London in my nose

Several people told us before we left Australia about the black snot of London, and I was skeptical. I admit it, I thought at best it was a great exaggeration, and more likely one of those things that people make up to poke fun of what I like to think of as my trusting nature and others think of as gullibility. And I was wrong. It really is black. London is in my nose.

We arrived Saturday a weekend a bit ago, and spent the first day sightseeing and enjoying being outside and not in a plane. Even the cold was exhilarating after Malaysia. Now we half-laugh at ourselves for needing to rug up so much in Spring, and half-dread what Winter will bring if this is the warm, sunny time of year.


All week we've been marvelling at how much there is to see here and how much is going on. And how GREEN everything is, even in drought. In our walk through St James, Green (above) and Hyde Parks last week we wandered past the palace and saw the changing of the guard, saw a performance of the same uniformed men in a band, playing theme songs from various movies, and saw the Combined Cavalry Parade (below) in Hyde Park, which apparently happens every year and was more men in uniforms playing songs and hundreds of young and old service men and ex-service men from lots of different cavalries.


We also saw the monument to the Australian services for WWI and WWII, which was really amazing. We found lots of names of places we'd been, including both Mount Tamborine and Tamborine Mountain!


Much of the rest of the week has been spent house and job hunting - successfully on one of those counts. We've found somewhere to live! We moved in on Saturday to a lovely, ground floor 2 bedroom flat in Islington, which we share with a Polish couple, Ela and Pawel. This was the first sharehouse we saw, less than 24 hours after we arrived, and we were lucky that E & P didn't find anyone else they wanted to live with in the time we took to say yes and get ourselves organised.

By London standards our room is large (about 1/2 the size of our room in Canberra) and very clean. There's loads of natural light, a gas stove (hooray!) and a real fireplace in the living room. And if today's temperature is usual for Spring, I just know that fireplace is going to get a work out come Winter! There's also a very nice cat in the complex, which makes me happy.


So we've still got plenty to organise (jobs, for example), but one week in we've found somewhere to live and had some very positive meetings with recruitment agencies, so I'm optimistic that everything will work out well. I've been told by a couple of agencies that I'll definitely have work in a month's time but that it may take a month. In the meantime, we'll buy bikes and see the sights of London in our rainjackets.