Irregular London dispatch #2

**Another email update to friends and family, sent in October**

Hi party people,

It's been ages since I sent that first, crazy long update on our life in London. Here's my attempt to 1) remember what we've done the past several weeks and 2) get you up to speed without (I don't know without what, it just seemed like that should be an alternative to #1). My memory is hazy because it's all flown by (but not always in a good way), so take the timeline below +/- 1-2 weeks.

Weeks 4 & 5
work, work, work (Leslie)
record daily spending in Moleskine (Peter)

Coldplay concert featuring Girls Aloud, someone else and Jay-Z, all at Wembley Stadium. Enough said.

Make offers on flats, after spending two exhaustive days with the flat finding guy - a Spanish/British/French national named Carlos who says "bye" like he's whispering it to his fairy godmother for the last time

Catch up with an old friend of Leslie's

There's a lot more I could tell you about the search for a flat, but it's still too painful to relive so I'll just leave it at:
The rental market in London is fucked up, securing a place costs a bajillion pounds and no, we did not manage to win the lottery or find that buried treasure beforehand. And we named our top 3 choices after Spice Girls to keep them all straight when we had to figure out what offer to make on which. Our preferences were, in order of highest priority: Baby Spice, Posh Spice and Old Spice. We ended up with Old Spice.

My ex-boyfriend's stepmother came to London to give a talk at a university in Leeds and then came to London to spend a day. PK and I met up with her for dinner at a really nice and reasonably priced Thai restaurant in a hotel on the edge of Hyde Park near Paddington. Kathleen is like an aunt to me, so it was really nice to see her and catch up. She also gave PK the thumbs up and brought me a little present. At this point, we were both missing feeling cared for by friends and family, so dinner with Kathleen was like a little lifeline back to our old lives.

We also had dinner with the friends of my former manager at Nordstrom. They moved to London from Seattle a year ago and love it. It also seems that they have some friends here, so there's hope for us.

Week 6
work work work (Leslie - no more time for commas)

Speculate about what life in our new flat will be like and then remember we don't yet have a signed lease agreement so we really don't have a flat yet. Bloody hell. Pester relocation agent about what we need to do next and how we can help the process along. Dodge emails from Leslie's company relocation coordinator about checkout date for corporate flat until she gives up and just extends to the maximum date we're allowed (which we ended up needing).

Our first visitors!!
Peter's sister, Krista, and her roommate, Jessie, came to stay with us for a couple of days. They camped out on the living room floor of our corporate flat. I was crazy busy at work so I didn't get to take any time off to hang out with them during the day, but Peter got to play tour guide for a couple of days. At night we'd end up having some sort of meal together and chatting like girls do, which was awesome. When they left, our flat felt so empty it was seriously depressing for a day or so. Must. Make. Friends.

Week 7
I'M SO TIRED OF WORK PLEASE CAN I HAVE A PEE BREAK? (Leslie)
Move in! But first clean the heck out of the flat because the job done "professionally" indicated that the "professional" housecleaners in London are most likely 14 year old boys whose mothers won't let them go out on their single track bicycles with their friends until they pick up their room.

Ikea, meet Peter. He's your new best friend. And can someone in customer service please let us know when things will stop being hard?

Isn't October an important month for us?

After moving in, we needed to get wardrobes (armoires) from Ikea to compensate for the lack of closet space in our flat (getting rid of clothes is just plain un-American). We also needed a small sofa, a rug and a mattress for the bed. We managed to get through the Ikea Relationship Trials TWICE in one week (plus a solo trip by Peter to Ikea to measure his individual fortitude) and also furnish our place for a mere +33% of our original budget. In British pounds. **le sigh**

We had a bit of a fiasco with the mattress. After quickly selecting the one we wanted at Ikea (a lovely spring number with memory foam top) we scheduled the delivery (much more reasonably priced than in Seattle - about $70 vs. $100+ in Seattle) of our furniture and got it two days later. Hooray! A mattress to stick in the bed frame left by the landlord! It was doubly crazy that day as the Ikea delivery happened the day the movers were here delivering our sea shipment and unpacking it all. The double crazy quickly turned into ARE YOU KIDDING ME? when we heaved our new mattress onto the bed frame only to find that it was ~13 cm too narrow for the frame. So after two days of frantic internet research and phone calls to mattress stores, vans for hire and Ikea, we managed to get the Ikea mattress back to Ikea (this did involve me receiving a phone call on my UK mobile while at the office from some random man who, without introducing himself, asked if I was ready for him to come over. Luckily for everyone involved, I'm good at rapid situational arithmetic and was able to figure out that Peter must have called this guy and given him my number since Peter still does not have a UK mobile number. Also lucky is that I had a desk phone so I could call Peter to confirm my math and arrange some complex word problems: if a man with a van says he can be there in 20 minutes, how long does Peter have to run home from the hardware store and rewrap the mattress in plastic?). By the end of the week, we had delivered a 100% pure memory foam mattress from a mattress and bed store near our neighborhood. It cost the same as the Ikea mattress but is of superior quality (yes, I did say so) and the delivery was free. And we love it. We love it so much because it represents triumph in the Ikea European/UK Mattress Size War of 2009, it fills every centimeter both length and width-wise of the bed frame and it's darn tootin' comfy to boot. It also remind us of Mark and Ineke (not in a weird way) because Mark has sworn by these mattresses for a long time but Ineke thinks they're hard and not suitable for leaping into bed, which makes me laugh every time I think of her telling me this however long ago. (And yes, I did just out our friends on their own mattress war - do with that what you will. I'm in England and you need a passport to even try to come over here and kick my ass.) I think that if/when we move back to the US, we'll be bringing this mattress with us. Which means we'll also need to buy our own UK bed frame to bring back, but I'll do what I have to do because it was so dang hard to get it in the first place. BTW, a UK king is smaller than an European king and a US king. It's about the size of a US queen.

There was furious unpacking (we didn't have the movers unpack everything because we didn't have places to put everything away) and emailing with the letting agent (the landlord's rep) and the relocation agent (our rep) to figure out what to do with the 4 large boxes of crap the landlord left here so we could finish unpacking our things and make room in the 2nd bedroom for our guests, Aaron and Stacy, who were arriving 8 days after we moved in. It went down to the wire, people. The landlord is an ass and he renews my belief that he's of the Terrence and Philip ilk and it was all I could do not to send him a clip of South Park's "Uncle Fucker". I would say that I hate him, but he did leave a very useful and more than decent Sony iPod stereo thing that we're using the hell out of.

You probably want to know more about our flat, don't you? Here are the deets:

* It's in Belsize Park, which is in zone 2 of the London underground on the Northern line. It's also only 3 stops away from my office.
* 2 bedroom (the second BR is just big enough for a bed), hardwood floors, lots of west facing windows and little balconies outside the MBR and LR that you access by crawling out the window.
* The fact that the flat has hot water on demand almost makes up for the fact that it's a whopping 10 minute walk from the tube for Peter. We can also walk to a bus line in 5 minutes.
* Here's a Google street view link so you can see our place. Our building is the one with the scaffolding in front, which is no longer there (the scaffolding, I mean. Of course the building's still there.).
* Our neighbors are Chris and Gwyneth and 10 minutes' walk away in Primrose Hill, lives our old chum, Jude Law. George Michael's up the road in Hampstead, but he's usually too busy soliciting volunteers in Hampstead Heath to come and hang out with us at our local, the Washington, which is a mere 3 doors down. There's also a Starbucks, a small grocery store, Indian, Chinese and Italian restaurants around the corner. When Peter's not busy memorizing the aisle and location of every item at Ikea, he's down at the hardware store hanging out with Sirajul and Mujibar.
* Belsize Park is chock full of yummy mummies and wealthy expats. Since it's in north London, the landscape is a little bit hilly (it gets really hilly in Hampstead and Highgate, which are to the north of us) and there are trees. Looks a lot like Cap Hill in Seattle, minus gross Broadway, but even that scene can be found in nearby Camden Town.
* We pay a lot for rent and will be paying even more in council taxes (in London, renters pay property tax, too) and utilities.

I'll upload pictures some time and send y'all a link. Right now, my Flickr uploads are backlogged from our trip to Japan and Hong Kong last Christmas, so I make no promises on when this might actually happen.

In the midst of all this unpacking, delivery/pick up logistics and trips to the hardware store and Ikea, we almost forgot that our 3rd anniversary was fast approaching. Fortunately, when we first arrived we joined as members of Southbank Centre (art gallery and performing arts venues) and scored tickets to a talk by Ed Ruscha so we went to that on the 12th and then had a late dinner at a surprisingly good Mexican restaurant (the Brits do not know how to do Mexican, people). Last year we went to CA's wine country.

Week 8
Work relents enough for a pee break
More visitors!

Our first guests at our new flat arrived last Tuesday - Aaron and Stacy! - for a whole week! It's amazing how quickly our flat started to feel like a home once they arrived. Back in Seattle, we constantly had friends over to our barely furnished house but their presence always made it feel homey and the Kassovers' arrival did the same here. Peter spent the days with them sightseeing and then I would meet them for dinner. Aaron's stepmom, Philippa, and his dad were in London as well, so we met up with them at Philippa's parents' house in South London (near Battersea) for dinner. So nice to have dinner at someone's home rather than another crowded, cramped, loud London restaurant.

I took the day off last Friday and this Monday so we could have a 4 day weekend. After researching the cost of trains, Peter hired (you don't rent - you hire) a car for the weekend and we set off for Shropshire near the Welsh border by way of Stonehenge and a night in Bath first. After checking out Stonehenge, we set off for Bath. We arrived in the later afternoon and checked into our B&B and then took a 10 minute walk through a nice park to the center of town. On our way to the spa, we realized we were all feeling a bit peckish so we ducked into the Garrick's Head for some drinks and nibbles. I managed to induct a fourth person (Stacy) into the Unholy Dis-Order of Pear Cider. Then we took in a nighttime bath at a rooftop pool fed by a thermal hot spring before heading back to the B&B. After wandering around in Bath for a couple of hours the next day, we set off for Shropshire to spend 2 nights at a B&B owned by Aaron's stepmother's high school friend. The rest of the weekend was filled with ridiculously idyllic English countryside scenery: narrow country roads bordered with tall hedges, pheasants crossing the streets, sheep dotting the land and rolling hills of pasture marked by borders of hedges. We even met and spoke with a bona fide English farmer wearing wellies. Patrick and Di, the owners of the B&B, were consummate hosts and really made us feel welcome and at home. Their house made an excellent and inviting home base while their cat, Possum, a sleek black cat with white boots, greeted us every time we came back and spent time with all of us in front of the wood burning stove while we had some really good conversations with Pat and Di about everything from health care, Obama, travel, how they met and what makes something "proper".

We just got back from Shropshire last night and at the ass crack before dawn, Aaron and Stacy climbed into a taxi headed for Heathrow. To be honest, I wasn't super sad to see them go because I was just so tired (it was 5 AM). But when I got home from work today and their room was void of all their luggage and the coffee table was all cleared off, it wasn't the same. It seems that despite all the furnishing and decorating, a home is really not a home until you can fill it with the people you love. So I might get a TV.

Well, that's it in a giant email. I'll try not to let so much time pass before the next update because I just can't remember that far back anyway.

In case any of you want it, here's our mailing address:
**OMMITTED** I'M NOT PUTTING THAT SHIT ON THE INTERWEBS.

Feel free to send presents, letters and money.

We're heading to Paris for 5 days via the Eurostar in a couple weeks. And then PK's family is coming to town for Thanksgiving (which they don't celebrate here, but we will!).

If you made it this far through the email, here's a special offer for you:
How would you like to stay in our 2 bedroom flat for a week at Christmas? We'll be in Shanghai visiting my mom, so you would have the place all to yourself. Send me an email and let me know if you're interested. It's not a first come, first serve thing: we would need to see who's interested and the dates and everything would need to fall into place just so. Having said that, we don't have any crazy requirements (like you having to pay us a week's wages in gold).

Miss you all and hope every last one of you and yours are well. Drop a line if you can - news from home is always welcome.

x's and o's,
Leslie (& Peter)

P.S. If I forgot anyone in this list, it's not on purpose. So just pass it on and tell them to get their panties unbunched. xoxo