My New House

This is my building. I live above a shoe repair shop (as you can see) and it has already proven handy. I took a pair of boots down to get the heel fixed and I got a discount. Robert and I are tight like that.


Here is my “flat”. It’s more of a glorified dorm room. It’s one room with, basically, two closets that have been converted into a bathroom and a kitchen. This is a shot from the front door – that far door you see is the kitchen.


Speaking of kitchen, isn’t it cute? In this context, "cute" and "tiny" are interchangeable. Interesting tidbit, that oven doesn’t actually have any numbers on the temperature dial. Cooking is a guess and check process for me these days. So far, it hasn’t been a problem. I have been setting it in the middle and just watching what I have in there. I figure “middle” must be somewhere around 350f and, really, isn’t everything cooked at 350f anyway?

Here are a couple of shots of my “living room”. That first one is back towards the front door and the second one nicely shows off my fun/sentimental picture collage. Please ignore the pile of trash waiting to go out...



This shows you my “bedroom”. Like I said, glorified dorm room with a lofted bed and all. That door behind my dry rack (today was laundry day and Britain doesn’t believe in dryers) is my bathroom.
You don’t really need to see a picture of it, but you might like to know it was made for a midget. I don’t know if that is true, but I think it could be. It does have a full size bathtub, which is nice, but the “shower” is just some y-shaped tubing attached to the bath taps with a showerhead shape on one end. I can’t actually stand in my shower – it’s about 4 inches too short for that. Bathing is awkward, to say the least. Also, my toilet makes an atrocious sound every time I flush it. My landlord is supposed to be in next week to fix it. But for the time being, I wake up the entire building every time I pee. So that’s good.
To continue the midget theme, my lofted bed (which is very comfortable) doesn’t have quite enough clearance for me to sit up in bed. It’s about 2 inches shy of an acceptable height. I hit my head a lot the first couple of days, but I have gotten use to it now. Yesterday morning I sat up to check the time and automatically dipped my head to one side - I am a quick learner.

Here are some photos of the neighborhood. I live on the high street - just a 5 minute walk from the Camden Locks and the Camden Market Place. It’s a really neat area and apparently very trendy which means I totally fit in, because we all know how trendy I am...




The High Street (above)
The Locks (Above)

I went a spent several hours at the market today. It’s a really interesting place. It’s an old stable/horse hospital that has been converted into a bunch of independently owned stalls. You get a little bit of everything in there: proper antiques, jewelry, clothes from cute to Goth, shoes galore, nick knacks form all over the world – and all very reasonable priced. The only down side is that the whole place smells of food an incense which means, depending on the direction of the wind, it either makes me hungry or nauseous. I picked up a few pieces from local artists today. Below are my favorite two.

This is by a guy named Bansky. You can google him and see more stuff, which I strongly recommend. He did a whole series (which this one comes from) where he went around stenciling the sides of buildings around town. He’s also done a lot of sketches and traditional canvas work. It’s all pretty cool – I think you can all tell why I like this one. NHR, represent.


And this I got from a “local” who is actually from Dallas. He had a stall in the market full of crazy bunny art (Bunnies riding rockets, Indian Jones Bunnies, Bunnies at War) as well as a couple of other cool series – urban fairies, romantic sketches, etc. He had a couple of different distinct styles too, which I thought was neat. It’s always interesting to see two paintings that have so little in common it would be hard to guess they were by the same guy. This one is called “Injection”. It might be my new favorite thing.