Bristol to London, with Oxford in the middle

Bristol is fantastic.

Well what i saw of it is anyway. We stayed with Kat in an area of town called Stokes Croft and spent most of the time walking around the area or sitting and chatting with people in the house. I really liked the area. There is a small group trying to build a community through different initiatives and the one that i found most interesting was through the use of graffiti. They have a website that would be good to check out. There is a very good bit at the bottom where they have listed places to be painted. Here’s the page: http://www.prsc.org.uk/

Possibly my favourite part of it was a tunnel which they had painted white in the hope that it would be painted by graffiti artists. it was and it looks great.

Hitching out of Bristol was easy enough and we got to Oxford by early afternoon with little problems. We walked to Ians place and put our bags down, had tea and a pee. After a chat we head for food in a vegan pub which actually has really good food and a pretty good selection. Even i ate stuff there.

the next day we went walking around all the colleges of the university and i was aazed by the scale of one of them. We  went through an archway into a small quad and then suddenly we are in a woods walking through meadows by a creek and we have the world behind us. It is a sanctuary and i can understand why people do so well there. they have time and space to reflect on everything. It was the setting for many a great story such as alice in wonderland and harry potter and you can instantly understand why.

In the morning when we were to hitch to London it was raining and I made a rational argument for why we should get the bus. so we did.  a short hour later, with more reading of mills and boon, and we arrived in London. We were to stay in London with Aisling and Ciara but we couldn’t go to theirs til later so we wandered around in the general direction of the Critical Mass which was starting by the river.

The rest of my time in London has morphed into one very long day and as such I don’t know which day things actually happened but in no general order we watched the final of the European Championships in Camden with a Brazilian guy, we visited the gardening museum which happened to be closed on Mondays, we found a tunnel by Waterloo covered in graffiti done by Banksy and other famous people I have never heard of, went for a walk across the whole of London at night, waved at strangers while sitting by the road at night, finished the mills and boon book, sat on a bench in Clapham Common a few times and met Bill and few other 16y/o looking guys on MDMA looking for a hug. We gave them one. I enjoyed London this time. Other times i have felt like an ant but this time I met some people and wasn’t over awed by the size of the place.

The final night in London was a strange one as I knew that I was about to lose my constant travel companion who had been with me for the past month. It was strange. We had grown close and I didn’t know how i would cope with the sudden loss of a part of me. That night we played scrabble, chatted, drank tea, went for a walk
and packed before we fell asleep for a couple hours each. in the morning we had to leave at 6 to each get our buses to where we were going. Me back to Aberdeen and she onto France and beyond. For some reason there was an onion cutting stall just beside where we were sitting. Who would put it there? It made no sense at all but that is how it was and we parted ways with a hug and the knowledge we would one day cross paths again.

I boarded my bus and sat in anticipation for the long journey home (on my own).