A Female Australian new to London and what can happen on a drunken night out

Enjoying a few vodka and red bulls, as was the popular drink in London amongst other backpackers, I discovered this rugged looking fellow Australian musician actually, shock! Horror! Had a few similarities to this scared young Australian lass, looking for love in all the wrong places.

What a cliché. Soon, the vodka and red bull mixes turned into straight vodka shots, and the evening got very messy indeed. The hostel we were all staying at, and drinking at, was hosting a karaoke night, and the morning after, I had faint memories of performing ‘Wake me up before you go-go.' I vowed there and then to stop listening to Wham!

One thing led to another with this fellow traveller, and stumbling back to his shared hostel room, we exchanged drunken kisses along the sparse, starkly lit hallways, dodging other similarly inebriated travellers along the way. His dorm room had close to 10 beds, with most inhabitants tucked up into bed like all good globetrotters should be at that time of night. Waking up, to a strangers arms wrapped around me was a bit of a shock, but what was worse was the already evident hangover.

The course of the next few days followed suit, us drinking all night and staggering back to one of our dorm rooms at all hours of the night, then enjoying a leisurely sleep-in followed by fish and chips down the road at a wonderfully English greasy spoon.

Everything was perfect, up until one night, when the handsome, dark stranger who'd been sharing my bed, suddenly announced his wallet had been stolen whilst he was showering in the shared bathrooms. From his jeans pocket, hanging on a hook in his cubicle! I was dumbfounded, asking questions, thoughts circulating around my head faster than a golden retriever running to water.

Days passed by, as did pound sterling notes from my fingers, whilst we looked for jobs. My by-then official boyfriend constantly ringing banks in Australia , emailing his parents, begging for them to send money over. I never did hear the excuse as to why his parents wouldn't send money to him, why he couldn't borrow money off anyone else, why I had to lend him money to catch trains to job interviews, or so I thought. What a fool I was, why could I not see he was taking me for a ride, milking my naivety and generosity for all its worth, only to have packed all his gear up and left by the time I returned to the hostel from a job interview.

Furious, shocked, but most of all hurt, I rushed around asking other customers at the hostel, workers, people on the street, if they'd seen a handsome Australian man carrying a guitar, a man who had not only stolen my money and my trust, but stolen my heart along the way.

Lucky I learnt my lesson early on in my adventure overseas, now I'm a hardened Aussie ex-pat pounding the streets of London looking for yet another rugged musician traveller. But this time, I have many experiences under my belt in preparation for the rough road ahead.