Real Estate Agents

Real Estate agent on Park Lane

We had an interesting experience with real estate agents whilst trying to find a place to live.  It's really quite different over here from in Sydney.  For those who may not have rented in Sydney, our experience has been you have to move fast.  You'll turn up at the Saturday morning viewing, along with 20 other people, you have to fill in the application form straight away and bring along your documentation as well as the holding deposit.  If you don;t do that you'll miss out.  It always seemed really competitive and as if the agents always viewed renters as these annoying creatures they have to deal with before they can move onto the big bucks in selling properties.

Here in London it's been a totally different experience.  It seems as if the market is still really competitive, at least that's what the agents say, but then we applied for 2 places and got both, so I'm dubious as to how tight it really is.  But the main, massive difference, between Sydney and London, is that you'll turn up wanting to see a place, and the real estate agent will actually drive you out to see the place.  I have to say, I could get used to that sort of luxury :)

Our very own hat stand

We were dealing with 2 agents and when we first got in touch with them, we kind of picked a rental number out of the air, we didn't really know what rents were worth in London.  The first agent said, no sorry we don't have anything for that price, whilst the second said, yep no worries we'll find you something.

We then proceeded to spend about 3 days with this second agent as they showed us dive after dive.  There was always something wrong with it, right next door to a main highway, up a pokey staircase with no hope of fitting furniture up there, full of mold, too expensive.  We were starting to despair.  We had even raised the rent we were willing to pay in the hopes of finding something, but still we get shown places with bathrooms we wouldn't fit in, beds we couldn't sleep in.  I was starting to get worried.

Our living room / dining room and through to our cozy kitchen

At which point I contacted the first agent again to let them know we had raised the amount of rent we were willing to pay and whether they had anything.  The next day we saw three places with them, all of which were nicer than anything we had seen previously, all for less rent.  We ended up taking the third place we saw.

Our kitchen, massive freezer but lacking somewhat in bench space

It's not to say the first agency wasn't nice, everyone we dealt with were really friendly and helpful.  It's just I think they like to get people moved in quickly without any real concern with what they are actually looking for.

Our bedroom, it even has a chandelier

Another difference with the rental market is that it seems most places come furnished, and it has no bearing on the rent.  In fact if you want a place unfurnished, often it will be more expensive as the landlord has to pay to store furniture somewhere.  I'm not sure why this is.  Do people rent here for shorter periods of time before buying?  Are most people renting in London essentially transients, in that they stay a few years before moving on?  I can't work out why you would want to constantly be sleeping in other people's beds and using their cookware otherwise.

The cafes in Hampstead

The place we eventually found has a lot of charm (ie it's quite small), but it's in Hampstead, which is a fantastic location.  I like to think of it as the Montemarte of London, in that it is on top of a hill and there are a lot of cobblestone laneways around.  There are more rich people though and less people trying to sell string bracelets.  There seem to be some good pubs around which we will have to work our way through, and only 10 minutes walk from Hampstead Heath. 

Hampstead Heath is quite different from the other green spaces of London, much wilder, with little dirt tracks disappearing off into wooded groves and dogs everywhere.  In fact it's more a case of the dogs can run everywhere and there is only a tiny fenced off area where dogs aren't allowed and that is where the toddlers can roam free.

Oh and about the lack of posts recently, we still haven't got internet (or a phone) at our new place.  This has limited our blogging somewhat.  I'm attempting to post this over the 3G network, so we'll see how we get on.  Thank goodness for free, unlimited mobile phone internet.

Natural History Museum

An impressive facade

Dave with the lovely building

We visited the natural history museum the other weekend, this has got to be one of the big London attractions, especially considering it gets a place along Exhibition Road.

The building is certainly impressive and was actually built specifically for the purpose of housing the natural history specimens in the Bristish Museum.  It first opened in 1881, but some of the specimens go as far back as 1753.  In fact there are even things collected by Joseph Banks on his voyage with Captain Cook.

We didn't get to see the full collection, too many screaming kids, we'll have to go back in the middle of winter, but there were some real finds there.

There was a lot of things I'd never seen before; a mammoth's head, a full dinosaur skeleton in the main hall, fossils of early humans, sabre tooth cat and deep sea creatures were all on my hit list.

What are you doing there sheep? Plus two more mythical creatures

Things like the mammoth are so freaky you kind of think of them as mythical creatures, just because you've never seen one and they sound so outlandish.  So it was great to see one in the flesh, or bone as the case may be.

To the left are some more seriously strange animals, what's with the double set of tusks?  And literally that deer (or dik dik) would not have even come up to my knee. I'm not sure what the sheep was doing there, maybe it was hoping to bask in reflected glory.

The main hall, complete with dinosaur

Even the boring animals were interesting.  There was a great exhibit on camels.  For instance, did you know that if a double humped camel mates with a single humped camel then the offspring has one really long hump?  And that they can drink 135 litres of water in 15 minutes and then look majorly pregnant for a couple of hours as the water makes it's way into the tissues.

One thing I definitely have to go back for is the dinosaur exhibit.  They had one set up in the main hall and it was impressive.  Unfortunately that area was packed to the gills though so we were a bit hesitant.

The man : Joseph Banks

Faded snow leopard

We mainly focussed on the mammal exhibit.  When you first walk into the main room and look up there is a full scale model (?) of a blue whale.  I'm not sure if it was a model or a stuffed creature. I think it must have been a model, it was far too big, but then taxidermists are pretty skilled.

A lot of the animals were obviously stuffed a long time ago though, and their fur had started to really fade.  I guess it's no longer allowed to go out collecting rare animals just so you can kill them, stuff them and stick them in a museum.  So we have to make do with threadbare lions and faded snow leopards.

A 1500 year old sequoia

In fact there was one very sad looking chimpanzee skeleton which had been arranged to look very much like a little child.  The story attached to it was that it had been captured in the wild, but on the journey back to England it had an accident and had smashed it's jaw against the mast and subsequently died from it's injury.  You could see the damage to the skeleton on the left side of it's face.  It looked very forlon.

To the left is a section taken from a Californian redwood.  This thing was 1500 years old, it was incredible.  Apparently there aren't many left.  It must be amazing to see these in real life.

What do you mean free unlimited internet?

I got myself a new sim card the other day, one which works in London.  I don't think there was anything particularly special about the deal I got, except for £10 I could call overseas for 5p a minute and access the 3G network for a year with unlimited downloads.  That's completely crazy!

For someone who is still hearing about friends being slugged with hundred's of dollars of excess data fees when they first buy iPhones, I can't believe this is possible.  And the other thing is that the network is faast, in fact I would say almost comparable to wifi speeds in Oz.  As a long-suffering vodafail sap, I'm in smart phone heaven.

Celebrity Spotter

After only 4 days in London we've already seen our first celebrity, Matt Lucas of Little Britain fame.  He walked right between Dave and myself on the way to Selfridges.  I actually didn't recognise him at the time, he was wearing a bowler hat and was on the phone.  I'll have to walk around with my phone camera permanently at the ready otherwise I'll have no chance.

At this rate we should see all the celebrities in the world in approximately 2 years, assuming there are 178 celebrities of note.

London Arrival

St Paul's Cathedral at dusk

For those of you who may not be aware Dave and I are now based in London.  We arrived a week ago following a 27 hour plane journey and a 1.5 hour immigration queue (we really need to get Dave some sort of EU pass).

Here we'll be documenting our adventures and answering the big questions. 

For the first week we have been frantically trying to find a more permanent base, which I'll be talking about in another post.  But now that is finally (almost) sorted and we can get on to the more important task of behaving like tourists.  Though we did manage to get our first "Are you South African?" the other day, so perhaps we are already well on our way to being tourists.

We'll be based in Hampstead, for those who may not be intimately familiar with London suburbs it's north west of the city.  It has a really lovely feel to it, the short time I've been there, with little cobblestone laneways and Parisian style cafes.  Our place is pretty small, but I think that's fairly standard for London.

We've already been planning our first trip away, we're thinking Ireland, just because that's something so few Aussies do and we're crazy cats that way.