A picture speaks a thousand words, so this will be my longest post yet. This week covered my final 3 days in London and the long trip home.

I have learnt that getting film hand-inspected when taking the Eurostar (St Pancras or Gare du Nord) or at Heathrow Airport is a real pain because they say it has to go through the machine as long as your film’s under ISO 800. Getting hand inspection done in the US or in Japan has been really easy, so I wasn’t expecting so much pushback from other airports.

After texting Sroyon (who is a more serious photographer and more updated than I am), he pointed out that Heathrow has 2 types of machines (CT scan machines and X-ray ones). The two types of machines (evil and good) currently coexist because Heathrow hasn’t finished replacing all 146 security lanes’ worth of machines. Thankfully, my film turned out fine and I could actually get the photos from this trip and write my Raynox ME-606 post.

My final 3 days were just spent with friends and walking around a lot. To drive this point home, I had dinner with 2 friends who both live in London but hadn’t met each other. This happened after dinner while we were walking:

SY: […] We went on a walk that passes by about 8 grocery stores and then Tomo said “wow, walking is so nice” and immediately tripped on flat ground.

V: HAHAHAHA I know she really loves walking

If it isn’t already abundantly clear – I love walking.

Anyway, here are some photos:

Thrifted this from the Queensway outlet of the Royal Trinity Hospice charity shop. It’s funny because I don’t have a dog. I am the dog and I’m walking myself (this would explain why I’m very food-motivated and also enjoy walking about).

Got to see a brat poster in real life. 🫡 (Favourite track off the album is Apple)

The largest baked potato of my life at Shepherdess BBQ Cafe. V was viewing a flat in the area and we decided to get lunch there. I thought this would be somewhat small as £10 doesn’t usually go very far in London, but I ended up having to take half of it home as I couldn’t finish it (P.S. they pack your to-go stuff really nicely too!).

V is disarmingly friendly and also has this preternatural ability to just start speaking to anybody, anytime.¹ While I was washing my hands in the restroom, V found out that the lady who was serving us our food had moved here from Turkey 4 years ago and really loves it – she said “it can be expensive, but if you split it with people it’s easy” (e.g. rent, or just expenses in general). Then came the question:

V: Ok so when are you moving to London?

Honestly would love to, but I need to find a job there first. As someone with no STEM degree who wants to move into software engineering in the year 2024, this feels like trying to get struck by lightning while also winning the lottery. Trying to move countries on top of this is perhaps a bit much. I don’t even want to say what I want out loud, because it might sound delusional / open me up to being laughed at.

what i saw while walking

Why do pigons do this even when there’s a big open space right next to the bridge? Baffling little guys. Still cute though.

Mallards (i think) and a coot. I love coots. They look so goofy and the babies have red faces. If you are interested in London wildlife, please check out Gehan de Silva Wijeyratne’s blog (I use full names for people I don’t really know personally) - he has a 3-part series of recommendations for where to go. I met him on a walk with the London Bird Club in Week 23 and he gave me a pamphlet for the London Natural History Society.

There’s a bit of lore behind the walk. I nearly missed it because my train got delayed and I reached the Baker Street Sherlock Holmes Statue about 10 minutes late. I figured that the worst case was that I’d have a nice walk on my own, so I decided to head to Regent’s Park anyway after making a blind guess on what route they’d probably take and somehow managed to catch up with them.

If you are ever late for a walk and looking for birders, just look for a group of people where everyone has a pair of binoculars.

I did not have binoculars and ended up taking in everything with my raw, astigmatism-riddled eyes and glasses.

I really want to know what the lore behind this memorial bench is. Wanted to put it on OpenBenches, but realised someone had already beaten me to it by a year. Hope Samuel Jackson Daly is having a good giggle wherever they might be.

No photos for the next thing, but I went to see the Angel Comedy Club’s free shows. Technically free, but more precisely, it’s pay-as-you-wish with a £15 suggested contribution. I try to go whenever I’m around. You get to see a variety of material (each night has about 6 folks), and honestly I’ve paid more for worse experiences at some ticketed shows elsewhere so I’d happily pay the suggested £15 for Angel anytime.

Anyway, this is what my version of London looks like. Consider this my attempt at travel blogging. The next step is to actually catch up on my weeknote backlog and ritualise the act of actually writing things on Sunday night, instead of 2 weeks later.

Random thought: It would be nice to be a photographer for shy people. Like people who are quite camera-shy but would want a few nice photos of themselves that they like.