Standard of Living

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Walk on, Walk on, with hope in your heart, and you'll never walk alone.....
YOU'LL NEVER WALK ALONE.....

Afternoon all,

I know the above won't mean much to you unless you follow the soccer, but Liverpool just won the Champions League trophy for the first time in 21 years, made even the more amazing because we have been so woeful for at least the past 15 years. We love you Rafael Benitez and Steven Gerrard! Ok, enough of that....

If anything, travelling is an interesting lesson in economics and the term 'standard of living'. Basically, the standard of living means 'how expensive is it to survive here?'

A case in point, I've ventured into Chinatown again to balance my diet. An english diet of greasy sandwiches (liberal amounts of butter and mayo), greasy fish and chips and pies, and lack of green vegetables has left me feeling a little festy and having a bit of a clogged sore throat. On my arrival in Chinatown, I've come to a little restaurant hoping to find something a bit more yang (soothing), to counter all the ying (greasy heaty food) I've had recently. Basically, my yang meal consists of wonton noodles, and a pot of chinese tea. I'd never thought I'd appreciate Chinese tea so much, the heat and anti-oxidants basically make it the draino I needed for all the rubbish I'd been eating lately.

But back to the standard of living exercise. My measure of standard of living requires a generic item that can be purchased in any country you wish to measure for. In this case, it's a bowl of wonton noodles. This is how high the standard of living in england is in comparison to other places I've been to:
Hong Kong - HK$15-$25 (~A$3-5)
Melbourne - A$6.00-7.50
London - 5 Pound (~A$12.50) And it wasn't that good either!!


I guess this trip has also been to help discover or confirm what's important in life, and i think connection is really important. Travelling is great, and is massive amounts of fun because of the different places and amazing experiences you encounter. But because travelling by its very nature is such a transient state, you don't have an opportunity to really develop strong connections or roots with any place or any one. What happens is you get a whole heap of single serving friends. Your connection basically lasts for the amount of time you spend on that particular event that you do together. It's good and bad, some people you don't want to bother spending more time with you won't need to, but others that you connect with that you wish to spend more time with float away because of circumstance (usually known as 'I'm going away/home tomorrow').

And something to keep in mind when visiting London, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO NAVIGATE ON THE FLY IN CENTRAL LONDON!! My brother and I thought it would be a nice idea to rent a car for the weekend to go see the country. On returning to London we had to find our way back to the depot at Waterloo in the dark. Now usually, I'd like to think I'm a pretty good navigator and have a reasonably good sense of direction. However, all your nous and prowess pretty much flies out the window when you have to try and navigate with a map that doesn't tell you which roads are one way, and it's exacerbated by the fact it isn't all nice and organised like in Melbourne. This results in lots of cursing and conversations like this:
'You've got to try turn right down the next one.'
'I can't. It's no enty.'
'What about the next one?'
'Nope not this one either.'
'Oh look over there it's Big Ben.'
'So where are we?'
'We're trying to turn right so we can get to westminster bridge. Go follow that taxi, cabbies know which roads are ok to go down.'
'He's going left.'
'^$%^& &%'
'No pressure, but the fuel light just started flashing.'
'f &(^ & brilliant. I told you we needed more than 5 pounds worth of fuel.'
'Well if you knew which road to turn right down it wouldn't have been an issue.'
'Yeah next time you try navigating with a map with no 'one ways' on it....'

You get the idea.

I'm going on tour tomorrow, which means I don't know how sober (sleepy drunk) or how often I can find a pc to sit down in front of to say hello. I'll be touring round France, Spain and Portugal so will attempt to correspond somewhere along the line.

Take care of each other.

miss you all,
Ben

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