Big Black Smoke

'Current mission: not to die in a London gutter'. I put that on my Couch Surfing profile. Does it sound too desperate? Yes? That's because I am.
Owing to an unfortunate chain of events, which I probably should have seen coming, which I will not relate here - they involved lots of eye-rubbing, teeth-gritting, near-phone-smashing and heavy-calm-down-sighing - I found myself on Saturday nearly literally penniless in the sprawling oversized bacterial colony that is London. Thankfully I had money on my cellphone, the number of my mother's godmother and her family, and a day travelcard courtesy of a gentleman from (I think) Bulgaria. So I went to throw myself on the mercy of a family I had never met. It's times like these that you're glad that New Zealand still has some ties to the 'motherland'.
Audrey (mum's godmum, very old friend of Granny's) and her daughter Belinda, and her daughter Venetia, have been incredibly good to me. I'm still at their house, but anxious to move on and not impinge any further.
Miscellaneous trivia:
- I have been growing a wisdom tooth for the last few weeks, and recently it has started to feel rather intrusive in my already crowded jaw.
- I went to Camden Town today, and some supernatural being must have heard of my moneyless state, because I got a free haircut from a student hairdresser.
- The people in the hair place all spoke Spanish.
- In the first house/hostel I was in, I met a Canadian who'd spent the last 10 years in Barcelona, a Romanian ex-boxer, several Bulgarians, a Lithuanian, an Estonian, a man from Bangladesh whose family was paying for him to study in the UK, and several French guys who let me have some of their crepes with Nutella.

Tomorrow, everything should work out. My money should emerge from the depths of cyberspace, thereby eliminating the most pressing problem. And after that, the city will be mine.