London

It has been a while since we have written on the blog - trying to navigate London has consumed all our energy for the past 2 weeks! We left Southampton on Monday the 16th of July, and caught a train to London. After dropping our bags off at our hostel, we headed out to start viewing flats, a couple of places we had seen on the internet the day before. This was the start of our steep learning curve.....the first place we saw was quite a nice place, just very far from anything else. The second place we saw was horrible, and we couldn't get out of there fast enough, but the landlord wouldn't stop asking us questions! She was still talking to us as we walked down the driveway.

So on Tuesday we made another big effort, searching through piles of ads on the internet (and we were only using one website!). It is amazing how many places are advertised each day. We had narrowed our search to North London, and managed to find a few places that seemed suitable....until we saw them, and realised they really weren't. A couple of the places were in council estates, the others were in quite dodgy areas...

Wednesay was more successful, when we narrowed our search further to only north-west London, and we went to see houses in Acton, East Acton and Shepherds Bush. All of these were quite good, although for one of them we would have had to sign a 12-month contract, and we weren't sure we wanted to committ to anywhere for that long. Another place had no living area, so felt more like a hostel than a home. So we decided to choose the one in East Acton, which is not too far from central London. The flat has 1 other kiwi, 2 aussies and 2 south africans, so we manage to bring the kiwis into the majority! It was a relief to find a place to live, as the search had been quite stressful, and we felt like we would never find anywhere!

On Thursday we headed into Oxford St, so I could go into the bank and start up my account, which went pretty smoothly. After that we went to Hyde Park, and sat on the deck-chairs scattered on the grass...until we got asked to pay to sit there. We decided to get up and go for a walk after that, around the lake and past the memorial fountain to Princess Diana, which was turned off for maintenance.

On Friday we headed up to Birmingham, to stay there for the weekend and pick up luggage we had left there before we left for Spain. We spent the weekend recovering from our flat-hunting in London, and hiding from the rain - many of the areas around Birmingham were flooded, with evacuations and no electricity or running water. Luckily the area we were staying in wasn't affected. On Saturday we braved the elements to head into Birmingham city centre, to go to the Walkabout pub (Aussie pub) to watch the replay of the Bledisloe Cup game...only to find we had missed it! Luckily they had it on tape, so were kind enough to replay it just for us. It was great to see the All Blacks win!

Shaun's great-aunt introduced us to a couple that live across the street from them, and the husband is very involved in the local rugby club, so he invited Shaun to go to their AGM on Monday night. Shaun went along, chatted to the locals, drank some Guinness and experienced a rugby club in England.

On Tuesday we returned to London, to start the next stage of our introduction to London...looking for a job. This has involved getting in touch with as many recruitment agencies as possible, sending out lots of emails, looking at lots of job ads, calling lots of people etc. So hopefully all the hard work will pay off! We spent Tuesday to Thursday doing this, taking a bit of time off on Thursday afternoon to visit the British Museum, a massive place that we will have to return to.

On Friday we moved into our flat, and had to go shopping to buy pillows, sheets, food etc...That night we met our flat-mates, who all seem very nice. Today we plan to buy more stuff to fill our room with, and explore London some more.