Sunday, September 13, 2009

it's an Offley nice flat, isn't it??

Well, Brian and Sergio have now been in London for three full days. It's been an up-and-down journey of jet lag, exploration, cultural adjustment, (brief) despair, and general anticipation.

We're staying in Peckham Rye with some very generous friends of Brian's, and have been using that as our temporary base of operations. From here, we have conducted our blitzkrieg apartment search, armed with our trusty "London A to Z" (thank you, Madelyn!) and looking up housing listings on Gumtree, the UK equivalent of Craig's list. (I'm still not quite sure why they chose the botanical name...)

After the first day of searching on Thursday, we were pretty dispirited and ready to throw in the towel, having sifted through truly dreadful listings like this one and visited only one place which, in Sergio's words "felt like you could get herpes just from standing on the carpet." That was not a good day.

But things got better on Friday, when we found a lovely one-bedroom flat in Kennington, blocks away from the Oval Tube stop. The Oval itself, for those who don't know, is a giant cricket stadium and the neighborhood around it is lovely: there's a nearby park, a nice church that holds a Farmer's Market every Saturday, as well as friendly shops and restaurants. Here's some pictures we took around the neighborhood today:







But really, the nicest thing about our street, Offley Road, and about the house itself is how completely "English" it looks. What's the point of moving to London if the place doesn't look like this?





We won't be able to move into the place until mid-October, but having it makes us feel much more secure. Now that the big search seems pretty much 'sorted', we'll be moving on to other things...

1 comment:

  1. peckham rye
    ouch!
    dont leave the house without ur blade ah ah

    so i have my answer

    you ARE south of the river
    although not too far from brixton and clapham so not that bad

    SW2 (unless it's SW9) in brixton, round the corner from M&S is an all time fave
    esp the painting on the wall

    and what can i say about the 2 brewers in clapham
    u shud go check pam ann there

    although she is a high flyer now so she might shun the place where it all began
    kazbar next door is ok but i,ve probably left a bigger trace in the two brewers

    go to herne hill at the weekend
    it's lovely and very villagey
    and brockwell park is fab too

    oh gosh am getting over excited now!!

    and the gumtree is aussie!!
    some aussies reckojn there are 1 million of them in britian
    i doubt it but there is a few (too many?) of them around

    so what took u to blighty?
    how long for?

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