Happy birthday Rhys!

A Beginner's Guide to Moving to London

A short summary of the key points you need to know when moving to London for the first time...covering banks, transport, housing and jobs.

Banks:

1. Lloyds TSB is a pretty good quality bank and specialises in foreigners opening up bank accounts.
2. I am with HSBC- they are sister bank to ASB so I was able to pay $50 in new zealand and open an account while I was still living in NZ. This is a good deal because it can be a long and tedious process to open up a bank account here- so be prepared if you don't have an account lined up before you arrive! I am with HSBC and they are just OK though- I would only recommend them on the basis that it was easy to open an account from NZ. I am planning to switch to Lloyds TSB in the next few months.

London Day Trip to Oxford

Well, it's finally day 4 of the long Easter weekend, and I thought I would tell you about our short sojourn to Oxford on Saturday. The other 3 days of the weekend have been happily filled with rugby, cricket-badminton, sun bathing, and Pimms- the perfect start to a British summer.

On Saturday morning R., me and my 2 flatmates grabbed a train out to Oxford. The town is about 2 hours by a slow train and a slow bus from London- perfect for a day trip. The train was packed with people on holiday, just like us. It was lovely to see rolling green hills and far horizons. One of the weird things about London is you can never see very far- there are no real vistas. The train took us through a few industrial estates of which the most exciting one was the Nestle Coffee factory which made the whole train smell like a coffee shop. There were also beautiful fields filled with yellow rapeseed, the perfect compliment to the lush spring greenery:

caves of forgotten dreams

This week I was working with spreadsheets, and listening to Fresh Air, still one of my favourite podcasts. I had skipped a bunch of recent ones- I do not want to listen to horribly depressing stories, or anything about Obama. But this week I listened to one of my favourite stories that I have heard in a long time (except for This American Life's story about death row lawyers).  

I have been to a few caves in my life, mostly just big airy non-scary touristy ones like Carlsbad Caverns or Cave of the Winds. These all had normal stairs or elevators, without any claustrophopia or wriggling-through-small-tunnels involved. But listening to an interview with Werner Herzog suddenly brought back all my memories of caves- plus made me think that maybe 3D movies are not the bane of the earth.

Herzog's new movie is a documentary about a 32,000 year old cave in France called Chauvet Cave. This cave has some of the most amazing cave paintings every found. However, the cave is now shut off from tourists, scientists, and everything else. Aparently just the breathing of people caused mould to start to grow on the walls and ruin the cave paintings. And what's fascinating is that we always think of cave paintings as little stick men with spears chasing stick buffallo on little stick legs. However, Chauvet cave has these incredibly advanced, beautiful drawings. Clearly people have been looking at the world as art since maybe the beginning of the human soul.

Steinbeck

 "And it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying, which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inexplicably to all reality, know and unknowable. This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Charles Darwin and an Einstein." -John Steinbeck

Oda al Tomate

You may have noticed this blog has changed recently. I have just listed it publicly, given it a new design and name, a new About page. Also, I will hopefully be doing some posts in a new style...exciting times!


Pablo Neruda is one of Chile's great authors (Among many), and here is one of my favourite poems...which even translated has a certain ring to it. Another plus is that it's simple enough to understand without reading it over and over, or trying to understand complex mind-numbing metaphors. It presents a scene you wouldn't normally consider noteworthy, and makes it important.

Of course, it also appeals to me because of the strong associations I have with tomatoes. The best tomatoes in my memory are always picked in the backyard, and eaten standing next to the plant, in the sun. The tomato is dusky and bursts beautifully in my mouth- it tastes like summer.

Work Life Balance

Slaw

I completely forgot for a while that with summer comes barbecues of course...but also delicious salads! I flatmate also recently introduced me to actual real coleslaw. I was always too afraid to touch the soggy white gloop that comes in those packages from the supermarket. And I'm not such a fan of cabbage or of mayonaise...or so I thought.

 But the other day (to go with a barbecue of course) we made homemade coleslaw using my increasingly useful vegetable mandolin. At first I thought it could only make carrot salad, which has limited charms. But it turns out that it can slice veggies for the grill, slice veggies for pizza (hello eggplant pizza!), and it's just getting more and more action as spring rolls into reality!

For the slaw we grated up carrot, purple cabbage, purple onion, and then marinated it in balsamic/mayonaise/paprica. Why had no one told me about this before? oh wait...they had, I just ignored them. Luckily I now have the whole summer to practice my slaw-ing.

little seeds

For Christmas, I was given 4 small pots and 4 small seeds. Somehow in the past month this has sprung into 30 potted seedlings! I guess I suddenly found a very good excuse to sit outside and poke around in the dirt. Plus, look how cute they are!

Hyde Park

Sunday was "sunny" and "warm" by London standards, so after repotting my coriander (it's still not dead!) Rhys and I hit the park. Hyde Park has bicycles that you can rent for 30 minutes free- known as Boris Bikes after the mayor who initiated the scheme. It was so warm and pretty out that the bike stand was clogged by people trying to figure out how to use their credit card in the machine. You can rent a Boris Bike for 30 minutes for free, and then pay by the hour. But they need your credit card details so you can't just run off and steal it. They did a similar scheme in Paris and people just stole all the bikes, so they are carefully rolling out the London scheme to try to discourage that sort of thing.

7 months

I arrived in London September 1st, and Rhys arrived only a few weeks later... now we have officially lived here 7 months (and made it past that big 6 month landmark).

 It seems like forever since I left (but still manage to miss NZ and all the people I left behind). But we've managed to fit a few travels and adventures into the mix while living here and there around London....