We’ll have photos, travel reports and a map so you can check our progress.
We’ve downsized a lot. Living out of a backpack for so long, we found that most of the stuff that we had unpacked from storage was completely unnecessary. Old clothes and random nick-nacks went to the charity shop. Out went our TV, DVD player and stereo; all of which were replaced with our laptop and some good little speakers. I even realized that my precious CD collection was no longer very important to me. I used to try to buy a CD per week, and I had amassed a pretty decent collection. But I realized that I listened to almost everything on MP3 via the laptop or MP3 player and that my CDs were doing nothing but collecting dust. Off they went too. I found a website called Music Magpie that bought everything. They didn’t give me the best price, but for ease, it was worth it.
The amount of clothes we got rid of was quite incredible. We had stuff in suitcase, boxes and bags that we never wore. Oh, but I might… Nope. It’s outta here.
Why was I buying DVDs? I generally watch a movie once and that’s it. Just because I liked the movie, doesn’t mean I need to make it mine. Talk about a hoarder mentality.
We still haven’t gotten rid of our books. Although quite a few of them did go. Computer books from 2001? I still like to have a collection of decent books, but in reality I rarely look at them and this year, I haven’t bought hardly any. Maybe one of these days they’ll go too. I know a guy that had a collection of 30,000 books, many of them valuable, and he sold them all. That’s tough.
It’s very liberating to de-clutter. At first it was a bit difficult, especially with the CD’s, but now I’m regularly patrolling the flat looking for other things that we haven’t used for a long time, if ever. It’s amazing, the amount of things that we had amassed over the years. Random gifts from people, stuff you pick up cause you think it looks interesting (it doesn’t look that good once you get it home.) It feels good to break free of things that you are hanging on to for no reason, and to stop buying things just for the sake of buying them. If it spends most of its time in a box, or unused on a shelf, get rid of it.
Yoga/Meditation
I’ve talked about this before, so it’s more of an update I suppose. I’m still waking up quite early every day. Usually between 6:10 and 6:25. This gives me about 45 minutes of yoga followed by about 15-20 minutes of meditation. I’m also still doing the Neti nose cleaning every day. We normally meditate in the evenings before bed as well. The benefits to all of this are obvious to me, and I can really feel it when I don’t follow this regime. Meditation before bed is really good and helps me to sleep better. Yoga in the morning wakes me up and by the time I’m heading off to work, I’m fully awake and feeling good. I’m also feeling stronger. Not that you’d know it by looking at me though. I can do the poses a lot easier, and ones that were difficult are now easy. I can do headstands in my sleep.
I’m really glad that I’ve continued doing this. It’s no longer something I have to force myself to do. I actually look forward to practising everything as I know that I’m going to feel so good afterwards. Which takes me back to the drinking thing. Even one drink affects my ability to A. wake up, and B. meditate properly. So, not only do I have a hangover, I feel worse by not doing yoga and meditation. I’m a lot more aware of the “movements” of that tricky little thing I like to call “my mind” and if I’m not feeling at my best, I can feel it having its way with me. Emotions take control more often and sometimes feel as if I’m walking through a haze. Not sure if that makes much sense…
I had an interesting experience a few weeks ago. I was waiting for someone, who turned out to be about an hour late. I could see myself getting quite annoyed and starting to get angry. But the interesting thing is I could see the anger. It was as if I was watching it from a distance. It was there, but it didn’t have control of me. It was very odd. I was thinking of how interesting it was. By watching my anger, I caused it to go away. This type of thing happens more and more often. I’m more in control of my mind. - It’s funny, how if it’s my mind, why can’t I control it? – This ability to observe my thoughts, I attribute to meditation.
I was trying to find out how to pull down RSS Feeds to my e-book reader. The Sony software is fairly shite in a lot of ways, one being that by default you can only pull down feeds from a specific set of sources that Sony has set up. Not very flexible. Searching for a way around this, I came upon this little application called Calibre. It lets me sync RSS feeds from any source, like blogs or news sites. Pretty cool. Even cooler is how it is clever enough to pull down feeds from newspapers and then arrange them on the reader in such a way that it’s dead simple to browse the paper by section and then by individual article. So, if I wanted to, I could schedule a sync of the Times, or Guardian each morning and be able to read the paper on the way into work.
Another really interesting feature is that Calibre can take comic book files, which are saved in a compressed .cbz or .cbr format and convert them into EPUB format which is viewable on the Reader. The comics are a little small, and are black and white, but it’s still quite impressive.
Best of all, Calibre is totally open source and of course, free.
Getting rid of our TV was one of the best decisions we’ve ever made. Apart from a couple of series that we like to keep track of, and the football, there’s absolutely nothing that I miss about having a television. No, I don’t know who was voted off of the latest (un)reality TV show, nor do I care. The BBC iPlayer is a fantastic bit of technology and with it I don’t miss the excellent wildlife documentaries that the Beeb produces. We watch a lot of movies on the laptop, but I think we’ve just about exhausted the batch of decent ones and even that is starting to get a bit dull. Good movies are harder and harder to come by. I’m finding that I don’t like watching action films or ones with excessive violence or crude jokes. Maybe that’s lame, but I don’t care. IMDB www.imdb.com (the greatest movie site on the internet) has a great section on parental control where you can check out how much sex/killing/swearing there is in a movie. I’m censoring movies from myself! Not from the sex bit, mind.
The internet is amazing. A bit of a no-brainer that, but still… I love it. Youtube and sites like www.freedocumentaries.org have some fantastic content. People out there are really able to share information not normally available via the traditional outlets. I know most newspapers are one-sided, but I always thought that the BBC was at least impartial. Not so. After reading alternative news sites like Above Top Secret, SOTT, News Sniffer and InfoWars you realize that you’re not getting the whole story when you follow mainstream media. The sites I’ve just mentioned are only some of a hundreds of alternative media sites out there. Some have a lot of crap/weird stuff on them, but at least they give you a different side to the story.
I love the ingenuity of geeks out there. Sites like MyP2P let you watch sports for free online. The infamous Pirate Bay is one of many torrent sites that let people share files with the world. Some files legal, some not. Modders release a hack to work around the ban by Microsoft on hacked XBox’s just days after the ban was implemented. When the government announced plans to look at cutting people off of their internet connections for illegally sharing files, encrypted (hidden) traffic skyrocketed. People are so clever.
Spotify rocks! The coolest thing to happen to music in a very long time. A totally different take on allowing access to music. Why buy a CD when you can stream it any time you want? Unfortunately it appears that for now there’s no more access to free accounts, but for us early birds, the worm is still free.
Free ebooks. Sites like The Gutenberg Project let you download out of copyright books for free. Also, sites like http://www.scribd.com/ have tons of documents, papers and generally interesting info that is freely available.
I’ve discovered that I can cook. Not only that, but I love it. I guess all the different foods we tasted over the last few years have suddenly triggered a latent cooking gene. We make Thai curries from scratch, Indian food of all description, soups, salad dressings, cakes, pies, sauces. We hardly buy any pre-packaged food. I even make pesto, which I always thought was impossible. We still haven’t got a microwave and don’t have a need for one. One of the best buys I’ve made in recent years has been an old-fashioned cast-iron frying pan. It’s nothing special and it cost me all of 13 pounds. Oh, but it IS very special. Who needs dodgy Teflon covered aluminium pans. This thing is totally non-stick. It cooks so much better than a traditional frying pan. It’s a more evenly-dispersed, slower heat and the food tastes delicious. You wouldn’t think that a pan could make that much difference, but it does.
We’ve taken to making extra food every night so that we have some left over to take to work the next day. We almost always used to buy lunch at work. Buying lunches every day adds up to a lot. I’d guess we’ve saved about 800 pounds each over the year by doing this. Not only are we saving food for lunch but any extra goes into the freezer for instant ready meals. A nice surprise when you’re feeling lazy.
We’ve downsized a lot. Living out of a backpack for so long, we found that most of the stuff that we had unpacked from storage was completely unnecessary. Old clothes and random nick-nacks went to the charity shop. Out went our TV, DVD player and stereo; all of which were replaced with our laptop and some decent little speakers. I even realized that my precious CD collection was no longer very important to me. I used to try to buy a CD per week, and I had amassed a pretty decent collection. But I realized that I listened to almost everything on MP3 via the laptop or MP3 player and that my CDs were doing nothing but collecting dust. Off they went too. I found a website called Music Magpie that bought everything.
It’s very liberating to de-clutter. At first it was a bit difficult, especially with the CD’s, but now I’m regularly patrolling the flat looking for other things that we haven’t used for a long time, if ever. It’s amazing, the amount of things that we had amassed over the years. It feels good to break free of things that you are hanging on to for no reason, and to stop buying things just for the sake of buying them. If it spends most of its time in a box, or unused on a shelf, get rid of it.
yoga
meditation
drinking
finance/economics
politics
nature/trees
Leytonstone
Booze
In the last year we’ve made a few lifestyle changes. One of the biggest changes is the reduction in alcohol consumption. I’ve gone from drinking a half bottle of wine nearly every night, plus a session in the pub on Fridays to nearly zero drinks at home and visits to the pub only every few weeks. Now, people that have attended those pub sessions may beg to differ with me with regard to a reduction in drinking, but it’s true, I assure you. When we first arrived back in London, after not really drinking for five or six months, I made a very good attempt at not drinking at all. That’s easier said than done in this city. Most of our friends live quite far away from each other, so a centrally located pub is usually the easiest place to meet. Matching your friends drink for drink with orange juice gets a tad dull after a while and paying for glass after glass of lemonade with the only result being a sugar rush isn’t that fun. But I have done it. Much to the disappointment of a lot of my friends. Want to see your friends get uncomfortable? Spend an evening in the pub and not have a drink. I think it’s almost harder for them than it is me. Drinking is such the “done thing” here that not doing so really makes you feel like the odd man out. I mean, at work we have a beer fridge that gets fully stocked each Friday. Drinking is the number one entertainment activity for the average Londoner.
For me, apart from the hangovers and the money poured down my throat, I’ve noticed that ultimately I feel disappointed after a night out on the piss. I know it’s supposed to be fun and often it is, but a lot of times I find myself walking home after a night out wondering why on earth I did it all. I certainly don’t feel a sense of satisfaction after a night in the pub.
Unfortunately for all of my good intentions, I’m still not as disciplined as I’d like to be and I do hit the pub every now and again. Although pints with pub lunches are out, as are glasses of wine to wind down with in the evening. It’s a step in the right direction I suppose.
Unplug your TV
Getting rid of our TV was one of the best decisions we’ve ever made. Apart from a couple of series that we like to keep track of, and the football, there’s not much that I miss about having a television. No, I don’t know who was voted off of the latest (un)reality TV show, nor do I care. We can watch movies whenever we want, and my local pub shows most of the football that I care to see. Although, there are indeed other ways of watching football on the internet, or so I hear. TV is a great little bit of technology. When a TV is in the room, your eyes are inexplicably drawn to it. Try sitting in a pub or restaurant where there’s a TV and not looking at it. Back in Canada so many restaurants have TVs. It’s incredibly distracting. Even the tube stations in London are getting TV advertising to go along with the poster ads that already cover nearly every square inch of wall space. TV has become so embedded in our lives. Most households centre their living room, the place where as the name suggests most of their time is spent, around the Television. Where in the past, or still today in many Asian countries, there may have been a small religious shrine or family photos in the the pride of place, we now put the TV. Think about that for a moment.
Saying that, I still like to watch a couple of things and there’s always the internet for that. The BBC iPlayer is a fantastic little application and with it I don’t miss the excellent wildlife documentaries that the Beeb produces. We also watch a lot of movies on the laptop, but I think we’ve just about exhausted the batch of decent ones and even that activity is starting to get a bit dull. Good movies are harder and harder to come by. I’m finding that I don’t like watching action films or ones with excessive violence or crude jokes. Maybe that’s lame, but I don’t care. IMDB www.imdb.com (the greatest movie site on the internet) has a good section on parental control ratings where you can check out how much sex/killing/swearing, etc there is in a movie. I’m censoring movies from myself! In my mind, if a movie has to rely on shocking me, or making my head spin with explosions, rather than telling a good story, it’s not for me.
Of course not having a TV saves a few quid too. No TV license, no satellite subscription, no keeping up with the latest technology in Televisions, DVD/BlueRay players or surround sound systems. HD TV looks nice, but how long before the next new thing makes it obsolete. It’s a never ending task to keep up with that stuff.
Without a television, we have a lot more time to do other, more rewarding things, like reading, talking, yoga, meditation or cooking.
Cooking
I’ve discovered that I can cook. Not only that, but I love it. I guess all the different foods we tasted over the last few years have suddenly triggered a latent cooking gene. We make Thai curries from scratch, Indian food of all description, soups, salad dressings, cakes, pies, sauces. We made pumpkin pie from scratch, pecan pie and banana bread. We hardly buy any pre-packaged food. I even make pesto, which I always thought was impossible. We still haven’t got a microwave and don’t have a need for one. One of the best buys I’ve made in a long time has been an old-fashioned cast-iron frying pan. It’s nothing special and it cost me all of 13 pounds. Oh, but it IS very special. Who needs dodgy Teflon covered aluminium pans. This thing is totally non-stick. It cooks so much better than a traditional frying pan. It’s a more evenly-dispersed, slower heat and the food tastes delicious. You wouldn’t think that a pan could make that much difference, but it does. No more scrubbing out stuck-on eggs! It even makes fantastic popcorn. This little baby does everything.
We’re still vegetarian, but not religious about it. We try to eat as much organic as possible and buy most of our food from an organic delivery service that brings us dirt covered knobbly carrots and other delicious delights. Compared to supermarket organic food (which does indeed taste better than non-organic) the food from Abel & Cole is a lot tastier. It’s local, for the most part, and seasonal. It encourages us to eat a wider variety of food and to try things that we normally wouldn’t buy.
We rarely eat out anymore and we’ve even forgone our once a week Indian takeway. Restaurant food doesn’t seem to taste that good anymore. Maybe it’s the preparation or the quality of the food, or perhaps it’s the simple fact that it’s not made with love that makes it taste below par. Whatever the reason, I like our own cooking better than most restaurants. Even the good ones that charge so much money.
We’ve taken to making extra food every night so that we have some left over to take to work the next day. We almost always used to buy lunch at work. Buying lunches every day adds up to a lot. I’d guess we’ve saved about 800 pounds each over the year by doing this. Not only are we saving food for lunch but any extra goes into the freezer for instant ready meals. A nice surprise when you’re feeling lazy.
I think that if you see cooking as a chore, then that’s what it will be. But if you learn to like it, then it won’t be a bother to spend time creating delicious, healthy meals. You can make any activity a pleasant one. Whether it’s commuting to work or chopping vegetables. You have to eat, so you might as well make the process enjoyable.
We’ve been back in the UK for over a year now so I thought I’d share some thoughts on what life’s been like.
Life certainly is different since we’ve been back.
There are a lot more mobile entertainment gadgets to ensure that the no eye contact rule is easier to keep while riding the tube. More free newspapers, then less, then more again. Even the old London stalwart, the Evening Standard went free. Talk about an easy way to get everyone to think the same. Give them free papers. The worse the better. There’s more violence and negative news in said newspapers too. Try finding a happy headline and you’ll win a prize.
More draconian laws by Her Majesty’s Government. Want to babysit your neighbour’s kid? Register with the government first. They know best. Trust them. Just don’t trust your local MP to tell you where they live. You won’t get straight anwer. My taxes pay for how many of your houses? Oh, one’s a duck house… that’s not so bad. the RSPCA will be happy. But DO trust them about the swine flu vaccine. Why wouldn’t you?
The women of London (the clone army) look more and more the same with their short skirts, black tights, higher and higher heels and sour faces. Smile! Everything is OK!
More Community Support Officers (revenue collection officers) and more cameras spying on all of us potential criminals/terrorists. I counted 36 on my way in to work the other day. I feel like I’m on the X-Factor.
Rain has turned into an Adverse Weather Condition and teenagers are made to feel afraid to even cross the road, in an ad campaign on road accidents.
The EU and me now have an unelected President. Democracy? We’ll kill foreigners to make sure they have it, but we weakly give up our own rights at home.
The economy crashed and now I own a bank. So do you. But we aren’t rich. Buy gold before the Indians get it all. Things are so bad even The Sheiks need bailouts.
What a place! It seems the whole world is going to the dogs. Tough little Staffordshire Bull Terriers on chains by the look of it. Who had dogs in London 2 years ago?
Things aren’t all bad though. Far from it.
There’s also a lot more love in the air to balance out the rubbish. I’ve talked to more strangers in the last year than I have in the previous ten. I’ve spoken to random people in the tube (one of which returned my mobile phone which had fallen out of my pocket) and made friends with the Pakistani guys in my local shop. Not to mention the Sri Lankans in the newsagents. I know 3 of our neighbours and actually have real conversations with them, whereas relationships with previous neighbours never went beyond “hi.” Our new Moroccan neighbours downstairs insist on bringing us all manner of culinary delights for no reason whatsoever. This has escalated into a kind of game where we bring down deserts and they bring up main courses. I have chats with my dog-walking friend David every morning as I walk to work. I then share a wave and a smile with another, as yet nameless man a little further up the road.
I actually enjoy my 2 hours of Tube travel every day. I can look at the journey as a waste of 2 precious hours of my life, or I can look at it as 2 precious 2 hours in a different place. They’re still my 2 hours, they’re still precious and I can do with them what I like. I’ve read an incredible amount of books this year. I’ve also realized that I don’t enjoy listening to music on the way in to work. I like to hear the sounds of the world around me, even if it is just traffic and screeching tube wheels. The journey also lets me shed my work energy so that I’ve gotten any work thoughts off of my mind by the time I get home. Rather than see the commute as a small prison sentence, I actually kind of enjoy it.
I’ve noticed how beautiful London can be. The amount of greenery in the city is amazing. The people in our neighbourhood have done a wonderful job of growing hundreds of different breeds of plants in their messy, typically English front gardens. I take the long way to the station each morning in order to enjoy the different trees, flowers and plants that line the streets. It seems every week I see a different flower in bloom, even at this late time of the year. For a few days this summer there were plums dropping from the trees down one nearby road. For another week, our street erupted into a riot of pink and white as the small trees blossomed and then covered the ground in flower petals after the show had finished. A few doors down, a Ylang Ylang bush emitted the most delicious fragrance into the air, like someone in a department store spraying perfume on us as we walked by.
We live minutes away from the edge of Epping Forest, which is a massive park (Forest actually, hence the name) complete with deer, nature trails, ancient breed cattle, ponds, centuries old trees, rivers and a multitude of birds. It’s beautiful. A couple of times we set out on mini adventures as we trekked nearly 6 hours in one direction, far out of the city and into neighbouring Essex. Our little corner of the Forest was a godsend this summer. Every evening we took walks after dinner, enjoying the air and open spaces and lying on the earth, letting the stresses of the day melt into it. Thankfully the parks officials keep this area in a somewhat wild state, and don’t see the need to keep the grass trimmed. The grass grows knee high and in the autumn as it turned a golden colour, it felt a little like our very own African savannah. And the blackberries! There’s hordes of blackberry bushes. For weeks in the autumn we ate till our lips were blue. Who would have thought that there was wild food in London.
I used to hate living in Leytonstone. It was boring, had no decent shops, no good pubs and it was a pain to get to. Now I love it. It’s got a forest! And good coffee houses, Turkish mezze cafes, a great little Nature Shop (the owner tells me good stories most weekends) and even the one decent Pub has had a paint job. Actually, it hasn’t changed all that much, but I think I have.
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