Nine Days in London

I leave for a short holiday in London this Friday. It's a bit of a weak decision considering I've lived there for two and half years already and seen most of everything, but I'm not going so I can see Buckingham Palace. I've a long list of friends to catch up with, and my dad's wallet to raid. I'll probably ride the London Eye and I might even zoom over to Cornwall to see the Eden Project if I can successfully hotwire a car, but the trip is specifically so that I can can spend time who really know the real me. By that I mean "people who can put up with my crap without stabbing me in the pancreas with a sharply bladed object".

Since some of my London friends will be away for parts of my time there, it'll be a bit of a juggling act to see everyone. Part of me wants to rush out and buy a PDA, a GPS CF card, an SD card loaded with a map of London, a SIM card for pay-as-you-go UK phone calls, a new iRiver 20GB mp3 player, a Bluetooth phone headset, a new digicam and a digital voice recorder. All that tech would surely get me organized. I think I might skip the whole deal and take a small paper notebook and a pencil, and see if I can do things the old-fashioned way via a non-volatile storage medium. It might help with the stress I've been feeling lately, although I better not lose that bloody pencil.

With me actually being away from work, my manager connected the dots and is starting to think about March next year, when my work visa runs out. She asked me to stay, and I said I'd think about it, but I don't think it'll happen. Vancouver is a super nice outdoorsy place to live, but I miss good friends, and I miss my family. The wacky thing about London is that it's the city where the greatest number of my friends currently live, so if that was the only variable in the equation, I might get myself a Highly Skilled Migrant Visa and get back there. I'd have to deal with Coronation Street, Emmerdale, Top of the Pops and Big Brother 52 though, which would suck.

Also on the radar is Sydney, which isn't as big business as London but is still quite good for one's career. I have a handful of buddies living there, and it would mean being only a quick weekend flight away from my dad, sister and brother, which is meant to be the optimum distance for family harmony. It's not very adventurous though, like Toyko, Kamchatka or Berlin. Maybe I'll spend nine days in London and pine savagely for the sunshine and green trees of Vancouver, along with the highly attractive (but snooty) tanned women and the endless plates of excellent Asian food. Maybe I'll even move to Florida and become a successful coke dealer, and spend my afternoons watching the August hurricanes plough single-file across the peninsula, spreading destruction and debris in their wake.