Winter Holiday in Sutton

It's been almost a week since we arrived in the UK and it's kind of felt as if we are on holiday. Although Frans is trawling through job sites and phoning recruiters a lot of the time, we have been able to do a fair amount of relaxing and local sightseeing. Sutton (where we're staying with our friends Kyle and Kelly) is a sweet suburban town south of London and really has everything you need; large supermarkets, banks, train station and a high street with phone shops, pharmacies and clothing shops.
We've been trying to take a different route each day when we go for our run so that we can see more of the area. Most of the houses are really pretty with a little front garden. On Tuesday, we ran to Carshalton which is a tiny village a few Ks away. There is a beautiful park there and some ponds or small lakes. On Thursday we walked to Cheam for a pub lunch and a visit to a Tudor period wattle-and-daub building called Whitehall.
Wednesday was a trip into central London for meetings with recruiters for Frans. It was very exciting to be in London and we really felt like this was why we had come. The buildings are so grand and detailed, all the pavements are so wide and filled with people bustling everywhere. The smell of coffee as you pass a cafe on almost every corner offsets the miserable weather; grey with a bit of rain now and then.
So part of our plan is to hit the ground running, and join a Parkrun on our first Saturday here. Kelly took us to a beautiful park called Nonsuch in Cheam, the neighbouring town. It was very chilly this morning and we were caught out by the bus journey; we calculated that we needed to leave the house at 7.45 to catch the correct bus to Cheam. But once we arrived in Cheam, we realised that the journey was only 10 minutes and we had almost an hour to kill before the race started at 9am! We didn't have a car to sit in, or warm clothes as we were going to be running. So we shivered our way through 45 minutes and then joined the "warm up" gang running in circles before the race started.
Tomorrow we're going to Brixton (another suburb of London, a little more central than where we are now) to go to a Mexican Carnival. We are meeting Paddy and Kerry there which we are really looking forward to!