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...
