My friend Mark has the phrase “cat herder” in his email signature. I found the following advert after a quick google search. I like.

A nice man at work introduced me to this comic. You should have played Half Life 2 and be a bit of a geek to appreciate it, but it’s well worth the hour or so of reading involved. I like more.

Still on the Halflife theme, this is so annoying. I like little.

And not to forget angryalien.com with a Star Wars re-enactment. I like lots.

:-)

If you told me a year ago, I’d be living in this, I’d have laughed in your face, then I would have rolled around on the floor laughing (well, I did when I was younger). This being our current accomodation, our studio flat, our really small habitat, our 12+ hour a day joy!

Want to see some pictures of our flat, learn how we manage to avoid stepping on each others toes, and much more? If so, read on, you brave, brave soul (nah, its not that bad).

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After living with Tony for the first few weeks, a situation arose where we had to move on, but unfortunately we only had four days notice and two of those were the weekend. Imagine trying to find accomodation in a big city you know next to nothing about. Not good.

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The first Friday in the country, we could not stay with Tony, due to a prior engagement of his and we had to spend the night elsewhere.

We searched for a hostel to stay in and ended up in Kensington at a hostel there. The hostel was part of a row of houses that are all identical so from the photo it’s hard to distinguish which door we walked through!

We discovered Kensington Park by accident on Friday night as we took a wrong turn trying to find a movie theatre. It took us finding the park to realise we had gone the wrong way. We visited the Park the next day. The Park is just huge and houses the Kensington Palace. There is a beautiful memorial garden to Princess Diana there as well as a small lake.

Our first few weeks were spent asking Tony many questions, applying for jobs, experiencing some London shopping and watching the soccer world cup.

Tony was very helpfull and answered all my questions like “Is the DLR part of the underground?”, “How much does broadband cost?”, “Is the UK a country?”, “Where can I buy cheap computer games?” and “How do I pronounce such-and-such”?

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Our first week in London revolved around where we were staying. We were in the Greenwich area, more specifically Maze Hill and aside from heading into the city we didn’t wander far. First, a little about Maze Hill. Greenwich (and Maze Hill) was my first impression of a London city suburb and give or take some rubbish, care and upkeep and the ages of the buildings, every other suburb seems to me to be much the same.

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Early in the day, we went for a walk to try and find our bearings. Half a block away we found Hatton Cross Tube Station (underground) and managed to work out how to catch the tube into Charing Cross where we could catch the National Rail (overground) out to Greenwich where we were staying with our friend Tony. If Tony hadn’t given us directions, it would have been a lot harder to work out our route. We bought a zone 1-6 day pass each which gave us tube and bus rides all across London.

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Flying Singapore Air on our second flight was slightly different than our first. The aircraft was a Boeing 747, with slightly narrower seats that the 777. The inflight entertainment screen in the back of the seats wasn’t a touch screen, so you could only control the brightness of the screen. The movies and tv shows were the same as our first flight. The plane only had 5 working toliets for 3/4 of economy class which meant a few queues waiting to go to the loo (about 10-15 mins). We were feed two meals and a couple of snacks, compared to the first flight where we were offered snacks about 4 times. I managed to sleep for the first couple of hours so I was slight refreshed for the next 10 hours of flight time (13 1/2 hours total flight time).

We arrived in London on Monday afternoon to a 30C heat, 3C hotter than Singapore (who would have thought).

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Our last month in New Zealand was absolutely mad. Sorting out all our belongings. Selling most of them at a garage sale, giving some to the Salvation Army and trying to pack the rest into 12 cubic meters.

Finalizing work took up quite a bit of my time as well. I had few old hard drives lying around that needed destroying. A friend kindly helped me sort them out as seen below. A great way to make sure no way can ever get at your confidental data!

We said goodbye to so many people over the last two weeks.

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It’s unusal to get torrential rain in Dunedin.  Generally Dunedin is sunny in the morning and it begins to get overcast and drizzly in the afternoon/evening.  Every five years or so, we get a good drenching.  The normally mild Leith becomes a torrent as you can see in the photos below.

I noticed I wasn’t the only one taking photos that day!