London - Week Four

I bet you're wondering how it went when I switched from coffee to tea. The thing is, only days after my declaration, my grandparents came through the city on a London and Paris tour. Being the loving and giving people they are, the brought me a gift: coffee from Canada. I had to chuckle to myself over the irony, but I knew there wasn't any way to brew such a treat in my current flat. Or was there? That same very day Flatmate Sarah launches into an unpromted introduction to the resident Italian coffee pot. Needless to say, the cultural adjustment has been postponed, but oh the coffee tastes so good.

On another subject, I thought I'd tell you a bit about my home life. I cannot say that what I have experienced is every Londoner's norm, perhaps they are just quirks of the flat where I live. For example, to turn on the shower, there is a pull string from the ceiling, just like one you would use to turn on a light. Pull it again and the shower goes off. You can adjust the temperature and pressure using knobs on the shower wall. This is a completely separate mechanism from the bath, which functions using normal hot and cold taps.










You may already know that the term flat just means apartment, but to be clear, most of the flats I have seen are not flat at all. You've got these rows of tall skinny houses that are all connected together, and where you see one outside door there might be four flats inside, cut up in a most creative fashion. The flat where I first stayed had a different level for each purpose. The entry was at the ground floor, you go up to the bathroom, up again to the bedrooms and kitchen, then up to the living and dining room.

All this sectioning off leads to incredible space issues, and there are casualties. The poor laundry dryers have been left out of the equation in most homes. Many people have a washing machine, but those are kept in the kitchen where a dishwasher might otherwise be located. For drying you can haul your wet things down to the laundromat, or if you prefer crispier clothes, you can just hang them on a drying rack. Strategic use of the radiators can help decrease drying time, and as a bonus you can bake your socks in the morning for about half hour before putting them on.