Livin' it up in London

After leaving Oxford, we went down to London and stayed with my friend Pam in Pimlico for a month before I had to leave to head back to NZ. 'Pimilco Pam' - it has a nice ring to it... I had a great time being a haus frau in London and Adrian especially enjoyed the 20 minute commute to work (as opposed to the four hour saga from Oxford).

We managed to get out and see all sorts of sights and sounds, like the Tower of London and the filming of Never Mind the Buzzcocks with Jeff and Sara, partying with Jeff and Ruth, and lots of markets when Mum and Dad were here - the Columbia Flower Markets, Spitalfields, the Borough Markets, the Up Market...the list goes on!

I would have uploaded a photo to this post, but completely forgot that NZ has capped broadband usage and completely ran down the flat's internet account so have no capacity to play around with big files or anything... So, you can check out the photos here instead!

Where's Wally?

Well, Wally #1 (Amelia) is back in Wellington (a Wally in windy Welly, how appropriate...) for the time being (see photographic evidence) and Wally #2 (Adrian) is staying in London to rake in those ££££s...

Ah, the long distance relationship, how fun. Not.

But, until the visa fairy decides to bestow on Amelia (a) a European passport of some kind (b) a whopping great PhD scholarship and a student visa or (c) a working visa to the UK, that's the situation we're stuck with... But, to make things more interesting, we've decided to have all sorts of holidays in exotic locations to make the year go by just that little bit more quickly. Holiday #1 is going to be held in the beautiful region that is Northland, followed by a quick jaunt to Wellington and the Coromandel, while Holiday #2 at Easter time is tentatively planned for South America - I can't wait!

So, while the spendthrift and the miser are apart, these blog posts might become a bit sparser as each of us stays in lock-down, saving money mode, but there will still be hopefully at least a post a month whenever the urge to spend $$ becomes too much! (And chances are very, very strong that that will be Wally #1 rather than #2...).

So, to get things started as we mean to continue, I've got some graduation and London photos that I'll put up soon, look out for them before Christmas!

How did 12 months go by so fast??

Well, it was inevitable, as, like sands through the hourglass, the days of our lives must go on... (Not so oblique reference to the not insignificant amount of daytime television I have been watching lately - although, on a complete tangent, why is British television replete with cooking and property shows and absolutely no Bold and the Beautiful etc.??)

But, I digress! To cap off an absolutely brilliant year in Oxford, we had a few farewell drinks at one of our local pubs, the Royal Oak, to say goodbye and also, with fortuitous timing, celebrate getting our MSc marks back. It was great to see everyone and we really felt fortunate to have met such lovely people.

So thanks everyone for making 2008/09 so special and don't forget to keep in touch!

The rest of the photos from the night are here.

Our final visitors

It's the final countdown, da da da dum dum... (Sorry, the title of the post just brought that song to mind...)

In our last month in Oxford we had a flurry of visitors keen to sample the sights and sounds of rural life - well, rural for London dwellers! Amber and Rachael came up for a weekend, followed by Euan another weekend and then finally Pam came up on our very last two days in Oxford and helped me move final bits and pieces back down to London while Adrian was off cycling the approximately 135km to Cambridge just for fun...

We managed to get two more punts down the river in which was great fun - although with the girls getting the windy day and Euan getting the calm, still day, the weather didn't really match up to the brute strength required to not get forced over to the edges of the river! What's that you say about punting being a matter of skill, rather than force? Obviously one year in Oxford does not a master punter make then...

Euan's weekend visit coincided with a flatwarming of some NSEP friends so it was lucky that the (extremely dodgy) spare bike hadn't yet fallen to pieces so we could all head over there for some merriment. Thanks for having us Belvedere Road!

After Pam's visit we headed to a hang drum/bass clarinet concert off Leicester Square and it was absolutely amazing! It was a duo called 'The Living Room' and here's one of them playing the hang drum - it's a new instrument from Switzerland and sounds incredible. They did some more lullaby stuff like this, but also some Nirvana, Queen etc. covers which made everyone laugh out loud.



The photos of Amber and Rachael's visit are here, the ones of Euan's visit are here, and finally, Pam's visit photos are here.

Enjoy!

Bits and bobs

Updating the blog has been a bit of a low priority as of late, what with HANDING IN MY DISSERTATION and other administrative matters such as finding a place to live in London and all the other joyful things that come with moving out such as getting final gas readings etc. etc.

But as the previous sentence might have alerted you to, the exciting occasion finally came around when we all handed in our dissertations and officially finished our MSc course. We get our marks back this week which is slightly nerve-wracking, but knowing that we've all passed (well, I'm assuming everyone did enough to pass!) takes the edge off the stress a bit. I took some photos of the relaxing that came afterwards - check them out here.

I also made a photo album of the various bits and bobs of summer, mostly of stuff in and around Oxford, but also including a day trip that I took to Bath to see my friends Sonja and Amy. Deserving of its own album however was the afternoon that Adrian and I spent in the gardens at Blenheim Palace which was absolutely gorgeous and well worth the half hour cycle. (I'm a cycling novice, it seemed like a long way on the map!).
Enjoy the photos!