notes on london

january 2026

Friendly dog in Greenwich Park

On the city

• Things are alive. In the West End you see musical billboards everywhere, advertising anything from a bear in a marmalade-stained red bucket hat to the classic Agatha Christie’s Mousetrap (of ‘oldest running play in the world’ fame). Pub culture is bustling, Spoons is an institution. Every night is busy. Unique scenes littered throughout; Reference Point is a bookstore + bar which hosts Wednesday chess nights, where you meet people trying to produce music videos, transcend the mind through buddhism, or get into finance.

• Things are old. Everything has history. On any day, a walk through the city feels like a walk through a museum of the past. Plaques, statues, remnants of famous individuals who’ve blessed a location with their existence. This is perhaps especially true for Oxford and Cambridge, where they draw their social status from. Museums, which are free, hold an incredible selection of relics from a colonial past. Running along the Thames gives you a nice breath in of the city’s age.

• Things are expensive. Reflective of many high cost cities, there is an undercurrent of tension. Everyone complains about the economy. Locals live on the city edges; the centre is for the wealthy. An Aussie feels like they’re paying double for everything. Meal deals from Sainsbury’s is how one survives. Restaurants are nice and diverse, but my narrow selection leaves nothing to write home about.

On people

• People are closed initially, but open up with a smile and friendly conversation. Sometimes, walking through the city people look like they’d strangle you if you gave them a glance. Then, you do something polite, they warmly smile, and apologise in a British way. I’ve felt like I’ve superficially met more people at the tails of a distribution of niceness compared to Sydney; more lovely politeness, more abrupt rudeness.

• Making online friends is a great way to find like-minded people. Turns out, the internet enables you to conduct a complex search query across everyone online, to find someone who has your same quirks tempered with their own essence. M was someone like this - we share the same fervor and exploding thoughts around psychiatry, same explorations in computational methods and startup-world, similar values and directions in life. He is a far better writer and thinker than I; but there felt to be an unspoken appreciation for each others’ unbridled passions.

• Intellectual connection is rare and should be cherished. You know you have a good research supervisor when the content you read in your spare time is the same as what they read. I would send a new mech interp paper from Anthropic, and be met with a podcast from Neel Nanda. I’ve appreciated the opportunities the team gave me immensely, and it’s shown me what’s worth striving for when it comes to intellectual collaborators.

• Those passing through are looking for connection. The hostel I stayed at was the cheapest I could find. In it, you find people from every walk of life - on short working visas to experience a new country, passing through amidst a 20s adventure, or simply international/domestic students looking for a reasonable place to stay. The more you open, the more you receive; I opened with psychiatry, and I received vulnerable stories on family, relationships, life.

On life

• Coming into a city with a purpose gives a different lens. I had a project and goal; to do research and interview people on the mental health risks of LLMs, and to learn if I wanted to ever live in London for career-related reasons. I think this angle kept me both more busy and more interested in everything; I was truly feeling the city out, and trying things to see if I wouldn’t mind living here. My current conclusion: I prefer the Sydney environment, but London undoubtedly has more opportunities in the spaces I’m interested in.

• Being in mythical places is both disillusioning and empowering. Irregardless of one’s ability to ignore social status and norms, it’s difficult to not be at least somewhat astounded to be around the same environment of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis in Oxford, or Newton and Darwin in Cambridge. It makes you feel you like you were in the room where it happened, in the same way seeing Freud’s Berggasse 19 did. But being in the environment makes you think: Huh, that’s it. These institutions are shrouded in mysticism, but being physically present helps you see the finer realities. There are the same beauracracies, same banalities, same frustrations as everywhere else; and similarly, the same talent, same intelligence, and same energy as I’ve seen amongst other places. But talking with my friends in these universities, I could see how these institutions increased their ambitions, and cultivated meaningful intellectual environments. There is still some magic here, but I believe it can be replicated.

• Being social overseas makes you realise how much more you could do back home. A final note which I’ve discussed amongst friends; there’s something happening every night. Since one has the added extroversion of temporariness, an absence of excuses related to commute times, and the additional drive of loneliness, the traveller is incentivised to do as many things as possible. Some of it was tiring, but much of it was fun - leading to the idea that we should have more regular friendly hostings in Sydney.

January passed by like it was nothing. I’ve now left London for Shanghai, feeling inspired by the conversations and opportunities the city has brought.