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...