24 hours in London

I love London, always have and probably always will. Living in Newcastle, pretty much as north as England can get, I’ve always found it to be so much more exotic than my home town and have been visiting a few times a year for work, shopping, or just a change of scenery since I was about 15. Last week I had the all-important embassy appointment at the American embassy. Now as we know, last week wasn’t exactly perfect what with the being ill and the lots of work, but somehow my sleep deprived self-managed to survive the 7 hour coach and get the visa stuff sorted.

My trips to London always seem to be short but sweet, and this time I found myself in the capital for a grand total of 24 hours. I’m being serious, that’s from getting off the coach right through to getting back on the coach. Take off from that the 2 hours spent at my appointment and a good 8 hours sleep, we’re down to a mere 14 hours to eat, drink and be merry see the sights. Okay who am I kidding I was merry and saw the sights.

Having such a short amount of time I wanted to stay somewhere that was in easy distance from the coach station, the embassy, having been to London many times before ease of sightseeing wasn’t top of my list. After trawling countless websites trying to find somewhere both affordable for a student, but not a hostel (I needed to get a good night’s sleep!) I eventually found the Victoria Inn, in Victoria, for a good price with reviews that didn’t sound too bad. Now I don’t know if my expectations for hotels are really low, the last hotel I stayed in didn’t have running water in the main building, or if previous reviewers were just harsh critics but I was pleasantly surprised. The hotel was in a nice location, clean and had friendly staff on reception 24/7, although the room was on the small side there was plenty of space for the night and a bed each. A cooked breakfast was also included in the price, a total novelty for this cheap skate traveller.

Our megabus arrived into London at 15:00pm and we headed straight to the hotel to drop our things and freshen up, before heading on out. Now I know most people would recommend getting a tube pass if you’ve got such little time, but being on low student budgets we opted to walk and I think we definitely still saw plenty.

We set off without any real plans other than to make sure I knew the route to the embassy since I’m brilliant at getting lost if I have a deadline. In true form, the half an hour walk from our hotel to Grosvenor square took us nearer an hour, by which point we just wanted to eat food and window shop, so we wandered along oxford street played house in John Lewis (yup, that happened) and bought the most delicious coconut and chocolate orange cookies from Ben’s Cookies. Seriously, why don’t we have them up north?! 100% recommended.

After our playtime on Oxford Street we strolled down past Piccadilly Market which was just closing but had some cute and quirky things, through St James Park, just as the sun was setting and up into Westminster where we of course got to admire the houses of parliament and big ben. No matter how many times I visit London I still find myself visiting Westminster just to look at the grandeur of the buildings.

 After our afternoon exploring and sightseeing we ended up at Loco Mexicano, a small Mexican restaurant just a 5 minutes’ walk from our hotel in Victoria. As you’ll learn Mexican is definitely my favourite type of food, and to be honest nachos, fajitas or anything with salsa is instantly the way to my heart. The food was gorgeous, nachos and fajitas to share were devoured in minutes, it was cheap and had an offer on cocktails.. What more could we want?!

The next day after the embassy appointment we met another of our friends and headed along to the south bank. It was a beautiful spring day, and deceptively hot – I actually managed to get sunburnt in the few hours we were out there! The south bank is another of my favourite places to pass time when I’m in London. I love just wandering along watching people bustling about their business and you can guarantee on a gorgeous day there’ll be plenty to watch, from photo shoots and interviews to street performers and bands, it’s all going on.

After enjoying the gorgeous sunshine, eating ice cream and watching plenty of street theatre we headed back to Victoria to pick up our bags and get a bite to eat at giraffe – yet again one of my favourite restaurants and another chain I wish we had back home!  By three pm, exactly 24 hours after I’d arrived, I found myself hugging everyone goodbye and climbing back up the stairs for another 7 hours on the coach back to Newcastle.

I had the most fantastic couple of days, and it was brilliant just to get away and clear my head, add to that the fact that my visa got approved (hello, America!) and I think I can say it was one of the best trips I’ve had in a while. It reminded me that while we quite often scoff at being a tourist somewhere we know, actually if you take even just a little time to explore you can find excitement round even the most familiar of corners.

Imagine the worst, live the best

Two weeks ago I posted my first ‘magic moments’ post, all grand intentions, it was going to be a weekly post, filled with positivity and plans for the week ahead. I didn’t want my Mondays to just be the same old weekend recaps – I mean I don’t think my weekends are ever even exciting enough for a recap. But as someone who suffers from anxiety I am always looking for new ways to find the silver lining in situations and to make sure I’m getting the most out of my weeks. Hence, Mondays magic moments… now 2 weeks have gone by and as I mentioned last week just kind of, didn’t go to plan, and I’ve got to rethinking the weekly post. It’s now going to be a monthly post partly because my weeks aren’t that interesting and mainly because I like the sound of monthly magic moments better, so check back in a couple of weeks to see how I’ve got on in my mission to add a little bit of happiness to my days.

entirely unrelated duck and daffodils - spring is here!

Magic moments don’t have to be created through goals or challenges though, and I am a firm believer that even the most negative or worrisome of tasks can have positivity buried within them.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve had a fair few jobs to do both for work, Camp America and just day to day life that have been causing me anxiety. A good example is my embassy appointment last week, It was a new situation, in a new environment with something pretty important relying on me completing everything successfully – my visa. Safe to say, I was pretty darn nervous. Equally my friends were sick of hearing me whinge on about all the possible things that could go wrong, what if I slept in and missed it, what if I couldn’t find the embassy, what if they decided they didn’t want me to get a visa. Yup, there were a lot of worries going through my head and a fair few sleepless nights over something that I now know to be not even a little bit tricky. However, amongst all my worrying I found myself hearing the same thing over and over again from well-meaning friends.

“Don’t worry about it, think positively”

Now I don’t know about you but I’ve heard that advice a million times in my life time and I’ve never quite got it. To start with, if I’m half way through a panic attack and imaging every possible horrific scenario – how exactly do you expect me to suddenly start imagining everything going perfectly? And on the occasions that I did think ‘positively’ and imagine success I was often faced with disappointment at the other side. If the reality of the situation didn’t live up to my imaginary one I was left feeling distinctly let down. The reality could never live up to the imagined.

So, I propose another way to approach those anxiety ridden situations. I thought that doesn’t force you to think positively, in fact some might say its negative. For me though, it works.

“Imagine the worst that can happen”

Now we’ve all heard the saying ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’ which challenges you to consider what could go wrong, but is often presented to you in as an offhand comment. I know I often hear “Now Molly, don’t worry so much, think positively, what’s the worst that can really happen?” I don’t know why people even ask me to be honest; I can definitely create a worst case scenario.

I say screw them. Imagine the worst that can happen, and I’m talking the absolute worst. Going to school with no clothes on, calling the teach mum and peeing yourself all in the same day worst. Imagine that hideously horrible event, feel every emotion, genuinely live that worst case scenario in your head. It’s a safe happy place, mines normally filled with cute pictures of cats and lavish travel plans, so if you can test out things going wrong anywhere your imaginations a good place to start. Act out all the different scenarios in your mind and test out all the reactions you could have and come to terms with any unknowns in the situation.

I know it sounds like a negative attitude but I’ve found I can then tackle whatever event is worrying me with a new sense of confidence. No matter what happens I’ve already lived through the worst, I know I can handle it because really, our imaginations are capable of concocting far worse scenarios than the real world is ever likely to show us. If you can survive your own imagination you can conquer your fears and step out into the world ready to take on any challenge.

You should always try to find the positivity in the negative and turn the fear into a magic moment. I’m learning increasingly that nerves and excitement are one and the same they both fill you with the adrenalin needed to take on a situation, and equally (at least for me) dread at what is ahead. I think that as long as you handle your nerves successfully then both can be crucial parts of moving forward, and can even prove to be the energiser for your success. I can think of countless presentations at uni that I’m sure looking back, wouldn’t have been half as good had I not had those nerves there reminding me to try my best.

This has felt like a weird post to write, and ironically one I’ve felt pretty anxious about, to lay out one of my coping methods for criticism on the internet feels far from safe. Yet in an effort to seek new ways of understanding my anxiety I wanted to open up and put it out there. I would love to know if you have any tips for overcoming nerves or anxiety. Do you think positively, or like me, find imagining the worst a better strategy?

That week where I just fell off the internet

Hi. Hello. Nice to speak to you again, long time no see. 

Umm, so I feel I should apologize. You see just last Friday I was here telling you all about my ‘oh so exciting’weekend ahead. Blog wise I was all set to spend my Sunday writing up ‘magic moments’ for you and was geared up to tell you about my adventures planned for the week. It was all going rather great if I may say so, I mean look at my tipsy jolly face Friday night, just back from a beautiful gig and getting ready to be stuffed full of midnight pizzas.

Unfortunately that was the only photo taken of what was a lovely night. Not only did I get to spend the evening with my bestest who was up visiting from Leeds but I also got to see a local folk band, Gilded Thieves play live for the first time in months and have a sneaky drink with some of them. I’ll post a full review of their gig next week, but safe to say they were fantastic as usual!

Sadly that was the point when my week took a bit of a nose dive. The next morning I woke up feeling slightly more hungover than I should have been and Saturday became a write off, by Sunday I was feeling no better, in fact by Sunday I was almost certain that I had the flu. Now I’m normally quite good at powering through illness, and this week that was definitely necessary. I had 2 full days of work planned and a trip to London for my embassy appointment at the end of the week, I could NOT be ill. Sadly though Ill I was, Monday was slept through and although I managed to get into work on Tuesday evening I drank a lot of tea, watched a photo shoot and did very little else before heading home and crawling straight back into bed.

Now any sensible person at this point would be cancelling their 6am coach for the next day and at the very least booking a later one, my embassy appointment wasn’t until Thursday. But no, little miss clever clogs here arrived home at 11pm Tuesday night and preceded to pack her bags crawl into bed and get up at 4.30am the next day, sneezing and ill. I waited for 40 minutes in the cold morning fog and eventually got on my megabus.

See, dedication right there, and I thankfully managed to get another few hours of sleep on the coach and woke up feeling ever so slightly better and ready to play bus games and explore London for a couple of days. I jammed as much as I could into those 2 days before getting a late night coach back Thursday night, and battling power cuts all day Friday to catch up on work. Subsequently when I woke up this morning with a shock remembering that It has been WAY over a week since I’d shown this here blog of mine even a little bit of love.

So that is where you’ll find me right now, curled up on the sofa with a cup of tea happy as a llama in a bow tie, getting my blog on. I promise to make up for this week’s lack of blogness with plenty of adventure recaps, thoughts, and review as well as the first in my little series of why I chose Camp America, because fyi I officially leave in just 96 days… So much excitement! 

And on that note, I’m going to leave you all in the capable hands of Miss Saturday, I hope she treats you well and Mr Sunday is good to you too. Have a gorgeous weekend my lovelies and catch you all on Monday.

p.s. I have definitely learnt my newbie blogger lesson... blogging is like cooking, always keep some spare posts chilling in the freezer just in case you don't have time to whip up something special... that is how cooking works right?