Life in London: update

Long time no see! My last blogpost was about my first week here and right now I have already been here for 2 months (what?).Time is going really fast and I have been spending my time meeting people and getting used to everything. I really feel at home now. Last week the kids went back to school which means that I now have some free time during the day. The last couple of weeks they had summer holidays which meant that they sometimes had clubs and other weeks I had to be with them for 3 days during the week. I am really happy that I already was here with the summer holidays because it  gave me some time to get to know them but I am also happy that they went back to school again. 

I did so much the last couple of weeks. I have seen so many things, spent so much money on my oyster card, met so many new people and I saw my family again. For now I am just going to tell you about the past week(s).

 Before the kids went to school again the family went to Cornwall for about a week and that's why my brother and his girlfriend had the opportunity to visit me. It was really good to see them again and I am really happy that they got to see some of London. We did quite a couple of things and one thing I was really excited about was eating "poffertjes" at Brick Lane haha. Sometimes you just got to have something Dutch! 

My mom was actually also supposed to visit me that week but my dad got sick so she wasn't able to travel to London. I haven't really been homesick since I got here but that situation made me want to see my parents again. So about 2 weeks ago when my brother and his girlfriend were flying back, I decided to go with them. 

I arrived on wednesday and my flight back to the UK was on sunday. During my time in the Netherlands I met up with a couple of my friends (Fleur, Sofie, Maud, Ragna and Bram, and I saw some other friends for about 10 minutes haha). Of course I also saw my parents which was great. On Sunday I had to say goodbye again. This goodbye was a lot easier than last time, haha. 

I got back around lunch time on Sunday and I was so tired that I didn't do anything all day except unpacking. On Monday I had to work but we didn't really do anything special. On Tuesday me and the kids spent about 5 hours in Victoria Park. There is this big playground in Victoria Park where they have slides and loads of other things like a waterpark. It reminded me of the waterpark in Washington DC! When we were walking back we saw a helicopter. 

We were allowed to stand really close to it while it took off (which made the kids really excited) . My hostmom told me that it's some kind of training and that they use this park because there are not a lot of parks that have a field that is big enough to land on.

On Wednesday the kids went back to school. On thursday I went to the city with a Dutch au pair. We went to Oxford Street and we had a coffee. After that one of my other friends Salla joined us. I had some tea with her and after that I had pick up the kids. On friday I suddenly had a lot of free time so I went to see Claudia (one of my Dutch friends) in Chiswick.

Basically we just walked around Chiswick most of the afternoon. I had to be back in the evening for some babysitting. 

On saturday I went to Alfie's singing. Alfie is (how suprising) a big British YouTuber who "wrote" a book called the pointless book. He had a signing in the waterstones at Piccadilly and I thought it would be fun to try to meet him: I got up around 7 to be there around 9. We waited in line for about 4,5 hours until we finally got to meet him. Alfie said that about 5,000 people showed up and that he signed about 1,000 books. I'm not sure about the 5,000 girls but it was way too busy to take pictures with him so I took 2 polaroid pictures.

After that we stayed on oxford street for a little bit and we met up with some other Dutch au pairs. We wanted to have dinner together so we went to Nando's (yum, chicken!)

On Sunday I tried to sleep a lot because I was so tired from the days before that. I ended up going to a really big au pair meeting with about 300+ au pairs. It was nice meeting some new au pairs but because I already was with a group we mostly talked Dutch. We had dinner at the spaghetti house at Leicester square and we ended up in a comedy club at a 1£ comedy night. It was suprisingly really good and we really enjoyed the show (with a big pint of beer, am I English yet?).