New Flat!

Just a quick update until I have time to write more (and add more pictures!) later.


Wow.  So… so much for avoiding the massive posts.  To be fair, I’ve been quite busy so haven’t had time to take things as they come and write them down.

To be honest, most of the last few days hasn’t been particularly interesting – looking at untold numbers of flats in all parts of the city.  I guess the one plus side to flat hunting is that you get to see the city in which you are living.  Because I don’t think I ever would have ended up in Hackney on my own (and trust me, you wouldn’t either).  Tuesday through today was pretty much full-time flat hunting, with a slight break to pick up a job.  In London, it’s very common to flatshare.  This means you live in a house with other people you don’t know (at first) and it’s really hit or miss what you end up with.  There are flats from groups of all students who have group dinners and all live in the sitting room to groups of various aged professionals who live in a place without any sitting room at all and never see each other.  And that’s just the good range of options.  You can use your imagination.  In any case, I’ve seen quite the range.

The best part of the week was when, on Wednesday night, I had dinner at the home of this absolutely wonderful woman named Kim and her husband.  Kim is a good friend of my uncle and aunt from when she met my uncle while they were traveling the world themselves (like I’m doing now!).  They’ve stayed friends and Kim was kind enough to cook me my first home-cooked meal while in London (and what a relief that was after so long having eatten out!).  It was a very fabulous and a bit surreal experience.  I say surreal only in that on top of the delicious food and the champagne she was very liberal with (having found out it was my birthday only a few days previous), I had mentioned I was going to the Dierks Bentley concert later that summer and she insisted putting him on the digital radio during dinner.  So, I was just the slightest bit tipsy from champagne, in London, with people who knew my family but I had just met, eating a delicious homecooked meal, talking about classic literature, and listening to an American country music star.  I have to say, it was fantastic.

The only thing this week that could compare is the fact that tonight, after four solid days of searching, nearly 20 flats and some pretty dodgy experiences, I have finally found a flat.  I had been out all day and had come back to Mimi’s place to relax for a bit and have a quick dinner before my last look of the night.  I was so disappointed in not having found a good place yet, and exhausted after a week of running about the city, I almost bailed on the last viewing but finally dragged myself out to go see.

The flat is owned by a landlord who lives out of the city but currently inhabited by a 24 year old girl named Ann who works as a radio broadcast producer for the BBC.  She runs a Girl Scouts troop, loves Doctor Who and Harry Potter, is very tidy, a bit of a techno-geek, despises smoking, and has been nearly as panicky about finding a flatmate as I have been about finding a flat.  I planned to stop in for five minutes then run back to relax and ended up staying for two and a half hours chatting with Ann.  I’m moving in tomorrow.

The flat is in a perfect location, in Hammersmith, which is a neighborhood on the west side of the city, north of the river.  It’s a really posh neighborhood and almost all residental families but with a really fantastic scattering of shops and pubs and restaurants in the area too.  It’s going to be about a 45 min commute to work, but that’s about standard for the city (some places were a lot worse!!) and it’s very reasonably priced given the area.  I have my own double room, we share a (huge!) bathroom and there’s a giant sitting area with attached kitchen and eating area.  The flat is a bit plain at the moment but we can decorate it as we like.

I’m so so happy and I’m really glad I went with my gut instict and agreed to move in (and to keep looking before!).  It just feels like the right move and by this time tomorrow I’ll be in my own place!  In the morning, I’m going to do a bit of shopping for proper bed linins and such but other than that, it’s all furnished!  Ann is actually out all weekend so I have the flat to myself to get settled and prepare for work next week.

Hopefully over the weekend I’ll have some time to related some of the funnier stories of my flat hunt experience but for now, I’m happy to have someplace safe, comfortable and best of all, friendly to live!  I’m getting well-earned night’s rest.
Two weeks and I’m set with a job and a flat.  How ace am I?


Alright, still homeless.  But… I have a job! I am [unofficially as the paperwork isn’t take care of yet but will be soon] employed!

I’ve been chatting for a while now with a guy named Alex Will who is the cofounder of a site called Spoonfed and playing around with the idea of me working with them and today we basically decided on it! They seem like such fun.  It’s a small internet startup created by these two LSE students while they were in school.  It gives London citizens the chance to view all upcoming events in tons of different genres, and get customized event suggestions based on their interests.  So… all of you people who thought I had gotten out of the event planning side of things, I just can’t escape!

I’m going to be doing marketing and PR for them and I’m basically the only person working on that full time (it’s a really small group, and Alex and his cofounder do a lot of it, but they need to deal with the business development side as well and the financial and executive stuff.  The rest of the group is mainly editorial staff to write the event articles).  Because I’m really working on it myself, I’ve got a ton of freedom to try out tons of different methods and since they’re small, any sort of work could be helpful.  It’ll be a fantastic learning experience and I hope I can be a valuable asset to them!  It seems like such a fun group.

Alright, it’s really time to find a place to live now.


Super tired after a day of house-hunting.  Eh, so so effort – better than before but still nada.  Hopefully a more positive update on the housing hunt tomorrow!


This has been a weekend of museums! Oxford seems to be full of them and, best of all, most of them are free or very inexpensive for students (shh, don’t tell, I’m still using my Colby ID card because it doesn’t have my graduation date printed). On Sunday morning, I took a tour of the Oxford Castle, a structure built in the early eleventh century and has been used as a prison since then (it just stopped housing prisoners in 1996 and at that point it was opened to the public for the first time). I took a tour that led us up to the top of the tower which over looked the whole city – clearly at one point in history it was used to keep an eye out for invading armies but yesterday it offered a great vantage of the Oxford business school to which I’ll be applying in a few years. We then went down into the crypt, supposedly the most haunted place in Oxford and got to view the old (and newer) jail cells. After that, I got to go on a special tour (they’re only running it a few months and only on the weekends) of a new area of the castle they’re just beginning to excavate.

After the castle tour, I went over to the Ashmolean museum, another Victorian style museum with a little of everything. It had some of the most eclectic collections I’ve ever seen including a wall of fob watches, a wing full of Egyptian artifacts, a room of porcelain painted plates, and a hall of master painters including Monet, Picasso, and Cézanne. I ended up spending a lot more time there than I expected and it was getting a bit late in the afternoon by the time I left to walk through Christ Church College (the Harry Potter college) but didn’t feel like paying the L5 entrance fee to go inside a few of the buildings so walked around the meadow and down to the water where there were hundreds of students enjoying the nice weather (the weather has been spectacular this weekend).

I was quite tired so after some more Indian food for dinner I had an early night getting ready to check out of my B&B and head back to London the next day.

Today, I started off by going back to the Oxford Museum of Natural History and Pitt-Rivers Museum again because I hadn’t really had time to view them properly when I visited the Friday before. I ended up spending the entire morning there and still felt like I hadn’t see most of what they had to offer. It was great! The Pitt-Rivers museum had an exhibit on body art and appearance and covered all styles of bodily adornment from all over the world. It was really interesting and they had some very unique artifacts.

After that, I had lunch with Mikki and Sophie, the girls who took care of me on my birthday, and we ate in this cute little coffeeshop in Gloucester Green Square. They’ve been so nice to spend so much time with me when they have finals this week! After lunch, I said goodbye to my new friends and headed to the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments which was such a strange little building! I thought it was going to be a proper museum but it was a side room off of the Oxford music buildings and I had to ring a bell to be let in. It was a fantastic collection, though, and there were some really beautiful old instruments.

Now, I’m back on the Oxford Tube, heading into London. I’m spending the night with my mom’s friend Mimi again but I really hope I have a place to live before the end of the week! I’m going to take this week to get settled with house and job for the next three months. Let’s see how that goes! Besides, there’s plenty of museums to keep me busy in London alone! 🙂