It's day three here and we're already feeling like we don't have enough time here. We've already managed to pack a fair bit of activity into the last couple of days and there's still plenty left to do.

On Friday afternoon we stumbled out of here to the pub still barely alive after four hours of sleep in 40 hours and went to the pub where I tried my first warm pint of English beer (not really a fan although it's beginning to grow on me). We were sitting like zombies calculating the earliest we could get away with going to bed when George messaged Cristy to see if she wanted to catch up sometime and she said 'I'll be there in 45 minutes' and the quiet afternoon turned into a big afternoon and night of drinking Magner's cider and beer and talking. At 9.30 pm we realised we had probably missed our free dinner at the hostel, so we drank a bit more, had a kebab (in the doorway of the restaurant to avoid the rain and a 50p surcharge) and then walked back home in the rain - the quinessential English experience.

You'd think after our lack of sleep that we would have had no trouble at all sleeping for 12 hours straight, but not so - I woke up at about 3 am and lay there stressing about if we were ever going to see our bags again. That said, I also had a dream that we got our luggage at 1 the next day, which pretty much came to pass.)

We started the day by walking to the Camden markets (in the rain), which were really cool. We went for a walk along a canal for a while, looked through the markets and drooled over all the food stalls until we eventually succumbed to an enormous serve of West African curries, which absolutely rocked.

After that we walked back to the hostel, tried to sort out what was going on with our luggage, then got the tube to the Spitalfields Markets. These would also have been really cool if we weren't completely marketed out after the morning. So, not knowing what else to do, we went to the pub. We found this pub that proudly proclaimed it was London's first brewery and had been brewing beer since 1669, so being understandably excited about the prospect of trying their beer, we rushed in only to discover that they did not sell any of their beer, and in fact did not brew beer at all and had almost entirely European beers on tap.

Later on we met up with Amy and Alex and my cousin Sarah and her partner Quentin at a bar that had 2 for 1 cocktails. After a few of these we went to Brick Lane (a strip of entirely Indian restaurants where the proprieters stand out the front and try to entice you inside with their great deals, kind of like Lygon Street). The first person who grabbed us offered us a free round of drinks with our dinner, and Sarah said 'We want a free round of beers for all of us, a free bottle of white and a free bottle of red'. The guy didn't seem to know how to argue this so we enjoyed a rowdy dinner of great Indian and crap wine. We were the first to get there and the last to leave and I'm sure they probably thought we weren't worth the sale.

We were completely buggered after this and hopped on the tube for a quick ride home, only to discover that we were going in the wrong direction, so we got off and changed to what we thought was the right one, but was in fact another one going in the same direction, so we got off again and finally managed to get on the right one. (The system here is really not that confusing, we're just idiots)

Today our plans are to go into the centre of London and actually do the tourist thing.

So far we've found that most of the things people have told us about London have not been the case for us. For example:

• Everything is expensive: we've found most things are around the same price (yes, after the conversion). For instance, most pubs have 2 pound pints, which is far cheaper than a good beer of that size in Adelaide.
• The food is crap: everything we've had so far has been really good (although admittedly we haven't had any traditional English food other than a bowl of chips in a pub, which were indeed crap).
• Everyone is rude: other than a strange style of customer service which entails no small talk, hello or goodbye or even telling you how much something is, everyone has been really friendly.

One thing that is true is the weather - it's been cold and raining every day.

So yeah, we like it here.