Aug
02
So, this week marks our first month in the UK. I am still trying desperately not to convert every purchase that we make, from £’s into R’s. Everyone, especially Mike, keeps telling me not to do it or I will drive myself crazy (too late to prevent that, I am afraid), but no matter how hard I try to resist, I just seem to do the mental maths and then I flinch! Some things come across as being extremely expensive and other things seems quite reasonable. I must admit that I don’t mind paying £2.99 for some tiny little thing at a shop, but then I bleat every time I have to pay 80 pence to park the car for 1 hour. I would rather pay the car-guards back home to cheat on the parking meters for me. (Yes, yes, you all know what I am talking about, we all do it. You get the car guard to only feed the meter when they see the traffic officers coming.) Over here you pay for parking by anticipating how long you might be. For example, you make an appointment to open a new bank account. The bank tells you that this can take up to 1½ hours, so you feed the £1.50 in the meter. (Yes, work it out in rands, you know you want to.) Now, the meeting at the bank is over in 15 minutes and you are left thinking about the rands that you just pumped into that little silver machine for nothing. On the flip side, you may think you are only popping into town to fetch something you ordered from a shop and it’s going to take all of about 10 minutes, so you pump the minimum 80 pence into the meter. This time, however, you are 7 blocks away from the parking lot and you bump into a friend who invites you to go for coffee… You look at your watch and realise that you will need to feed the meter… Do you walk the 7 blocks to the parking lot and then back to meet your friend for coffee, or risk getting a fine? On the bright side though, my bike gets here this week and then I am going to cycle to town. Whoohoo.
This week has again been full of frenetic activity. We got our landline phone this week, which does of course mean that we are at least 1 step closer to getting our broadband internet connection.
On Wednesday we took Mitchell and Jenna into London. The train trip from Tonbridge to London takes about 30min, depending on how
many stops the train makes. Mike had a lunchtime meeting at his office in London, so we all spent the morning and afternoon together and he just popped into the office for the meeting. Jenna was excited to see Big Ben and Buckingham Palace, but then she got far more excited about feeding the squirrels in Green Park. Our “flight” on the London Eye was absolutely beautiful. It is big and graceful and slow and silent, you can see as far as your eyes will allow in every direction and it was amazing to watch the Thames seagulls, but this time from above them. It was indeed a very touristy thing to do, but worth every cent (sorry, penny).
Tomorrow our ship sails into Tilbury harbour. It is still going to take about a week to clear customs, but just knowing that ‘our stuff’ is just a few miles off the UK coast right now, is a sweet, sweet thought.
Jenna and I took a late evening walk on our own this week. We called it the girls’ night-walk. Mike and Mitchell had gone to the golf-driving range, which stays open until 21:00pm in the summer. It started to get dark and we were quite a long way away from home, out in the farmlands. It was an incredible feeling to be out there and not be afraid. Don’t get me wrong, I am not becoming complacent and I know that good and evil happen everywhere, but there we were, out in the bush with wild foxes and hares and not another person in sight.
On Saturday we were invited to meet another SA’n family who live in Tonbridge. It was fantastic to get some good old advice from people who live in the area. They gave us lists of scout troupes, dancing schools, gymnastics clubs, youth groups, etc, that Mitchell and Jenna can join. Kent seems to be ‘the little South Africa of the UK’. I hear that it may have something to do with the fact that the pleasant Kent weather attracts the SA’ns. Shops, bakery’s, dentists, everywhere you go, business are owned by South Africans. There are also a lot of South African children registered in most of the Kent schools that we have had dealings with.
Today Mike and Jo Bowen drove down from Greenithe (next to the Dartford tunnel) to spend the afternoon with us. Mike and I were at Crewe Primary school together and then we studied IT together at PE Tech. Mike and Jo have been over here for 10 years, so they had some good advice to impart to us too. It was an awesome afternoon of chatting and catching up on a lot of missing years.
Sunny weather, starry skies, night walks, new friends and old ones, pounds of rands and helping hands… the weeks march on, the weather changes, the days get shorter… each day we learn something new… a lot we like and a some we don’t.
This is Kerry Wright!
