Creative kids building a Picasso masterpiece in Hyde Park

I’ve come to enjoy London and its peculiarities. It is an amazingly massive city with much to offer-it has every option available for everyone who seeks it. If you’re a struggling musician, you’ll have no qualms looking up pubs that organizes open mic sessions so that you’ll have 5 minutes of spotlight which could lead to a big break or you could be a Bulgarian musician, hoping to earn that scholarship from Goldsmith’s college while working two jobs to support your tuition fees. Everyone has a story.

Sometimes, I see the patrons of LEON, the café that I work in, and I wonder about their backgrounds, the relationship they have with the ones dining with them (often a clashing difference) and their stories. Their foreign tongues and strange credit cards tell me that are not British-so what are they doing in London? Are they like me, who couldn’t get a working holiday visa for anywhere else but for the UK? Do they harbour dreams to make it big in London? Did they think it’s a city paved in gold, a land of freedom, hope and opportunities? Are they merely on their vacation?

Anyway, I spoke to Ulpu the other day-what brought her to London. It was Muse, apparently. Yes, the band. Ulpu’s a very quiet girl from Finland but she dresses in the loudest and most garish colours. Sometimes she turns up at work in hot pink stockings, sometimes a lime green ones. Her crazy, unruly dyed bright orange is held back by a neon blue headband- a stark difference against her pale, creamy skin. When she was in high school, it wasn’t that good for her. She was a social outcast and she didn’t enjoy mixing with her mainstream classmates. She doesn’t drink and she doesn’t enjoy being with pissed people. And then she got interested in Muse. She enjoyed their music so much that she started stalking the virtual world for any information about them. And in time, as she became a permanent resident in some forums, she made some good friends who loved Muse just as much.

And then they decided to move to London, where they feel that their passion and enthusiasm are more accepted. They’re free to love and worship who they want. Nobody think they’re crazy. In fact, London loves those who are a wee bit kooky.

Ulpu has attended at least six Muse’s concerts-all over Europe. She remembered one of the most significant moments was when her friends and her, held a banner that read, “We wouldn’t have met if not for you”…and as she said that to me, her eyes teared in nostalgia.

She has no ideas for the future but at the moment, she’s content being in London. “People here don’t judge you as much,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll ever be going back to Finland.”