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).