A month of London life

I've only been in London for a month, and I can already see the advantages of living here.

So, I live near here (forgive me for not posting my address).  The first thing you'll notice is that there is much more green around me than one might expect living so close to London.  I've been taking advantage of that.  The parks are good for running, which brings me to my first advantage.

Running
I really do like running, and London is nice and flat.  It's not always fun running along city sidewalks, but it's certainly not boring.  Luckily, I live near enough to Gunnersbury park to run around there a lot.  I can make a 5 mile loop starting and stopping at my home and circling the park.  This, of course, means that I've gotten up to 5 miles running again, which is nice.  I'd like to keep progressing, and as I do I will find more loops.  There is a long waterfront path along the Thames that can offer pretty scenery and longer mileage.  The one downside is that I have to ride my bike a couple miles down to Kew to start the run, and of course I then have to bike home.  That brings me to my next advantage.

Biking
Riding a bike has never been a past time for me.  I don't bike for the joy of it, but I do enjoy the convenience of it if I can actually bike somewhere.  I bought a bike while I lived in Ely, but mostly because I was regularly seeing a personal trainer in Cambridge that was a couple miles from the train station.  I used my bike for shopping at Tesco, getting to my photography group shoots, and the training.  That was it.  It had very specific uses.  Now, I am biking everyday.  There is plenty within walking distance, but London just keeps going, so there's always something just a little farther down the road.  I can make it to the corner store and back in 15 minutes by foot, but I can make it there and back in 5 minutes by bike, so why not?  It's pretty flat here, so I can explore most efficiently by bike.  I made it down to Big Ben in less than an hour.  I have a cinema and a gym less than 10 minutes away.  I have a shopping center about the same distance in the other direction.  I have a mall about 20 minutes away.  If I really need to go somewhere farther than that, I take the tube.

I just kept riding east until I looked up and saw Big Ben.  This particular shot has Big Ben, the London Eye, a double decker bus, and a black cab.  This is as London as it gets.

Gym

I'm not normally a fan of gyms.  They're expensive, they necessitate a long term commitment financially even though my exercise routine never stays that long, and they make me self conscious.  The one thing that I do need consistently is a treadmill, as running in crappy weather or in the dark is not fun.  As it happens, I found a gym just up the road that works for me.  It's called Pure Gym.  It's only 16 pound per month, has no contracts, and allows me to check online to see just how many people are there at the moment.  I am giving it a shot.  It's convenient, and that gives it a much better chance of lasting in my plans.

Entertainment

Obviously, London has more than a few entertainment options.  I've seen Julius Caesar at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, a stand up comedian named Anthony Jeselnik (a Pittsburgh native, as it happens), and some live music at a couple blues bars.  To find more social things, I have been a fan of meetup.com for a while.  In London, it's more useful than it's ever been.  There are all kinds of groups around me, and I've tried out a few already, mostly to play some tennis and volleyball.  So, between running, biking, tennis, volleyball, and the gym, I have been more active than at anytime in the past few years.  London has made it easy.  My laziest methods of entertainment are just as easy because of my awesomely fast fiber optic internet.  Since I am no longer on a school intranet, I can use the Chrome extension that allows me to get USA content I otherwise couldn't (Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, Pandora, USA Netflix with all my Star Trek).  I also discovered that MLB.tv is only $40 for the rest of the year, and I have the time to spare at the moment.  I watched every Pirates game this past week, and it was awesome.  I hadn't done that in years.  It's a good time to watch the Pirates, too.  

General Convenience

There are so many little things I just like.  I like having food choices again.  I've had Mexican food for the first time since leaving the States.  I have a 24 hour convenience store at the end of the block, with Dominos right next door.  My munchies have already necessitated taking full advantage of that.  Even my gym is 24 hours, though I don't normally get the urge to lift weights at 2 am.  But I could! I am an easy walk from several tube stations giving me access to three underground lines (Piccadilly, District, and Central) and the Overground.  I'm only 30 minutes from Heathrow on the underground, which came in very handy for my trip to Spain.  There are cinemas nearby.  There are multiple microbreweries.  A doctor's office is easily walkable.  I really just like having a convenient life, even if just for a little while.  

And it's only been a month.

My phone's affect on my traveling

I have generally accepted that as long as I have a good map that I know how to read I am never lost.  I still keep a print map with me when visiting a new city if possible, and Streetwise Maps are the best ones for me, but Google maps on my iPhone makes that less and less necessary.  I save all the important locations in town, look up new ones as I necessary (sometimes I just need pizza), and wander aimlessly without ever being lost.  It costs a little to use the data, but if I'd rather not pay that I can just download the maps of the cities before I leave or whenever I find wifi.  The biggest worry is that the battery might run out. I carry my charger everywhere and recharge whenever I can, which is admittedly a bit of a nuisance.  It also shows that my explorations are usually of cities.  However, I hiked all around the Lake District and along Hadrian's Wall using the phone's map to show me where I was.  I got myself a backup battery so I could venture longer and farther.  I make sure to have a print map, but it's become a backup and a planning tool.

During this past trip to Spain, I used Google maps to find food, plan walking routes, find appropriate buses to get me to airports, and even check out street views so I'd know what to look for when I got to the hostel.  Apart from using Google Maps, I also used my phone to check hotel prices when I considered rebooking, check hostel facilities, take pictures, hold boarding passes (only Ryanair didn't allow this), read up on the history illuminated in museums I visited, check opening hours and costs of said museums, and check wikivoyage for more suggestions of places to visit.  Plenty of travelers still swear by tour books and whatnot, and they'd probably call me lazy for relying on my phone so much.  They might be right, but I love the fact that I have the option to be lazy.  It's one reason I can relax so much when I'm traveling, so long as I stay paranoid about keeping an eye on my phone.  Losing that thing would pose an incredible challenge. 

One random advantage I learned about using my phone came when I lost my glasses while hiking in Wales.  I couldn't read a thing, but thankfully I could enlarge the text without scrounging around for a magnifying glass.