Tag: england

Time Trials

The weather has been pretty lame in London for the last couple months, or I guess you could say all year but mainly the last couple months as the expectations are higher, since we are officially in the 2nd month of summer. For some reason on the Tour de France weekend the sun decided to come out. According to the media there were over 1.5 million people in attendance and definitely everywhere you went there were loads of people.

It made for a great day with the sun, the huge crowds and the world’s most popular cycling event. Rach and I don’t really know anything about cycling but it was good to see it in the flesh. The Saturday started off with a parade of cars going around throwing free goodies into the crowds (bottles of water, food samples, tiny toy bikes etc) as well as people dancing to music on floating dance floors on top of vans. This was on just before the race started.

Continue reading “Tour de France in London”

Snow

We woke up today nice and early (and excited because we’re flying to Dubai tonight) and I looked out the window to see if it was raining and was amazed to see everything covered in snow! It looked very pretty, our first snowfall for this winter! All the cars and trees in our street were covered in snow, unfortunately the snow wasn’t still falling, it would have been great to see falling snow. More snow is forecast for tonight so hopefully that doesn’t delay our flight out of London.

More snow

Snow again

February is supposed to be the coldest month so no doubt there is still more snow to come.

Stay tuned for our update and photos from Dubai 🙂

Jo W decided it was time to see some London sights for the first time after being here for nearly 18 months 🙂

Jo and the guards

Buckinham Palace

We went and saw the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace. There were heaps of people around as clearly it’s a popular thing to do. It was the first time I’d seen the palace or the men with the red coats and big tall fluffy hats.

The great thing about London is every thing is really close. We walked from Buckingham Palace to the Westminster Church, to Big Ben, to the London Eye and then on to Trafalgar Square. It’s all so close to each other.

Big Ben is very cool. My bus goes passed it and the London eye each day and I still look at the big clock each time. It’s got a lot of detail and looks great in day, as the gold plated parts shine and it also looks great at night too with all the lights on.

Continue reading “A day out in London doing the touristy sights”

We’ve been in London now for 7 weeks but it feels like much longer than that! Looking for a place to live and a job was a bit annoying but now that we have both of those we have so much more to look forward too 🙂

I started a new job on Monday, working as a PA for 2 directors. Its an ongoing role so no more temping yay! I temped for the last 3 weeks at 2 different places and they were the most boring 3 weeks of my life!

Our Room

We finally moved out of the dodgy place we stayed at for the last 6 weeks! It was so annoying staying there in a room with no TV, I missed TV! As well as sometimes having to have cold showers or walk to the other side of the place to look for a shower that has hot water! A girl we were talking to in the kitchen one night said she had a mouse in her room and she went to complain at reception and they just laughed at her. It was such a quality place! We seemed to have such bad luck with houses a lot of places we tried the room had either been taken or they didn’t want couples as well as some places we looked at were just crap! We moved into our place on Thursday which is great, our room is massive and the house has recently been refurbished so its all nice and modern with a great kitchen and bathroom which you don’t see too often in houses in London. We are living with a South African couple, a Aussie guy and a Kiwi chic, they all seem really nice which is a bonus. So it was a great week overall getting a new job and moving into a new place 🙂 except now its starting to get cold and the days are grey and rainy, I’m not looking forward to winter at all!

We have booked a couple of trips, we’re going to New York in September and Barcelona in October. Adrian and Nat are also going to Copenhagen in September. We will hopefully do some weekend trips to places in the UK soon.

More photos of our place:
Kitchen
Bathroom
Court Yard
Ladder to Terrace
Terrace

London Eye

The day started out really sunny and nice but an hour before we were to leave it started raining. We were a bit annoyed because we thought the cruise would be pretty horrible in the rain but pretty much as we were walking to the boat it cleared up and a bit of sunshine came out.

The cruise along the river Thames was very cool, there was a guy on board telling us what was what and some history about the buildings, and he was a bit of a comedian too. He talked about this architect that has designed numerous buildings around London his first one being the Millennium Bridge. The queen apparently opened this bridge and while she was walking along it started to wobble so much so that hey had to close it for 18 months while they stabilised it.

Continue reading “Our day out in London (new photo album added)”

We arrived unwillingly in London after a great time in Portugal and of course great weather. We were in for a rude surprise to hear the weather in London would be 18 degrees, windy and cloudy. I guess we’d better get used to this, as there’s much more of this to come.

We spent our first three nights in a budget hotel, which was definitely budget. It looked like an old hospital or mental home. The price was expensive too.

We spent the first few days looking for a temporary shelter over our head for the next few weeks so we could just relax and get on with doing the important things e.g. looking for work and a more permanent place to stay without the worry of not having a place to stay.

Our Room

The View

We ended up being recommended to a place that specializes in people like us. People who are looking for a place to stay with no commitment and for short to medium lengths of stay.

I’m not going say how much the room is per week but let’s just say when it’s converted to Australian dollars that it’s probably more per week than any one you know paying rent in Australia and that would be for a house too 🙁 The room has what we need and will do for the short term. It has a great view out on to the major park in the area. It’s close by to a tube / metro stop. It’s close to the high street (the street with all the good shops) and last but not least it’s close to Johanna’s home.

Any way, I better get back to looking for work.

Ps. Keep checking back for the rest of Lisbon and Portugal.

Tube Stairs

Dinner last night for Jo’s birthday was good fun. We went to this unsual restaurant that served thai buffet with the usual stuff, prawns in stir fry, beef meals and what not. But the only catch is that it was all tofu shaped and coloured to look like real meat, even the prawns had the orange lines painted on to them so they’d look like real prawns. What the! Any way it was great to catch up with Adam, Jen and Kate. I also met this girl Belinda, who I knew of and after talking for a while we both know heaps of the same people and we just started drawing connections left right and centre. She also went to my high school too and knows friends from several different circles. Small world.

Any way, just quickly a few other things about london:

– You have to have a paid licence to watch TV!!!!!!!!! And you have to pay for it to watch free to air!!!! Did i mention paid? What the!!!! Check this out: http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/information/. Apparently they hunt you down too and knock on your door and demand payment. People pay on a monthly basis too. 25 pound a month. Rip off!

– The pciture above is of the largest tube escalator. The photo doesn’t do it justice as I’m already a fair way down, but these things are so steep. According to the injury prevention signs around the place, people get injured a fair bit. When I say steep I mean steep, like you can see down the top of the person in fron of you 🙂 Just kidding but I guess you know what I mean?

– Apparently getting cash out at the same time is only a new thing here and half of the staff don’t know how to do it…

Any way, today we’re looking for secure storage to go store all our stuff in while we go for our big journey.

Ness wanted to know what we ate for dinner on our first night, well we went to a pub, Jo warned us of the some times lame standard of pub food. I ordered a chicken breast with bacon on top with melted cheese, chips and salad. It sounded good. Well what came out was different it had bbq sauce squirted all over the top like as if they had 3 year olds adding the sauce. The salad (if you could call it that) had the basics but nothing to write home about. The chips looked like they had been cooked for an hour 🙂 Overall the meal didn’t look pretty 2 out of 10 for presentation but it got a 7 out of 10 for overall taste so I guess you can’t complain. Rach had a rissotto which she said was great.

Any way gotta run. It’s great seeing the comments. Keep them coming. Nadia, kindly informed me that the castle is London Tower. I also put the photo up as well.

Rach & Jo

Adrian & Rach

Today we caught up for lunch with Jo and sat right next to the river Thames where we could see the gherkin building that Jo had talked about as well as the apparently famous Tower bridge and some castle and the city hall.

A few quick points about London so far:

-At an early glance, things here don’t seem that expensive even after conversion from pounds to dollars. We went to an equivalent of Rebel sports where brand name clothes and shoes were cheap as compared to Australia.

Tower of London

Food prices don’t seem that bad either, sometimes the same or a little bit more, nothing that I would call “expensive”. No doubt we’ll see the expensive side before too long.

– There one dollar coins are the same size as our two dollar coins. I first thought I’d been given back extra change i.e. 2 x 2 pound coins but sadly it was only 2 x 1 pound coins.

Tower Bridge

City Hall

– The car selections here are so much better here than back home. Lots of different brands, versions, diesels and station wagons that we don’t have home. Holdens are called Vauxhauls here too.
– The police drive BMWs not Holdens or Fords.
– It took us a while to see our first traditional style phone booth 🙂

Later tonight we’re going out for Jo’s birthday dinner. It’ll be good cause Rach and I will catch up with all of our other friends here in London.

Ps. The blog time is now in London time.

We touched down in Heathrow airport at close to 6am and it was fresh 5 degrees outside. Customs was easy as, I thought it would be harder along with a few more grueling questions. Signage around the place was useful and in no time at all we were on the underground tube. It felt like it was the afternoon because we’d been up for 3 or so hours but really it was 7 am and London was all going to work and school. The closer we got to central London the more packed the tube got. It was busy enough that at some stops people couldn’t get on to the train. We thought we were going to have a hard time getting off the train with our already difficult to carry luggage (I had to carry Rach’s big back pack as she was struggling with it). Teri met us at the station and we went back to her place from there.

The tube is easy as to use. There are helpful maps and signs every where in the stations and on the trains. I hope that we pick a place to live that is close to the tube as it’s so easy to get to places on it. Rach and I have been back and forth and via different routes a fair bit so far with no probs. I read it once before and totally agree, the tube map is something you will become very familiar with. Being on the tube makes you feel like you’re in Sydney because the maps of the tub network look like the same maps of the Sydney rail network. As well as London being very multicultural just like Sydney, you’d never know you were in London just by looking at the crowd.

We went to our 1st contact orientation day. We caught the tub in to some where and grabbed some lunch from Subway. Subway here don’t have chicken fillet. What is going on? At our orientation, they spoke to us and about 30 other people all from home, NZ or South Africa. At the session we signed up for our bank account and got our UK sim card and a phone call card.

Later in the day we caught up with Jo. After to speaking to her for a little while it felt like we’d seen her just last week, even though it was really almost a year.