Life in London

This is a ‘blog by request’ I guess, after a fair few of you have asked for an update of ‘London Life’ for Ross and I. So, if you’re interested in what we’re up to, what we’ve seen and done in here in this massive city, what our plans are work situations are, etc…read on! We’re currently living in Kilburn, North London, about fifteen minutes by train right into the centre of London. London city is a bit of a confusing to people who’ve never been…so I’ll try to explain. Having lived in Osaka, another very big city, in the not so distant past, I guess we were already accustomed to big cities, but London is something else entirely. For one, it’s a city with very few tall buildings or skyscrapers, but rather than being built high, it is built far and wide! For Aussies, it’s perhaps more confusing as we’ve grown up in cities surrounded by suburban sprawl, whereas London is a city surrounded by…more city. It take about forty minutes to ‘leave’ London and hit something that resembles the outer suburbs of Melbourne. Kilburn is a great place to live, we both love it, though if we’re honest, we have been looking into another suburb nearby now that Ross and I have both secured long term positions at schools for the school year beginning in September. We’ll see…..We have a six month renewable lease and love our apartment, but also love moving! (or I do anyway!  ) Kilburn is North London, which means it is fairly multicultural with lots of Polish and Middle Eastern people, restaurants and supermarkets. Mostly, it reminds us of Brunswick or similar parts of Melbourne – lively, busy, great food. There are lots of pubs nearby where we head for a drink once or twice a week, a great park down the road with an outdoor gym and an excellent go-to ‘restaurant’ (and I use the term loosely) called Woody’s where you can buy amazing kebabs, gyros meat, salads and breads for so little money it seems criminal. The High Street is busy and bustling and all the main store chains are there as well as a great Japanese/Korean grocery store where we can stock up on rarer stuff. We do most of our grocery shopping online though, and have it delivered in the early evening. Though I miss grocery shopping, the crowds and having to travel by train with my groceries is completely unappealing. We’ve been loving the work we’ve been doing lately too. Ross finished up a supply position at Kings College two weeks before the end of term, a majorly posh private school in South London renowned for it’s amazing results and delicious school lunches, and did day to day supply at a mixture of schools until the end of the school year, whilst I bade farewell to my colleagues at my school in Outer London a couple of weeks ago now, and we’re well into our school holidays. Both Ross and I have taken on great positions to begin in September with the new school year. Ross will be at a gorgeous little Primary School teaching Year 5 and leading Numeracy in a beautiful suburb not far from us which is known for it’s windy roads and curious layout in the otherwise gridlike streets of London. Hampstead is a rambling suburb with lots of old trees, green spaces and famous faces. We’ve been there for shopping and a delicious breakfast…it’s most like Elwood or Brighton or somewhere like that. It’s also famous for Hampstead Heath, a huge green park where you can swim in big open ponds (one for males, one for females and one for mixed bathers). I’ve taken on a Head of Drama position at a prep school and will be teaching Drama and English in another lovely central London suburb close to home and close to Abbey Road – where the Beatles recorded their albums and took that famous zebra crossing shot! Prep schools are small private school for pupils aged 5-14 and are aimed at preparing them for bigger private or boarding schools and the admission exams they need to take for them. It should be a challenging post, but I’m actually really excited, even if the kids are going to be smaller!!! I hope I don’t trip over them…much. We’re both really excited about our new jobs, especially because they’ll give us such a good chance to meet new people and further settle into life here. It’s been lovely lately, meeting more people and having a few visits from people back home too. Ross has had drinks after work with a couple of people he’s worked with, and his birthday picnic was a success (when we eventually got there after our train line was cancelled for the day!) with lots of new friends coming to help us celebrate. We’ve had Dad and his partner Dee visit, Allira (whose moved to the UK to nanny) has come to stay and see London, Nicole Pownall and her partner Tom came to stay, and we caught up for dinner and drinks with Cath (from our time in Japan!) and her partner who visited last week too! It’s been lots of guests, entertaining, eating out and sightseeing and it has been such a pleasure to show people around. It’s so much fun to help people experience parts of London and in such a great city, it’s easy to entertain everyone. So, if you’re reading…come and visit (but bring BBQ shapes)! Rather thabn bore you with a blow by blow, I’ll tell you some of the highlights of our time in London lately:
-dinner at Gordon Ramsey’s restaurant at ‘Claridges’ in Mayfair with Dad and Dee
-a ride on the London Eye (amazing view)
-taking Tom and Nicole around London and to Brick Lane for great Indian food (with free pappadums, of course!)
-cocktails with Cath at ‘Circus’, a bar in Covent Garden where circus performers do trapeze from the roof
-taking Allira to Notting Hill and her first sushi train experience
-joining the gym, where I am training to beat Ross at Squash (I beat him twice today, though he appears to have made up a series of special rules and handicaps just for me ‘Oh yeah, Allie, when you serve a foul four times then fall over, you win the point’)
-buying bikes, which we now ride all over London
-playing tennis and squash and eating dinner with Brad and Bek
-joining the library (I forgot how good those places are)
-rewatching the entire Harry Potter series
-sleeping in…because we are teachers and it is Summer. 
-our weekend trip to Oxford, Bath and Stonehenge (a famous historical area where a group of stones are clustered in a mysterious alterlike formation that has been around for thousands of years but continues to baffle historians and scientists) where we took in two fabulous rural cities, saw the dining hall from Harry Potter, ancient Roman Bath ruins and Jane Austen’s family home and were entertained by a horrible couple from Australia who had nothing nice to say and seemed to only have come on the tour to see where Bob Hawke famously skulled a yard glass of beer and landed himself in the Guinness Book of Records whilst an Oxford student.

Dublin and County Wicklow

OK, I promised myself (and all of you out there reading) that I would keep up my blog so each entry didn't need to begin with 'sorry it's been so long'...but here I am again, proving myself fallible. Apologies. Aren't you lucky though - absence makes the heart grow fonder. Enjoy, you've waited long enough! I'm going to write this first-entry-in-a-long-while with our trip to Dublin...way back in the June half term break. We've become so accustomed to mid term breaks, I'm not sure I'll be able to cope with a 'normal' Australian timetable again. For those who've just tuned in, let me fill you in. In the UK, there are three terms. If you're in a normal school, they're called September term or first term or Autumn term, then there's Winter term over December and January, followed by Spring Term from Easterish onwards. If you're in a posh school (or pish-posh, as I have come to call it) like the one I'm about to start with this September (more on that later) then you call them by old fashioned names that sound much better if you pretend you're a member of the Royal family and enunciate, head held high: The Michaelmas Term, Lent Term, and...Summer term. (enunciate, it sounds better) These terms are all divided by two week term end holidays (except for summer where we have six weeks off) but in addition, each term is halved with a half term one week break in between the halves. In each half term thus far, and our holidays too, Ross and I have managed to take trips overseas, so I'm very proud of how proactive we've been about it all, even if the whole planning/booking hotels thing relies a little too heavily on lastminute.com..... So, because of a long summer of no paid work ahead of us, back in June we decided to head to another country, but to make it a little closer to home and thus less expensive. We headed to Dublin for four days, and explored it and the surrounding villagey areas of County Wicklow. Dublin was a good trip and lovely chance to relax, but I must say that it really confirmed our desire to head away from the big cities on our next trip. I think I've blogged about it before; the big European cities, and how the grime and stuff can get a bit uninspiring, and I have to say, we expected Dublin to be a fair bit prettier and more 'Ireland' than it turned out to be. If I'm honest, I was picturing something a little more Maeve Binchy 'Circle of Friends' and a little less 'Snatch' (which isn't set in Ireland, but works for purpose of comparison ;).....) So we arrived in Dublin with subtly incompatible expectations, Ross' dream was to hit up the Jamieson Distillery and Guinness Factory, I wished to meet a Gerard Butler lookalike and have my own person 'PS I Love You' experience...purely to honor Stef's requests, of course. Our arrival in Dublin was lovely actually, said Butler lookalike greeted us at the passport checking desk, smiled winningly and cheekily tried to take my notebook from me while I made quick witted remarks about never reading a girl's diary, while Ross rolled his eyes at my embarassing myself. That done, we headed into town on a local bus and arrived at our hotel (a nice place, similar to big country town hotels like The Vue Grand in Queenscliff, thought less luxurious, for sure) before taking a wander through Dublin and relaxing by the river with coffee and lunch. My first impression of Dublin 'My, this looks a lot like Tooradin!' (from the bus on the way in, it really did) My second was 'My, this is like a mini Melbourne!' Ross and I have actually encountered a few European cities now with touches of Melbourne in them, which I guess explains why Melbourne is often referred to as being quite European and cosmopolitan. Excellent deduction Allie. Our first day in Dublin was all about orientating ourselves, eating delicious traditional food (heavy soups and casseroles, heavy brown Irish soda bread) and confirming the short day tours we'd booked in advance. On Day 2, we headed out of Dublin on a tour of County Wicklow. What a stunning part of the world. It takes about fifteen minutes to leave Dublin, which really is a very small city, before you bypass some of the pseudo Cranbourne stuff and move up and out into the rolling, gorgeous, lush green countryside that stereotypes and ABC TV series are made of. Wicklow is actually known as the 'Garden of Ireland'. Our trip to Wicklow Mountains included a fabulous chatty tour guide/bus driver who informed us about everything from the new adventure playground at a McDonalds we passed to the conference facilities at a resort hotel we drove by and the more interesting tidbits too. He stopped to allow myself and other ridiculous women on the bus take snaps where 'PS I Love You' was filmed (you mean Gerard stood here? He looked at this?), he showed us places where 'Braveheart' was filmed, which, though it was set almost entirely in Scotland was actually filmed in Ireland. A highlight was definitely the stop in the ancient monastic settlement 'Glendalough', where ruins of a church, houses, gravestones, etc all date back to the sixth century. It was a truly amazing place and Ross and I had a really nice wander there through back lanes and up into the hilly areas. Glendalough actually means 'between two lakes' and it was lovely to wander this area and see all the breathtaking scenery. 'Really nice wander' translates into Allie moaning about the hills we have to climb while Ross fulfils his lifelong quest to search for the source of water at every place we visit. After finding a waterfall and chatting with a groundskeeper, Ross permitted us to head back to the coach for the rest of our tour. In the afternoon we headed to Avoca, a small village in Wicklow that is famous for two reasons 1)It has the oldest working mill in the world and distributes Avoca milled products all over the world 2)It is the town where ABC series (and one of Mum's favourites) 'Ballykissangel' was filmed. The old ladies on the tour were very pleased. Our following two days in Dublin were lovely, and included visits to traditional Irish pubs (which are EVERYWHERE) to hear great music (both) and drink Guinness (Ross), taking in the whole city on the City Sightseeing Circuit bus, seeing the Book of Kells at Trinity College (an ancient text from 800AD, that features the hand copied text of the four gospels and is lavishly and intricately decorated) and enjoying tours, tastings and pour your own opportunities at the Guinness and Jamieson factories. Both Jamieson and Guinness and impressive places, and though I had my doubts about it, I actually loved touring the Guinness factory. The whole brewery area is massive and you can smell it in many parts of the city, but it;s a lovely earthy smell. The tour is self guided and leads you up through a building that is actually shaped like a giant pint glass, where the froth and top of the glass' equivalent is a 360 degree viewing space/bar at the top of the building where you drink a complimentary Guinness. I can also wholeheartedly endorse the city sightseeing bus that circles the city; we found out tons of interesting local knowledge. A statue of Oscar Wilde stands at the corner of a village green in Dublin, looking across an intersection to a house opposite, his house where he grew up. Interestingly, Oscar used to sit in his home, staring across at that same village green and watching the children that played there. That's what I'll remember most about Dublin, the lovely little secrets or quips the people offered us about the town. Dublin is a lovely place, but sadly, Ireland seemed a sad country in many ways. Economic troubles have hit it hard and many people have had to leave Ireland to seek work in other parts of the EU or further afield (such as my master eyebrow lady from back home, Hazel) out of necessity. Homelessness and other sad scenes were prolific in Dublin, perhaps more so than other major cities we've been to, or more surprising because it's such a small place, I don't know. We loved our time in Dublin, but were encouraged by the experience to make sure our next trip would be one where we had chances to head out of the city and explore the surrounding countryside. Depending on who you are, our trip to Dublin ended with either a) a fabulous sight or b)a tragic scene. Outside the windows of our bus as we headed out of town to the airport.....as thousands and thousands of middle aged women scrambled through the streets, headed for the city stadium...to enjoy their mush anticipated 'Westlife' concert. :)