Museums, Museums, Museums...

Wow... I can't believe I'm writing about stuff that seemed to happen such a long time ago. At the rate we're going, we'll never be able to catch up to the present. So, I'm thinking this post will have to be short.



Well - at some stage we ended up going to the British Museum. It's truly an amazing and fascinating place to check out, and - it's FREE! Definitely a good thing when you still haven't received a paycheck in the local currency. Also - it means you don't have any obligation to attempt to get your money's worth and see the entire museum all at once, so you can check it out one section at a time, without getting yourself all British-Museumed-out.

They've done a good job in swiping incredibly valuable cultural icons from all over the world, placing them all under one roof (seemingly not feeling any guilt for it!), and allowing tourists like us to gawk at them.



Take for instance, this Easter Island statue... I hate to say it, but although the statue in itself is pretty fascinating, what I found more interesting was that I just saw Ben Stiller in "A Night at the Museum" on the flight over here... "Hello dumb dumb, give me gum gum" certainly has a catchy ring to it.



They also have the Rosetta Stone there - which is what they used to help them decrypt Egyption hieroglyphs (check it out on wikipedia). See - I can't help but think that something as important as that is kept in a museum in London, rather than back where it was originally from!



And - we also went to check out the Museum of Natural History, with Anthony Lui (at friend from church back in Sydney). This museum is really for kids, but it does have quite a few interesting displays of dinosaur bones... and an animatronic T-Rex (pictured).

What's more interesting is that JK Rowling is releasing the next and final Harry Potter book there (Tracy entered us into the competition to witness the event - childish I know, but since we're over here...), and is also doing an all-night reading of it. The inside of the entrance hall has a kind of Hogwarts kind of feel to it...

Anyway - in more recent news:

• tonight we went to see the London Philharmonic Orchestra play in the newly renovated Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank. The concert was fantastic - but as it always seems to be the case for me, too much of a good thing becomes a tad boring. The accoustics of the hall were great - we were sitting right up the back, and could hear everything. Even when the guy playing some sort of wooden block thing with a stick, dropped his stick.
  
• Tracy found a job! Well - she found two actually (after having little success after searching for more than 2 months!!!), and now has to decide which one to accept (wouldn't you hate to be in that position).
• We're going to see the Lord of the Rings muscial (!?!?!??!?) on Friday.
  
• We've booked to go to Amsterdam in a fortnight's time.
• I lost an my Oyster Card with GBP 17.50 on it. ARGH!
  

Without Adult Supervision

So here we are in London, all grown up and living on our own, having to look after ourselves, cooking, cleaning and adjusting to life in a new city.

Our first few weeks mainly involved trying to get used to the sudden increase in domesticity in our lives, getting used to being married (and for me, fighting the urge to look around in search of Chris's mum when I heard the words "Mrs Hing"), hunting for a place to live and exploring London and for Chris, also getting settled in to work. Needless to say, the first few weeks went by in a bit of a blur, but here's a glimpse of what we got up to:

Our first visit to the British Museum. Amount of time spent in the museum before Chris's eyes glazed over and we had to make a quick exit: approx 30 mins, which gave us just enough time to see one section of the Egypt display and check out the Rosetta Stone.

At our temporary apartment, we had a skylight with blinds that could only be open/closed by using a large pole - as demonstrated by Chris below:

...and here is Chris in ninja mode, using the pole as some kind of fighting device (as you do...):

Our temporary apartment was really conveniently located only 10 mins' walk from Chris's work, so a couple of days before Easter, when I returned to the apartment after a day out exploring the city, I was surprised with post-it note instructions for an Easter egg hunt....turns out Chris had snuck back to the apartment during his lunch break and set it up for me!

Here's one of the Easter eggs that was camouflaged in our fruit bowl:

Here's my stash of eggs by the end of the hunt - Chris did good:


At times, it's been difficult having to live with just the bare minimum of possessions and every now and then, we'd really wish that we'd shipped over some of the things that we have sitting at home that we didn't think we need.

For example, we know that we have a brand new salad spinner waiting for us at home and it would've really come in handy over here. Chris managed to find a temporary solution by becoming a salad spinner - he even seems to be having fun:


Our salad ended up being nice and dry, but the problem was that Chris ended up making himself feel rather sick after all that spinning, not to mention that the apartment enjoyed a light shower, which may be fine when we had floor heating and floor boards at the temporary apartment, but probably would not be as great in our current carpeted apartment...

Grocery shopping in London has also been quite an experience, and seeing that we don't have a car, it's an experience that I usually go through every day as I can only carry so much home with me every time.

One of the positives about grocery shopping here is that there are loads of decent pre-prepared food in the supermarkets and a lot of the vegies come pre-washed, pre-cut/trimmed and packaged in handy little serving-sized packs.

The downside to it all is that you definitely pay for the privilege of being able to cook without actually having to cook much, and the fresh produce here just doesn't quite taste as good or as fresh as at home.

It might have something to do with the fact that walking down the vegie aisle of the supermarket is a lot like walking in on the vegetable version of a UN meeting - the vegies seem to have flown in from all over the world.

This is an example of one of my typical vegie purchases:

You probably can't read the label, but it tells me that out of my vegie trio, only the carrots are from the UK, whilst Mr Cauliflower is from France, and Mr Brocolli is a representative of Spain.

As for the mixed peppers (as an aside, over here, they're not capsicums but peppers - this I find a lot easier to get my head around than the fact that snowpeas here aren't called snowpeas, but are "mangetouts", which from what I can vaguely remember from high school French, would be translated to "eat all" and that just makes no sense to me), the label helpfully informs me that the yellow and green peppers came from Holland, but the red pepper came from Israel. This makes me wonder what happened to the Dutch red pepper - was it kidnapped en route to the supermarket or are the Dutch hoarding all of the red peppers for themselves?

We also did a lot of the typical touristy things during our first few weeks in London, but I imagine that our photos probably look the same as any other tourist's photos of London, so here are just 2 of our personal favourites:

* Our visit to Greenwich and the obligatory photo of me standing next to the Greenwich Meridian:

* I'd promised Chris that I would include a shot of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square - for some reason, Chris is fascinated with Admiral Nelson. He hasn't quite explained to me why he is so fascinated, but maybe he can cast some light on this in a later post:

Our first days in Londinium

We arrived on a Thursday, and I didn't have to start work 'til the Tuesday - so we had a bit of time to wander around the city, which we discovered to have been formerly known as Londinium. Around the area we were staying in (Barbican, and the Square Mile) there were bits and pieces left over from Roman times - like... a wall (I guess you really have to be there).

We found a Marks and Spencer, where we discovered that chicken was by far the most affordable meat (if you can call it that) you can buy. So, we bought 1.2 kilos of it (it's even cheaper in bulk) and proceeded to make our first home-cooked meal as a married couple. All quite exciting, and the bonus was it was edible.



We also ambled down to St Paul's and the Borough Markets. St Paul's is impressive - and it really sticks out from the rest of the drab corporate buildings around it. I like the way they've designed the Millennium Bridge so that when walking from the South Bank towards the North, you get a nicely framed view of the church which makes for a good photo - but for some reason we didn't bother (which is unlike us). The picture that we did take was the memorial to the people that fought the Great Fire of London (I think...).

One day we'll have to actually go inside the church.



Borough Markets was also fun but incredibly packed out. We managed to barge our way through the crowd to get a buy a brownie from a cake stall (fantastic), and contemplated buying a pie to take home to heat up in the oven for dinner, but didn't as we couldn't tell what was inside it. Usually, that wouldn't have concerned us (what's in a meat pie? meat, right?), but since they sold so many different types of meat there from a variety of animals, it did make us think twice.

They also sell rabbits, fresh from whichever field they were happily frolicking in. Not so cute when they're strung from their hind legs...

Home Sweet Temporary Home

So this is what it has come to...I have finally cracked and have resorted to blogging.

Whilst Chris has the problem of over-embellishing his stories, my problem is that I can't remember what I've already written to each person whom I email, so I find myself repeating the same "witty" remark to the same person, which ends up leaving me sounding not-so-witty. So in the interests of preserving some vague image of witty-ness, it seems that blogging may be the way to go...

We have decided to tag-team the re-hashing of our past 2 months in London, so I guess I'd better get a move-on and post something so that I can pass the task back to Chris.

Here are some shots of our home for the first month in London (again thanks to Chris's work):

It was pretty new and swish, and it really did trick us into thinking that we could afford to live in a similar place permanently whilst we were in London - we were wrong.

3 weeks of apartment hunting and 25 apartment viewings convinced me just how wrong we were, but in the end, we have found ourselves a decent apartment to call home.

I'm loving our current apartment, but the things that I really miss about our temporary accommodation are:

* The big kitchen - I think it's about 4 times the size of our current kitchen and I'm not exaggerating (although I'm very bad at judging space so I'm probably wrong anyway...)

* The dishwasher that I grew to love - At home, the closest thing that we have to a dishwasher is my dad and we have always washed our dishes the traditional hand-washing way, but it only took me less than a week to become a dishwasher-convert. Such a brilliant invention!!

Sadly, there is no dishwasher in our current apartment and there would be no way of fitting a dishwasher into our kitchen (unless we were to sacrifice the fridge or something), so it's been a harsh readjustment to the joys of hand-washing.....

* The flat-screen TV with 300 channels of pay TV - Now this is probably what I miss the most. Chris is still persisting with his no-tv-for-a-year-because-it'll-improve-our-communication experiment. I think it's a nice concept, but why did it have to involve TV?????

I feel like I am missing out on some kind of cultural aspect of our stay in the UK because I am unable to watch trashy BBC dramas, or get my dose of reality TV (a new season of UK Big Brother was launched last night and I could only read about it in the paper today!! ugh) and I almost cried when I found out that Eurovision was on a few weeks ago and I couldn't watch it!!

That said though, I think I am actually getting used to our TV-less existence and most of the time, I don't even miss it, although it may have a lot to do with the fact that most nights, we usually end up watching movies on the laptop instead....it may defeat the purpose of not having a TV, but at least it gives us something to look forward to when we're hand-washing our dishes after dinner!

To London!

So the first photo - this is us, clearly excited about the adventures awaiting us in a foreign (not really) country. Or, maybe it was just the fact that we'd scored business class seats (thanks to work) and got to hang out in the Air NZ lounge before boarding. You can tell we hadn't been stuck on a plane for 24 hrs yet...

Second photo - these are Thai's new business class seats. They go completely flat, but the entire seat still reclines at about a 10 degree angle - which is a pain when you're trying to catch a bit of sleep in between movies.

As soon as you fall asleep, you find yourself slowly sliding down the chair until the seat belt catches you around the love handles (to remind you you're not in first class)... it can't be that much harder for them to make the seats go completely horizontal, can it?

Anyway, I'm not sure which part of the journey this is.. I'm guessing we're still only a couple hours into the trip because we're not too feral yet (that dirty facial hair wasn't just grown on the flight).

Third photo - this is the halfway mark at Bangkok's new airport. Trace has her violin which we carted over as hand luggage, and... I have no idea who that guy in the red shrit is.

Just before we touched down here to refuel, I read in one of the in-flight magazine that Bangkok's new airport was full of problems... and they were critical ones like... the runway. It was made so dodgily that when jumbos take off, the thrust from the engines blows the runway apart. And so it had to get rebuilt, but I don't think it happened before we used it. It wasn't the greatest thing to read at the time.

However - we did get to use the Thai lounge there, and I got to have a shower - which is something that I highly recommend on a 24hr flight.

Long Time Coming

After signing up for this blog when we first arrived in London, two months ago, I've decided that it's about time we write something...

Before we left for sunny London, everyone back home told us that starting a blog would be a good way to stay in touch. After re-hashing the same stories via email to everyone for the past two months, I'm starting to agree that blogging might be the way to go too...

But after saying that - the one good thing about telling the same story to different people over and over again is that the story does get better and better each time... however, I'm lazy, and for now I guess there'll only be the original, un-embellished account of our time in London.

So, now we've got the task of documenting what's happened since we got here. Luckily, I'm a bit of a dork and carry our camera everwhere, so I think I'll just post photos and make comments about them (if I can work out how to do it).