Today was more lowkey than previous ones. I dragged all my bags across the city again to the new hostel and set out to see the sights in the area somewhat northwest of downtown. There's a nice park up there and a hill with a great view of the skyline from the top. I then stopped by Camden Market, which is a cool area that has a ton of tiny shops packed into this old horse infrastructure along the locks of a canal that was used to transit goods from the Thames to the actual freight rail hub. Didn't buy anything but the whole area was interesting and the canal was nice to walk along. I took a nap in the afternoon since it's been a few rather late nights for me now, and when I emerged for dinner I got some nice Lebanese food just around the corner from the hostel. The complaints I had about the last hostel seem to be even further exaggerated here - I wasn't thrilled with the common areas of the last one, but this area has literally none. I suppose there's the bar itself on the ground floor, but there's no way to tell if someone in there is affiliated with the hostel so it doesn't work the way a proper common room would. Still no kitchen, either. I also complained about some of the people at the last hostel being weirdly antisocial, and the people here are even stranger. The guy in the bunk above me smells absolutely terrible and I suspect he's homeless. I also had a fascinating conversation with a woman in the bathroom, but I'll get to that later.

After dinner I went into town to check out Soho by night since I've heard it's an interesting area. I ran into this guy I'd seen in the hostel as I was going to the subway stop and, since he was doing essentially the same thing, we ended up walking around together for a while. He's Chinese, a proud Swiftie, and extremely gay. He's a nice guy but seeing as his favorite activities involve fashion shows, Taylor Swift, and gay bars I'm not sure we have very much in common. Soho somewhat reminded me of Time's Square with its crowded sidewalks, big electric billboards, and obvious tourist traps, but it was somewhat more charming and generally less gross feeling. I walked from there down to Trafalgar Square and Big Ben (um, ackchually, Big Ben is just the bell inside, it's really called the Victoria Tower). From here I could see the London Eye and Westminster Abbey, both of which are really striking. I know the Eye gets a lot of hate, and I'm not in any rush to actually pay for the experience of it, but I think it's a visually impressive and distinct part of the skyline.

Since Mitch from last night never followed up with me, I ended up heading back to the hostel and calling it a night slightly earlier than in previous nights. In the bathroom, however, I got roped into a truly fascinating conversation with an English woman who I overheard talking to this guy and explaining something about her video that was going to bankrupt Elon Musk. She refused to show me the video, but from what I could gather, it contests that the moon is fake and everything regarding human space travel is too. I asked all manner of questions to try and suss out more info on this but naturally she didn't have a lot of answers to my questions. Apparently, all the satellites I've ever seen are just drones designed to convince stupid people like me that satellites are real. The war in Ukraine is fake and NASA has worked with Elon Musk and Putin to kill people and destroy traditional internet infrastructure to drive a need for starlink's fake services. She wasn't able to explain the fact that I've used starlink before. The moon landing also couldn't have been broadcast without wires since wifi wasn't invented until the 90s. When I pointed out that I had watched TV over antenna plenty of times as a kid (as she certainly did as well, she was probably 40) and that wires clearly aren't necessary for the transmission of a TV broadcast, she dismissed that as ridiculous because the moon is (supposedly) so far away. She also asked how the people on the moon didn't burn up if they were so close to the sun, given that the sun is the largest planet. (Just for the record, I know most of this doesn't make any sense. That's not my failing to explain it correctly, her ideas are just completely incoherent.) My favorite bit of all this, though, is her plan to release the info. Apparently she used to be close with P Diddy - he supposedly was interested in her romantically - and was working with him to put this out there, but then all the allegations came out and things fell through. Her revised plan is to instead go on a podcast with either Andrew Tate or Kanye West and use their platform to take down Elon. The other guy present kept stressing that she needed to be careful, and she very somberly kept acknowledging that she was almost certainly going to be killed for putting the truth out there. I wished her well in her quest to take down Elon and called it a night.

Tomorrow I think I'm going to try and see the science/natural history museums. I also might cough up the 30 quid to see the shard or St Paul's cathedral, we'll see.