Glasgow looks like home, for now...

Well, time has passed and we have now (almost) left behind the hotel, jet setting lifestyle. Almost because we have one last trip to make next weekend (May day weekend). We will be renting a car (well a 7 seater van) and driving back down south to Sutton in Greater London to drop off my Mum who is heading back to Australia and to collect the rest of our luggage. In the meantime, we have now found and settled into our new flat in Merchant City in the heart of Glasgow. We have all the amenities and utilities arranged and, especially now that we have the prospect of regular bills coming in, I am now looking for work in earnest.

Glasgow is turning out to be a very comfortable place to live. In many ways it is quite like Adelaide. The people are quite laid back and friendly (well, most of them, but this is Scotland) and the layout of the city is rather grid like. There seems to be quite a lot of restaurants, nightclubs and cafes (although with kids we might not be able to see quite so many of them). We have still yet to find a good place for lots of fresh veggies and fruits (we also currently have an inestimably small fridge) but haven’t found the farmer’s markets yet. We also have to look around the west end to see what kind of shops are round there.

As an aside, for anyone that has wondered about the funny little phenomenon of west end / east end in cities in the UK, there is an interesting explanation. In most UK cities, especially ones that had a lot of industry, there tends to be a west end that is posh and upper class, and an east end that is working class and common. This is to do with the fact that in the UK the prevailing winds are mostly from the west off of the Atlantic Ocean and towards the European coast. This means that the pollution from the factories would be blown towards the eastern side of the city, meaning that the east was usually full of smoke and grime from the factories. Thus the rich bought in the cleaner west side of the city and the poor in the grimier east.

So we cut the difference and chose the Merchant City in the centre of the town. Merchant City used to be a warehouse and market area which also housed (and still houses) a number of civil building for the city. Now it seems to be in the midst of a redevelopment rush as a lot of the old warehouses are being converted into apartments and so forth. Unfortunately we happen to be living right next to one of these redevelopments in progress, still, it’s probably why the rent was so reasonable. The funny thing about that is that all the building sites I’ve seen in the UK is that they have these signs that apologise for the noise and inconvenience and often state a membership in an association of builders that are courteous to the general public around them (no late noise, cleaning up rubble, making sure that dust isn‘t a problem, etc). So I find it amusing that they don’t seem to work weekends and they all stop around 5-6 pm. From what I remember in Australia, most people would be ecstatic if building sites followed that ideal.

Anyway it’s getting late and I’m off to bed. For those that are interested, I’ve made a quick web gallery of some of the photos I’ve taken and will try to get it uploaded soon.

Cheers

Yes, we're not dead yet....

As Heather has pointed out to me (thanks Heather :-), It has been quite a long time since my last entry into the blog, but something has happened that has made writing much easier. We have bought a laptop for use in the UK for both my and Annmarie’s studying and for doing other things like looking for work (which is something I am currently doing properly) etc. For those who might be interested it’s a Compaq Presario 2100. So this now means that I can write up entries before hand and then upload them onto the web when I next connect to the net (the internet café nearby has facilities for bringing in your own laptop and connecting that to the net).

We are currently holed up in sunny Glasgow (the friendly city is the official catch line I believe). We are staying in what should be our last fancy hotel for some time (the Radisson SAS, I highly recommend it, especially the breakfast buffet) as we are currently looking for somewhere more permanent. We have looked around for a 2 bedroom flat in our perceived price range, but being the snobs that we are, we are now looking for 1 bedroom flats so we can be in the west end (there‘s just a better class of people there). It now looks like Annmarie will not be working for the short term (it‘s going to take longer than we originally thought for it to get settled), so we have dicided to change our plans and head up north. Annmarie thinks Londoners are all too sullen and grumpy anyway, and thinks that the Scottish seem much cheerier in general. So now it looks like I am looking for proper daytime work in the country of my birth.

But, of course, everone is probably more interested in the previous couple months travel. The previous entries were all rushed attempts at getting something up, so maybe I should just turn the clock back to the beginning and recap the whole trip…

Tokyo

Tokyo was everything that the clichés make it out to be. It was bewildering, energetic, chaotic, enormous yet full of a strange sense of calm and tranquillity. It sometimes felt like those odd little bits of film you see occasionally where a single figure sits still amongst a bustling crown with the film sped up. Other times it just felt like we were back home, that there was no pressure of the largest city on earth.

Of course our trip there was not without drama (what journey to somewhere as exotic as the orient would be devoid of such things). Oddly enough, it seemed that most of our problems came from following the standard tourist travel advice (combined with not realising that when your on holiday, other people have weekends).

When we arrived in Narita airport, we were of course tired (flying with 2 kids is hard work, even when they behave) and in a foreign land. We were also over half an hour behind schedule. Once we got through customs (the most thorough and detailed customs check of the whole trip) and put our bigger bags into storage at the airport, we needed to get to our hotel.

It wasn’t actually a hotel though, it was a actually a nice, budget version of a traditional Japanese inn called a “ryokan”. This is a word that we seem to never have pronounced correctly once in the whole time we stayed in Japan. Every time we told someone we were staying in a ryokan, we got strange, confused looks till we changed it to “small hotel” then we got looks of relief and recognition.

Anyway, we were in Narita airport, with bags safely stowed. I had already planned that we catch a train called the Narita Express (or the limited express, depending on times) from a station located conveniently under the terminal, out to a station in Ueno, from where we would switch deftly to a subway train on the Oedo line, and travel three stops to the neighbourhood in which our accommodation was located then walk, probably for only maybe five to ten minutes to arrive at our destination. As it happens, we now know that had we followed this course, I would have been just about right with map reading for the final walk aside.

Instead, Annmarie just wanted to get there as quickly as possible...