12 April 2005
The trials of buying a car - week two in London
Sorry there are no photos with this entry yet, internet access is difficult at the moment but we will try to get them up here soon.
I will make this entry somewhat shorted than the last few have been - I am sorry my friends there was just so much that happened in the first week!
OnSaturday the 26th April Chris and I headed into London city to meet up with some friends of ours from Darwin - Jess and Jeff - who have also just recently arived here for a couple of years. They had quite a rough start to their experience but after a couple of weeks (by the time we arrived) they were gettig properly settled in to a new apartment and jobs. It was great to catch up and share the Cornish Pasty experience!
Easter Monday started off wonderfully - until breakfast when Chris' tooth fell apart on a piece of bacon (I can hear the vegetarians saying 'so there'). Literally a quarter of one of his molars came off and unfortunately was swallowed before Chris realised! As there was nothing to be done right away we decided to carry on with our plans.
It was a beautiful day so Chris, Leia and I headed to Battersea Park on the River Thames for a picnic and a gruelling round of Trivial Pursuit - Leia cleaned up (especially on the sport questions).
That afternoon we headed to the emergency dental clinic, where we waited for for three and a half hours for the dental practitioner to pop some temporary filling into Chris' mouth, tell him to get it sorted out properly soon, and to only eat mushy stuff. Poor Chris. Unfortunately it looks like it is going to be quite a major activity to fix and will probably take several visits to the dentist to solve. The thing is though that here you can't just go to any dentist, you have to be registered with a dentist in your area and seeing as we don't have an area and arn't planning to be in Leia's area much longer we will need to leave it for now and get it sorted in the next week or so.
Leia left early on Tuesday morning for a week in Germany with a friend. We spent most of the next week looking for cars on the internet, in the Auto Trader and going to see various vehicles in various spots around London. We had very little luck finding something which suited what we both wanted, what we needed and our taste and budget. It was a tense week, we were both getting frustrated and a little short with each other. There were however several advertisements that we saw which made us chuckle. For example: the little ford that was "very reliable, a good runner. Needs a jump start", the wonderful citroen which had "CD player, airbags, remote central locking and a toe bar". TOE? Foot finger? Then there was the one which sounded great all over but had "smokes heavily, still runs" added on casually at the end of the ad. There was the one which was fabulous but "pulls to the right when braking over 30mph" and so on and so on.
We did find one old (1992) Citroen campervan that was quite good, but by the time we had decided that it was what we wanted and then started looking into insurance it got sold to someone else. Bugger. Insurance here is very difficult to get if you are here on a visa like us - but we knew we deffinitely wanted to get one so....
We ended a miserable and tense week with a £5 comedy night. The host was a funny guy (useful if you want to be in the stand-up scene) who made mention of Chris' fabulous 70's Footballer haircut. There were some top acts on that night!
On Monday 4th April we decided we had to leave London - even if we didn't yet have a car. So we packed up our stuff, tidied Leia's flat and jumped on a late evening train to Oxford. Why Oxford? Just because.
I'm sure the scenery outside was lovely but we couldn't see any of it - because it was dark. It was about an hour long trip through several towns including Slough. (If you ever watched the English series on ABC at home called "The Office", Slough was the delightful town used as the setting.)
We arrived and were immediately surprised by the number of bicycles chained up by the train station! Literally hundreds! That's how you can tell this is a student based city. Or maybe they are just more environmentally friendly here. Or they can't afford the car insurance either! Anyway - we made it to our hostel and ....the rest of Oxford will come in the next (episode/issue/chaper) entry.
I will make this entry somewhat shorted than the last few have been - I am sorry my friends there was just so much that happened in the first week!
OnSaturday the 26th April Chris and I headed into London city to meet up with some friends of ours from Darwin - Jess and Jeff - who have also just recently arived here for a couple of years. They had quite a rough start to their experience but after a couple of weeks (by the time we arrived) they were gettig properly settled in to a new apartment and jobs. It was great to catch up and share the Cornish Pasty experience!
Easter Monday started off wonderfully - until breakfast when Chris' tooth fell apart on a piece of bacon (I can hear the vegetarians saying 'so there'). Literally a quarter of one of his molars came off and unfortunately was swallowed before Chris realised! As there was nothing to be done right away we decided to carry on with our plans.
It was a beautiful day so Chris, Leia and I headed to Battersea Park on the River Thames for a picnic and a gruelling round of Trivial Pursuit - Leia cleaned up (especially on the sport questions).
That afternoon we headed to the emergency dental clinic, where we waited for for three and a half hours for the dental practitioner to pop some temporary filling into Chris' mouth, tell him to get it sorted out properly soon, and to only eat mushy stuff. Poor Chris. Unfortunately it looks like it is going to be quite a major activity to fix and will probably take several visits to the dentist to solve. The thing is though that here you can't just go to any dentist, you have to be registered with a dentist in your area and seeing as we don't have an area and arn't planning to be in Leia's area much longer we will need to leave it for now and get it sorted in the next week or so.
Leia left early on Tuesday morning for a week in Germany with a friend. We spent most of the next week looking for cars on the internet, in the Auto Trader and going to see various vehicles in various spots around London. We had very little luck finding something which suited what we both wanted, what we needed and our taste and budget. It was a tense week, we were both getting frustrated and a little short with each other. There were however several advertisements that we saw which made us chuckle. For example: the little ford that was "very reliable, a good runner. Needs a jump start", the wonderful citroen which had "CD player, airbags, remote central locking and a toe bar". TOE? Foot finger? Then there was the one which sounded great all over but had "smokes heavily, still runs" added on casually at the end of the ad. There was the one which was fabulous but "pulls to the right when braking over 30mph" and so on and so on.
We did find one old (1992) Citroen campervan that was quite good, but by the time we had decided that it was what we wanted and then started looking into insurance it got sold to someone else. Bugger. Insurance here is very difficult to get if you are here on a visa like us - but we knew we deffinitely wanted to get one so....
We ended a miserable and tense week with a £5 comedy night. The host was a funny guy (useful if you want to be in the stand-up scene) who made mention of Chris' fabulous 70's Footballer haircut. There were some top acts on that night!
On Monday 4th April we decided we had to leave London - even if we didn't yet have a car. So we packed up our stuff, tidied Leia's flat and jumped on a late evening train to Oxford. Why Oxford? Just because.
I'm sure the scenery outside was lovely but we couldn't see any of it - because it was dark. It was about an hour long trip through several towns including Slough. (If you ever watched the English series on ABC at home called "The Office", Slough was the delightful town used as the setting.)
We arrived and were immediately surprised by the number of bicycles chained up by the train station! Literally hundreds! That's how you can tell this is a student based city. Or maybe they are just more environmentally friendly here. Or they can't afford the car insurance either! Anyway - we made it to our hostel and ....the rest of Oxford will come in the next (episode/issue/chaper) entry.
# posted by Elke & Chris @ 2:45 pm 
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Glad to see you've aquired the skill of travelling through time. That should come in very handy on your travels. What will you do when the real 26th April comes along???
Liz.
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Liz.
# posted by 
: 11:43 am
: 11:43 am << Home
