First UK Drive

Rented a car today to take the dogs out to a kennel for our Italy trip.

I did great pulling out of the Budget rental car park and managed to turn left into the correct lane. Things were going fantastically for 200 yards until I ran into a bus. Damn Brits driving on the wrong side.

Fortunately I just sorta clipped it and took off the passenger side mirror. Took me pretty much all day of driving to get used to the whole bulk of the car being off the left, not the right like I'm used to...

Not sure if I'll be driving much...good thing we got the extra insurance...

(seriously...I ran into a bus.)

Some of Jamie's Photos from London

Some pics from our first month in London...and a London Walk we did yesterday on our first Bank Holiday Monday in the UK.

We went to Peak District, 2 hours north of London on the train. We started in a small village called Eyam, famous for quarantining itself when the plague broke out there in 1665, which potentially saved hundreds of lives. Then we headed to the Chatsworth House, a beautiful house owned by a Duke that has public gardens.

West End trip 1

Yesterday ended up being a very busy day. We’d planned on getting up early and doing a day trip to Brighton with London Walks. When we got up and looked out the window, we saw it was overcast and drizzling – not the best weather for a trip to the seaside.

We decided that instead of gallivanting in the rain at the seaside, we’d get some chores done that we’d been putting off for a while – specifically a trip to the madhouse that is Primark on Oxford Street.

Primark is a bizarre store. It’s sort of like a combination of the prices of Winners and the absolute crap clothing and house wears you can get at Wal-Mart. On the other hand, at £5 for a towel, it’s hard to go wrong. Unfortunately, it’s the back-to-school shopping season and at £2 for a shirt, I think most of the school-age girls in London were madly winnowing through stacks of polyester crap looking for the perfect ensemble. We managed to get our towels and ran for the hills, sanity more or less intact.

After a few hours of recovering at home, we headed out again. Ken had managed to get half-price tickets to Boeing Boeing – a play in the West End starring, oddly enough, Rhea Perlman. The show was hilarious, although Rhea wasn’t quite up to the task and definitely seemed out of her league.

After the show we decided that a pint or two were in order so we headed over the road to the pub (one of the best things about London is that there’s pretty much ALWAYS a pub over the road, regardless of where you are). As it was getting late and it being a Monday, they started closing up so we were forced to wander over to an open-late bar that caters to West End actors over by Charing Cross. A bottle of wine later, we were all ready to go.

The tube stops running at 12:30, so we had to grab a cab back home – didn’t work out to be as expensive as I’d expected – only £20 and that in a black cab – next time should be cheaper if we take a mini-cab...

The Monkeys have Arrived!!

Phew...yesterday was an extremely stressful day! The monkeys arrived safe and sound around 5:30pm. Which meant we basically sat in our new flat (with no furniture) all day waiting for them to arrive. Very fun!

They were a bit stunned when they arrived, Charlie in particular. They are both being very clingy today, but they are getting lots of love. We're going to stick around the house today to make sure they settle in nicely. There's a vet right down the street so we will go introduce ourselves as well.

We also are getting our new bedroom suite delivered today...we are VERY excited about sleeping on a good mattress! We are also lucky to have a big bedroom, so we were able to get a queen sized bed instead of a double. Looking forward to a good nights sleep tonight!

Our New Flat

Here are some pictures of our new flat on Clapham Common - we took them with a camera phone while the cleaners were there so a) the picture quality is quite frankly crap and b) there's weird powdery brown stuff on the floor - evidently that's some sort of sea-grass carpet cleaner stuff that gets sprinkled and then vacuumed off. It didn't seem to do anything, but I think the cleaners felt better for it.

Living room including a bit of a view out the window and the fireplace:


Other angle of the living room (yes, that's a giant table with the benches on the top of it - they were cleaning and needed them out of the way):


Our bedroom:


The bathroom:


My kitchen (there's another little counter off screen to the left - it'll be good for the toaster and coffee machine):


The back garden - yes, it's actually bigger than the one in Burnaby:


The view from the little deck area in the garden back through the conservatory and into the kitchen:


We've ordered some furniture (a bed and a couch) plus we've bought some dishes and crap for the kitchen, so it should start looking like a real flat later this week. Until then we're staying in our temporary flat in Bermondsey which has luxuries like places to sit and a place to sleep, as well as things to drink out of...

More Photos

First Week Photos

This is the reason that you might want to re-think visiting London in August:


We spent a few hours wandering around St. James Park yesterday after being scared off by the hordes around Buckingham Palace - we'd thought that maybe we could visit the state rooms which are only open in August, but not with the massive number of people milling about...


There are loads of birds in the park, including a bunch of pelicans:


They even have a few herons that hang about:


Apparently the Queen owns all the swans in the world:


I feel like this some mornings:

Almost a Week

We’re sitting in our flat watching BBC morning news inside, and watching the rain come down outside. It’s just drizzle right now and evidently it won’t last long, but it’s making me wish we’d looked harder for quality umbrellas, although it’s hard to focus on that with the weather we’ve been having here – blisteringly hot and sunny, to the point that I managed to get a sunburn even with sunscreen on.

We’ve been busy the last few days. When we saw the flat in Clapham, we hadn’t actually seen much of Clapham itself, so we took the tube down to the Clapham South and started walking up towards the Common. The South side is a nice little area – a few little shops and a giant Tesco, which will be convenient. They also had a sign that there’s a farmer’s market on Sunday mornings, which will be nice as it’s only about a 7 minute walk from our flat.

Walking up the South Side road, there’s loads of decent looking houses and conversions on one side (along with a few council estates, although not really dodgy ones like in Hackney for example) and the giant park on the other side, complete with little ponds with people lined around the edges fishing.

Our flat is about halfway between Clapham South and Clapham Commons tube stations – perhaps a little closer to Clapham Commons. We walked up to it, timing the walk from our flat out of curiosity – it took about 5 minutes, although we were more sauntering enjoying the sunshine than walking with purpose like I’m sure we would in the rain on the way home from work.

Clapham Commons tube is at the start of the Clapham High Street, which is lined on both side by bars, restaurants, curry places, thai places, a massive Sainsbury’s, and load of little shops. I think we’re going to enjoy the area – it’ll take us AGES to visit all the pubs, but we’re up for the challenge.

After the visit to Clapham we tried to sort out our bank stuff. The company set up an account for us and were supposed to mail the bank cards etc to our temporary flat; however we hadn’t received them yet. We managed to find Jamie’s office just off Blackfriars and called the girl who was supposed to be dealing with it – turned out she’d forgotten to mail them. She said that she’d courier them to the office (she’s outside of London) and they should be there sometime today. Unfortunately we can’t sign up a phone without a bank card, so we’ve been without a phone so far. Should be sorted later today though, which will be nice.

Saturday we made a MAJOR strategic error. Our flat is only partially furnished and doesn’t have any chairs, couches, or a bed. We’d visited the John Lewis shop (a big department store chain in the UK – equivalent to a higher-end Bay from what we can tell)and found a mattress and couch but wanted to compare to other stores. The only other place we know of is the Marks and Spencers, and the only location with furniture is the Marble Arch store just off Oxford Street. This is where the major error occurred – we went to Oxford Street on a sunny Saturday afternoon in August. I wouldn’t recommend doing this. It was absolutely PACKED with tourists all being incredibly annoying. The M&S was disappointing – very limited in-store selection and what they did have wasn’t very nice. Good place for expensive pre-packaged food and perhaps clothing, but not so much for furniture.

We continued the disaster after the M&S by going on a London Landmarks walking tour. We started with a boat cruise up the Thames from London Bridge to Westminster. All of the tourists who weren’t on Oxford St seemed to be here. I had no idea that there were that many tourists in the world, let alone in central London. Absolutely insane.

The tour was fun and very interesting, although we were melting in the blazing sun (news says it got above 30°C). We ended up at Horseguards on Whitehall and walked as quickly as we could to the Westminster tube and back home.

Sunday was an excellent day – we’ve been on a Canadian expat forum on the internet asking loads of questions and getting some really good advice. We headed out to the Covent Gardens area to meet a pair of them and have a few pints. We hit the Roundhouse on Garrick Street – a typical and slightly pricey London Pub with a fair selection of ales on tap, although I stuck for the most part to Kronenburg as it was screaming hot again.

After a few pints, we walked up the road to a pub called “The Maple Leaf”, which is a Canadian bar. It was very odd – it sort of had the fake british pub thing that so many Vancouver bars seem to try to go for (ie Smiley O’Neals or The Lions on Cordova) complete with a fake log wall, a stuffed moose head and a stuffed black bear in the corner. They actually had a Sleeman’s Honey Brown on tap, which I was forced to try (not very good – tasted like they needed to clean the pipes or something) and a plate of not-hot hot wings. Very odd – felt like we were in Vancouver for an hour or so.

We called it a day and headed home. It was 30°C in our flat according to the thermostat in the living room, but no air conditioning. Friggen HOT. We had a light dinner and tried not to melt for the evening.

Rain seems to have stopped – evidently it’s going to be a nice afternoon, hopefully will give us time to find a decent umbrella. We have to sign the final paperwork for our flat this afternoon, and order some furniture...

Our Temporary Flat

We've been put up in a temporary flat in Bermondsey just off the Tower Bridge road. It's fairly small - we figure it's somewhere between 250 - 350 sq feet, consisting of a small living room with a couch and a tv, a little table for two, and a small kitchen area. We've also got a little bedroom area, although it's not seperated in any way from the rest of the flat, as well as a small bedroom.

It's in a newish development called "The Maltings", which is a converted brewery I think. Our particular section was just built/renovated two years ago but they did a crap job - the laminate floor doesn't quite meet the wall for example.

It's in a fairly decent neighbourhood, although Bermondsey is one of the "up and coming" areas in London. Formerly quite rough and tumble it's starting to become a slightly nicer area, although I'm not sure I'd feel too comfortable walking around at night around here.

We've got a nice view - across the city to the London Eye directly out our patio window, and a view of city hall if we stand on the balcony.

It looks like we're going to be here until the 11th at least, which means we're going to have to figure out how to use the little washing machine...

Here's some pictures of our view:

Satellite Image of our new flat

Our place is more or less at the green arrow:

First Days in London

Well, we made it.

We got to the airport at a reasonable hour on Tuesday considering that we had passes to the Maple Leaf lounge at the airport before our flight. We'd spent a busy morning runing around cancelling bank accounts and doing the final packing of our four giant suitcases.

We arrived at the airport at about 3pm Vancouver time and went to the checkout counter. We asked if we could upgrade our tickets from economy to business class and were told that we'd bought our tickets on some sort of a corporate rate and that it would cost several thousand dollars EACH to upgrade. Screw that. It also transpired that the corporate rate did not include passes to the lounge that we'd been looking forward to so much. Damnit!

Oh well...Milestones in the departures waiting area serves a nice pint so we spent an hour there waiting for our flight. The flight itself was fairly uneventful, except that neither Jamie nor I could sleep - a combination of nerves, excitement, and 6 small children (ie all under 5) in the front row with us.

We got into London earlier than expected and made our way to the immigration control area expecting the worst. Turned out the girl who admitted us was viciously uninterested in me and only asked what flight I was on and where I flew from. I answered those two questions and she stamped my passport and sent us on our way. We picked up our bags, found our driver and headed into town.

The temporary flat we've got is in Bermondsey just off Tower Bridge Road on Tanner St in a converted brewery - it's nice, but very small and lacking slightly in personality...it'll do for the time being. After getting settled in, we headed out for a bit of wandering. We didn't go very far - we managed to find the London Bridge Tube stop, where I pretty much crashed - lack of sleep and blood sugar did me in. We got our Oyster Cards (prepaid tube cards) and head to the Marks & Spencer food shop were we got some coffee grounds and supplies for breakfast. We headed home and tried to stay awake for the rest of the evening until 8:30pm when we couldn't fake it any more.

We slept well, but were both up and awake at 4:30am. Jet lag sucks. The morning was nice and we relaxed for a quite a while, waiting to go out for our flat search. We were really early and wandered around Knightsbridge and Harrods for a while (they have a Krispy Kreme counter in Harrods; how sick is that?!?). We were at the Homesearch office at 9:30 and loaded into Sandy's car to start our day of driving.

The first flat we looked at didn't bode well for the day - it was a fairly small basement suite with low ceilings, an odd smell, and damp stains on pretty much ALL the walls, including a fair bit of mildew on one. The only redeeming feature was a massive private garden in the back.

The next two were no goes - one was already under offer, and the other was in the process of having a contract signed as we pulled up; we didn't even get out of the car. We hit gold with flat number three.

Number three was a second floor flat in a block just off North End Road in Fullham - a very nice residential area just west of Chelsea and Kensington. It was small, but was very nicely done with a great kitchen, a huge fireplace, wood floors throughout, and TONS of storage. We put an offer in on it and kept looking, just in case.

The next bunch were pretty much crap. We looked in some fairly dodgy areas (Battersea mainly) and were getting pretty frustrated until we hit the Clapham Common South Side and found what turned out to be our new flat.

It's on the South Side road just across from the masssive Clapham Common green space (absolutely huge) and a decent-looking pub. It's fairly big by London standards - about 1000 sq feet as far was we could tell with a modern kitchen, a little solarium, a huge garden, massive reception room featuring 14-foot ceilings, and huge master bedroom. As we were looking at it, another girl was there putting an offer in. We fell in love with it as soon as we saw it and put one in ourselves. Turned out the landlord loves dogs and the kiddos were the reason she gave it to us instead of the other girl.

We move in on August 11th, the day Jodi and Tristan arrive for their one-day visit. It's only partially furnished so we're going to get to go furniture shopping - hopefully we can get everything delivered on the 11th.

The rest of the week including signing the rental agreement, exploring a bit of Clapham High Street and our new neighbourhood, and perhaps a pint or two along the way...

Enough for now - I'll try to get some pictures up over the next few days...