Our First week in London… Holiday? Or not a holiday? That is the question.

Greetings Australia! From cloudy Loughton!

Well what a week it has been… Our super-cheap flight from Stuttgart Germany into “London” landed us out at Stansted airport, the furthest airport from London that somehow still claims to be a London airport! Luckily for us this was the best airport for us to picked up from by Jo’s family friends, who we have been staying with here in London (Phil, Carole and their two boys Rob and Chris). Upon arriving we spent one day getting acquainted with this little town out in the North-East of London (Zone 6 approximately 40mins from central London). Taking a look at the High Street, finding out where the trains and buses leave from, before - somewhat unexpectedly - being left the keys to the house while the family went on holidays for the week! But that’s okay Jo and I are pretty trustworthy Aussies, we didn’t even have a single party!! (Mainly because we didn’t know anyone to invite). Instead we spent the week… house-hunting *shudder*… this is the point where our overseas holiday stopped being a holiday and Jo and I had to take things seriously.

We spent the first few days trying out the numerous different suburbs of London, visiting cheap properties and flat shares trying to determine which parts of London were ‘dodgy’ and which were… respectable. Our conclusion is really quite simple the East half of London is dodgy!! So we have decided to concentrate our efforts on the western half, which appears to have less ghetto-like suburbs and better transport links, basically the opposite of Sydney.

By the end of the week after trawling through Gumtree.com and visiting numerous properties we were beginning to become a little discouraged as we just couldn’t find the right mix of flatmates, room size, suburb and services in a building that doesn’t need to be condemned. So after adjusting our budget (deciding to spend more), only looking in the suburbs we liked and not wasting our time on adds that were written in poor english, we found a couple of very nice places. But things aren’t necessarily that easy… Once you find a nice respectable house and landlord that is after more than just your money, you then have to be selected by the housemates from a huge list of people just like yourselves who have been trawling through Gumtree.com searching for a place like this! So with that said we had two nice places we’d like to live, one has decided they no longer wish to move and the other, hopefully, will call us back very soon with some good news (fingers crossed). So now that we have potentially found a place to live we get to spend this week looking for a place to work *sigh* when will our holiday be a holiday again???