I have mentioned that we are moving into our own flat in the past few blog posts and this weekend that day finally arrived. We are finally in our own little place in Acton.
Moving our stuff from Sutton to Acton without the help of a car was interesting; moving house entirely using public transport was rather tricky. On Thursday, I had to be in Acton 9.30 to meet with the representative from the inventory company. They are in charge of documenting the state of the property before you move in so that if there are any damages incurred during the stay, you can be charged accordingly but not overcharged for things that were broken before you moved in. The process was much more thorough than I expected! He used a recording device and moved around the house identifying everything from scuffs on the walls to the number and type of glasses in the cupboard.
I had done this trip on my own because Frans has taken up a short-term job for a few weeks while he gets all the clearance necessary to start his “real” job. At the moment, he is working for a removal company packing boxes and heaving furniture from place to place. It is back-breaking work, but he is enjoying having something to do during the day and a little bit of extra cash coming in. He has met some interesting characters, many South Africans and Zimbabweans, and always comes home with a story to tell about a huge and beautiful house that he packed up and moved that day.
On the 4th of April, Frans will start working at Royal Bank of Scotland as a Business Analyst – what that entails, I am not that sure. But it has something to do with making sure that the computer programmes and systems are complying with the necessary financial regulations that all banks are required to follow. He will be working as a contractor which means he has had to register himself as a Limited company.
We spent the Easter weekend in our new spot. We don’t have TV or internet access yet, so we spent a lot of time listening to the radio – which was actually quite fun and different from the “usual” entertainment that we have come to rely on!
Then we went to Hammersmith on Sunday to watch the famous head-to-head between the Cambridge and Oxford rowing teams. We had no idea what to expect and only knew that there would be hundreds of thousands of people lining the 4.5km stretch of river where the race was taking place. We met up with Paddy and Kerry at the station and arrived to absolutely pelting rain, luckily the weather cleared up fairly quickly and it ended up being a lovely outing. We managed to find a lovely spot on the Thames walkway with a bench and an uninterrupted view of the river.
On Easter Monday, Frans and I went for a long wandering walk. We walked through the closest park to us – Gunnersbury Park. The far end of the park is near Kew so we wandered through the streets of Kew for a while. We wanted to visit Kew gardens, but they were closed due to the weather. In the morning when we woke up there was rather aggressive wind and rain but by 10am it had cleared up to a lovely sunny day. We discovered later (thanks to Chantal in South Africa) that there had been a rather scary story, Storm Katie, which had lashed many parts of the UK! And this was presumably why Kew Gardens were closed. But we are very keen to visit again soon while it is spring and see the lovely blossoming flowers. Instead we walked along the Thames path spotting the Mallard ducks, swans and barge houses.
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