First Few Days in Londontown

3.9.2008

After a long trip from Helsinki to Heathrow and some unfortunate delays, I successfully got to the flat. It is absolutely brilliant. Parquet floors, double beds, brand new kitchen with new equipment(we’re the 2nd group to live in the flat since it was renovated), the whole place real nice and clean. At least clean enough; the flat had been empty for over a month and some maintenance work had been done, so it was pretty dusty and a bit gritty in places, but nothing that was really much of a bother. No pillows though, so had to spend some money on pillows, duvet covers, sheets, etc.

First thing I tried to do after the landlord gave us the keys and left was to see if the neighbors had any unsecured networks that we could’ve leeched off from. There were about five of networks, but the bastards had secured them all so we couldn’t use any. Living without the internet is a real pain in the arse. Today we’re trying to arrange the BT broadband service, and if all goes well we should have internet in about a week or so, fingers crossed.


I’ve also gone to the bank today to try and set up an account with Lloyds TSB, and was sent off for a few hours with an appointment at 3 o’clock. So I came to a pub I saw yesterday that was meant to have Free WiFi but as it stands, it’s not working. Oh well, I’ll have to learn to live with my withdrawal symptoms. Anyway, the man in the bank seemed pretty optimistic about setting up an account, so hopefully I can get that done today.


Yesterday we got to an internet café to apply for British Gas/Electricity online, and hopefully that went okay. I don’t know why it wouldn’t have worked, but I suppose you never really know. They are meant to send us some welcome package via mail which we are then meant to send back to them with some forms filled in, but that should be alright…


I flew in on Monday so this is my third day here, and so far I am enjoying it a lot. Wood Green is really quite brilliant. Apart from a few areas to which I wouldn’t want to stumble in at night, everything is pretty savvy. There’s a cheap supermarket in Wood Green center called Morrison’s where the food prices for one are a hell of a lot cheaper than anything I’ve seen in Finland. 800g of minced beef was a little over £2 which is brilliant. Now I don’t know how disgusting that meat will actually turn out to be, but it didn’t look horrible. Also, everything is a lot cheaper here than in the center. Every pub has pints for less than £2, and even the lunch menus and whatnot are probably about a good 20% cheaper than in central London. If the area turns out to be nice and livable, then I reckon we’ve made a very good choice getting the flat from this part of time. The kind of quality we’re getting for the money we’re paying is absolutely brilliant; loads of people a bit closer to central are living in places half the quality of ours but are paying probably about £40 - £50 more per month.

I’ll try to take some pictures of the area to post online :)