britlog

My life unfortunetely has been all about work, and studying for an upcoming exam. So unfortunetly i have limited stories to share. On the weekend I did manage to do at least one interesting thing. I went down to Putney to meet my friend Kaila to watch her boyfriend play some cricket. Amazingly, after 7 days of rain Sunday was glorious and sunny. It made cricket watching very pleasant:

What was surprising though, was given their prim and proper appearance, Cricket involves a lot of equipment adjusting. I think when they guys get ready to bat, bat, and finish batting, they spend more time sticking random padding and sorts down their trousers, adjusting and then removing said padding than they actually hit the damn ball!
But we did get flashed quite a few times!

Speaking of flashing. I joined a gym last week near my work that has a pool. I went Monday morning for a swim and flashed my whole lane and apparently my neighboring lane too, since it was a girl in the lane beside me who pointed out my dropping bathing suit. nice.
When i finished up a little while later, the life guards were quite smiley with me.
On the bright side, I know my chances of drowning are super slim.

Another rainy day in London. And so far, it hasn’t got me down. I went to the Kitchen & Pantry in Nottinghill today. A cute cafe with awesome comfy couches that comes recommended from a friend of a friend. There are the odd smattering of couples who are actually there to talk to each other, but on a whole this place is a place to come drink coffee, sit and read or look intellectual with your laptop. Oh and the unwritten rule is Macs only.

After deciding that I’ve had enough of the couple making out in the couch across from me (note, everyone else in our area just raises their newspapers a little higher – or a script if you’re the guy beside me – to block the Sunday indecency) I trudged on in the rain to another cafe. There I ordered a soy cappuccino and a pretzel (odd thing to have in a cafe, but they looked tasty). I ended up with a regular cappuccino with an almond croissant. It never seizes to amaze me that in London it’s possible for two people who both speak English as their first language to misunderstand each other that much.

In other news, my London Look must be solidifying because I got asked for directions on two separate occasions today, bringing my weekend total to 6! And the scary thing is I was almost correct with the directions. I would always realize a few minutes later my slight errors, feel a bit bad but then think: meh! Don’t be asking a foreigner!

Confirming what I already know (and feel): London is the most expensive place to buy residential real esate.

#1. London
#2. Monaco
#3. NYC
#4. Hong Kong

“Congratulations on becoming a member of the Executive Club.”

This arrived in the mail today:

I noticed it immediately. On my first day of work actually.
It must be some stereotypical politeness that is ingrained in their culture combined with some desire to not waste energy on something that would only be for themselves. But ANY time ANYONE feels like a cup of tea or coffee (this is London, it’s obviously tea. The coffee is for the sole Italian who works here) they stand up and pose the question to the office: “hot drinks?”

Inevitably most of the office in turn lets out an enthusiastic squeal of .. ‘oh yes… indeed, that would be lovely!” The person than collects everyone’s mugs, plugs in the kettle and proceeds to fix everyone drinks. It all seems so civilized and considerate. And it is. And it happens about every 35 minutes, like clockwork. I knew I was moving to the island of tea, but I didn’t expect this sort of ritualistic addiction.

What’s also interesting is the mad stash of cookies …err.. biscuits as the Brits call them, in our communal kitchen. Seriously, there are about a dozen different kinds, plus snack sized kit kats in our fridge that seem to get restocked nightly. And whenever one girl in my office does the hot drink round, she does a “biscuits?” round while she waits for the kettle to boil. Now since I’m new, I don’t want to be rude so I say yes to everything, but as a result I’ve eaten more junk this past month than I have all year!

On the bright side, I think the obsession with biscuits explains the teeth.

Poor Oxford Street. It get’s such abuse! A few weeks ago I mentioned the stampede at the opening at Primark. Last week there was a big fire above the NEXT store which crippled traffic in that part of Lonodn for hours (I look for the good YouTube video later). And now today chaos again as Top Shop launches it’s Kate Moss line.

No I didn’t go down there myself, I know better than to fight throngs of trashy (and chavy) British tweens. No, this photo is from the news, and it will do. But I do wish I worked a bit closer like my friend Adrienne who works just around the corner. It would have been very amusing to see the madness.

I haven’t posted a photo in a few days, so here is one from today.  After having two pieces of a co-workers left over wedding cake today, I decided to walk off the sugar rush on the way home via Hyde Park:

It’s cheaper to fly off this island for dinner, than actually eat a meal here!

I swear, I hear more Polish here in London in one day than I heard all Easter weekend in Warsaw! I’m not even counting my Polish co-worker, or our Polish office who I speak with often .. no I’m talking about hearing Polish on the tube, on the street in the shops, seeing people read Polish magazines and newspapers. But today was a new one. Today in Primark I heard the store manager talking to one of her sales associate in Polish!

600,000+ Polish immigrants indeed.

Saw this today: Irish house prices stage first fall since 2002

First time in 5 years!
Of course let me just add this detail from the article:
pushing the annual rate of house price inflation down to 7.4% from 9.5% in February, when prices were unchanged on the month.

7.4% is still nuts.
I can only hope that a little bit of that price correction trend finds it’s way into London.

I think I’ve been here long enough now to comment on the housing market here. I think I can sum it up with: it’s bloody crackers. (british speak for absolutely insane).
Looking at prices you have to ask, how on earth do people afford to own in this city? Take this nice modern 2 bedroom flat similar to a modern condo in Toronto. It’s listed at £545,000 in my Kings Cross area! Ok, that was a super high end looking property, I’ll give you that, but even something more modest like this one bedroom is listed at £338,000! £338,000! At today’s exchange rates that’s $754,182.19 Canadian! And it’s not like I’m shopping around Notting Hill, or South Kensington (though you know I wish we were). No,this is King’s Cross, London’s version of Toronto’s Parkdale – if Parkdale was once known as Toronto’s red light district / drug capital, and was now undergoing a massive gentrification that included a Eurostar link to Paris (details, details).
But the key phrase there was ‘red light district’. I admit, this area is actually getting pretty cool and I see more drunk people at the park near my work at lunch time than at Kings Cross… but come on! THREE quarters of a million Canadian dollars to own a lonely little one bedroom flat in a mediocre area?! A flat that’s posted as less than 500 square feet I might add!!

So I decided to infiltrate the madness by posing as a potential buyer, and met with a mortgage broker yesterday. Well, it seems buying is a lot easier than in Canada. Down payment requirements are MUCH lower, in that there really aren’t any, it just impacts the interest rate you’ll get. But not even by that much. You put down 15% you’ll pay a rate of about 5.2%. Put down 10%, you’ll pay a rate of about 5%. Interesting. So apparently you don’t need much money to put as a down payment. Good to know, since stamp duty (land transfer tax in Canadian speak) is 3%!! (4% if your property is more than 500K!). So that gem of a flat we just saw would require the purchaser to pony up £10,140 on tax alone! Ouch. I also learned that most people in London have interest only mortgages, and choose to make principal payments intermittently through out the year; like say when their banker bonus comes in.

I left my meeting with the mortgage broker with such mixed feelings. At first I was thrilled to find out that immigrants like us with pretty much no credit history and only a week old credit card can get pre-approved for a mortgage pretty much on the spot. But then the rationale kicks in. How hot, and insane is the market?!. And I’m still absolutely gobsmacked to know that when I shop at Tescos for my groceries I’m shopping amongst people who mostly all live in million (Canadian) dollar homes. But I think you just a hit a point when you get used to the prices and these things seem normal.

And no, moving out to Slough is not the answer. There’s a reason I didn’t live in the ‘shwa in Canada, and that reason applies for England too.

I saw an article in The London Paper about an exhibit on display in London at Liverpool Station’s Exchange Square. This is what it said:

” As of today, a new exhibition will celebrate technologies past, with a tongue-in-cheek look at everything, from maps to the mobile phones of old. Crammed into five, 2.5 metre glass pods, the Mobile Museum of Extinct Technology features 3D illustrations of real-life situations … passers-by can pick up a telephone attachment to each exhibit and listen to a comedy voice over explaining what they see.”

Sounded interesting enough. And when we arrived it LOOKED interesting:

But then you press the button and listen. At first it seems quite funny, referring to us as ‘tribes’. But then the blurb ends with something about this technology seen in front of us will likely go extinct at the end of April when Nokia launches the new something or other product. Wtf?! Are you serious?! Hmm. Next pod, same thing. Bloody hell! We’ve been had. This isn’t a ‘museum’! This is a giant 3D advertisement for Nokia’s new product! How dare you pretend to be art! How dare you even use the word museum!! You lured us here under false pretenses. And the technology you’re claiming is extinct isn’t even extinct! PC’s, mobile phones, CD’s, maps? This insults me on so many levels. I was thoroughly disgusted.
I think tomorrow I will channel some of my commuting rage into a nice piece of hate mail to The London Paper for reporting this as an ‘exhibition’.

It turned out to be a pretty busy weekend. Saturday morning hat shopping with 2 friends was a lot of fun. I really should have been born in another time, because I think I look awesome in hats. I did learn though, that hat shopping is a lot more complex than I thought. There are hats, facinators and petite creations. I liked the petite creations best on me (although the facinators really suit my friend Kaila) . What do we think of this one:

ps. did you notice the crazy hats in the background? They’re insane, and yet I love them all!

I’d gush some more about the weather but I worry that I might lose my loyal reader(s), so I won’t – hi Jim! But I will say that us ladies who shopped for hats equally enjoyed coffees by the river in Putney, and it was glorious.

Saturday evening started off with going to meet one of Jason’s coworkers for a quick pint or two with intentions to go out clubbing later, but instead morphed into something must messier. we did go to a pub, but then after it closed we went to a tiny Cuban place that had some deadly (and delicious) mojitos:

Almost as delicious as the Mojitos at Cafe Havana in Manhattan. Eventually we did leave, and I recall taking a night bus. Actually we weren’t very efficient, we took a series of 3 buses to get home.
This morning with a slight dull headache I decided we should try to cure ourselves with an injection of culture at the Chelsea Art Fair. Upon arrival, seeing a entrance fee of £6 each proved that our cheapness greatly out weighed any desire to enrich our lives with the local Sloane Square art scene. Or maybe it was more so our desire for a nap.
Over at St. James part, the London marathon was out in full force (crazy freaks!), but so were the picnickers and other seemingly lazy people. 36,000 people are spending their Sunday running the streets of central London, and we’re in a state of near REM under the shade of a tree.
Photos of two very different Sunday afternoons:

For what it’s worth we did go over and look at the runners, but got bored rather quickly. Marathons are so predictable, it’s usually a Kenyan who wins anyway