Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Our new dog!!!!!

Our flatmate Dan just brought his pet to come live with us (he had been up in Manchester with Dan's mom), and so now we have an awesome new member of the household!

Meet Chunky!


We love him soooo much!

Monday, September 10, 2007

London here we come!

So after a great deal of excitement and only a few major mishaps we have finally made the big move south to our new place in London. Our new place of residence is in a really great flat with our roommates Tanya and Daniel in Camden, just minutes from the Chalk Farm tube stop. Our new place is extremely nice and homey, and in many ways like our old place in Eugene. It has wood floors, big windows and is very nicely decorated. It is in a 1920s era block of flats with a courtyard of trees in the center. There are lots of families and people from all over the world living in the complex and it so it always smells like delicious cooking! We are within a short walk of the rest of Camden, with all its amazing pubs and music venues, as wells as nearby Regent's Park, Hampstead Heath and the really nice neighborhood of Primrose Hill. We are within 20 minutes of central London and yet our neighborhood is so pleasant, full of trees and families and quiet streets. I still can't believe how quiet and nice our apartment is. Our roommates are great. Tanya is a freelance photographer and Daniel is an actor who runs his own landscaping business. They have great tastes and share many of the same interests as we do. So far we are having a really fun time. Last night we had an illicit barbecue in the back yard and bought tickets to see Arcade Fire together in October. After a big trip to Ikea for storage stuff we are getting settled in very nicely in the new place, and can already tell we will be much more comfortable than we were in our old place.

The last few weeks have also been quite exciting. My mom came to visit us and we had a really fine time hanging out together and seeing the sights. Ryan went down to London early for a job interview and so the first week of September was spent just my mom and I getting the house packed up. I was in charge of putting on a charity concert in Edinburgh on the 5th to raise money for sustainable development programmes in Darfur, Sudan and so that has been a major preoccupation for me since finishing my dissertation. In the end, despite an enormous amount of work, we had a pretty low turnout at the concert. Still we made money for the charity and I learned an enormous amount about putting on gigs. Hoping to try again and put another one on in London this year for the same cause once we get settled in and I get a chance to become more acquainted with the music scene here.

In other news, the move down to London was a big debacle. We had reserved a van ahead of time to drive all our stuff down to London, but when my mom and I went to pick it up it turned out the thing was a people carrier not a hauling van and it wouldn't work at all for what we needed. After a feeble attempt to remove the seats and put all our stuff inside, which failed miserably, we ended up returning the thing and calling all over town until we found a company that had a large hauling van available. When we finally got the thing, we realized we had erred on the side of caution and gone too big! The thing was extra long and tall and very hard to maneuver. To make matters worse, it was a manual transmission, making my mom the sole driver as I don't know how to drive stick and wasn't about to start on a rental vehicle in the UK! Unfortunately, mom had not driven a stick since 1963 and certainly not done so on a hilly terrain in rush hour traffic! We had a terrible time driving the thing back to my house, stalling at several stop lights and getting it stuck in an alleyway where we had to ask this nice guy walking by to maneuver it out for us. By the time we got the van home and packed it, it was after five pm, and I had developed a terrible headache. In the end mom drove down to London in one shot, with no dinner and no stops to rest or pee for over eight hours with me in the passenger seat loaded up on painkilers and groaning. Once we got to London we got lost for an hour and finally made it to my new house after 2 am. What a mess!! All in all, mom did a heroic job, so if you see her give her a big clap on the back!

Anyway, we are now here in our new place, and despite these initial hiccups, we are looking forward to a fantastic year.

alletta