Musings of two Aussies in London

So after nearly 10 months of living in London, I think we’re fairly well placed to share our views on the differences between living in London and living in Australia.

Adjusting to life over here was surprisingly easy, once you get over the scale of London. But the lifestyle really isn’t that different – the English drink a lot, are very social, and love sport. They also slag their sportsmen off when they don’t win, sing their team song really loudly once they’re drunk, and then get a kebab on the way home. See? Very similar.

There are some differences though, with many of them linguistic! To Aussies thinking of moving here, you will be laughed at, and on occasions you won’t know what people are talking about, and vice versa.  So a guide to the ones that have stumped us.

Australian	English
Cordial	Squash (anything that can be diluted is squash)
Vacuum	Hoover
Pantry	Larder (our flatmates find pantry particularly hilarious)
Whiteout	Tipex (WTF)
Bottleshop	Off license or ‘offey’
Doona	Duvet
Lollies	Sweeties
Chips	Crisps
Drunk	Wankered
Hello	Y’Alright? (after months of observation, we think the answer to this is not ‘yes’ but to just say ‘Y’Alright?’ straight back to them. It seems to satisfy them).
Hungover	Hanging
No way/that sucks	Bollocks
Park	Common

  

Things to be aware of when moving to London:

• Anything that we change to end in ‘O’, they don’t understand. This includes povo, devo, budgo, bottleo, traino.
• We need to slow down and separate our words more. 'Dyawantmetogiveyathefiftypence?’ is not a word.
• Don’t look anyone in the eye on the tube. Ever. If you cough or sneeze on the tube, prepare to get death stares from the whole carriage.
• If you stand on the left side of the escalator, you will be abused. Brian had to instil this in me by punching me in the arm every time I stood on the left.
• If you’re walking down Oxford Street or Regent Street while texting, you are the worst type of person. Likewise if you walk out of John Lewis and stand in the middle of the busiest footpath in London trying to decide whether to go left or right.
• If you start converting London prices to Australian, it seems expensive (just under double at the moment) but once you start earning in pounds, you realise how reasonable it is. Rent and the tube are expensive, but daily living costs are so much cheaper. To put it in perspective, a block of cheese is about $3.50 instead of $230.00
• The beef here is rubbish – but the pork is amazing.
• Tuna tins don’t come with a ring-pull. So you need to take a can-opener to work.

But oh, the reasons to move here!

• There is always something amazing to do, and so many of the events are free! Some examples? Dog fashion parades, ice sculpture festivals, street food van festivals, Notting Hill Carnivale, museums, photography exhibitions, ice rinks, movies in the park, polo games.
• The West End – every show you could think of, every night of the week. Shows don’t ‘tour’ to London like they do Australia – they play every night.
• Every borough is unique. When you think you’ve ‘done’ London, just ride the tube and get off at a stop you’ve never gotten off at before and walk around. You’ll find bakeries for dogs, comedy clubs, Walkabout bars with Gladiator game nights, pubs with 4 floors that serve different themed food on every floor, even café’s that charge you 2pence per minute you stay there, and then the coffees are free!
• Everything is open every day, until late.
• The tube or bus will get you everywhere, you will never wish you had your car here.
• Happy hour is everywhere! Two cocktails for £8, from 5-9pm every day of the week! It is so much cheaper to eat and drink out in London then it is at home. You won’t ever want to go out when you go back to paying Australian prices.
• Flowers are so cheap you could have fresh ones in your home every week if you wanted. Boys I know this excites you to no end – girls, a fresh bunch of tulips is about $5. Australian florists are up there with oil barons I reckon.
• There are over 18,000 restaurants in London – every style of food you can image. You’ll have so much fun trying them all, from the Supper Club in Notting Hill where you get served dinner in bed while watching a burlesque show, to Shalamar late night chicken on Clapham High Street where the middle eastern owners belt out Backstreet Boys every night of the week while cooking your chicken.
• Squirrels.
• Healthcare is either totally free or ridiculously cheap. My nose job cost £50 (just kidding Mum!)
• It’s really not that cold (though everyone keeps telling us that we had the mildest winter ever!) It’s been about 5 degrees during the day, and it really doesn’t rain much at all. When it does rain its only drizzling, nothing like the downpours at home. And the summer was awesome – over 30 degrees most days. And you’re allowed to drink in the parks here. Cider in the common anyone?

Moving to London was the best decision we have ever made, and our time here is flying by. If anyone is thinking of taking the plunge, do it. You will have the best time of your life. And Marmite is actually pretty good.

Signing off with a bacon and brown sauce butty,

Kobi & Brian

xxx

Our tube station

Tube poetry

Clapham high street

Measuring time from Greenwich

Theatres on every corner

Notting Hill

Portobello Rd markets

Gates to Regents Park

Daffodils in spring 

Exploring the royal parks

Street art

Regent street

Tower bridge

Tower bridge

The Eye

The Eye

Picnics and snoozes in the common.

York

Next on our list of English towns to visit was York, the medieval walled city in the north. Everyone who has ever been to York has loved it, so we just needed to pick our weekend. Megan and Cousy were driving that way for a birthday on the Saturday night, so over a few drinks the road trip idea was born - all driving to York, spending Friday night in the pubs, with Megs and Cousy heading to their party Saturday night and picking us up again on their way back through York Sunday morning. 

 

Brian and I took a half day on Friday and we all headed up to Yorkshire. 5 hours and the worst traffic later, we checked into our B&Bs and hit York. 

Things we've loved about York:

• Our B&B host Bruce. He is Alaskan, and made us Alaskan waffles for breakfast (incase you're wondering, the 'Alaskan' part is just lots of strawberry and chocolate syrup!) He was so lovely we had to get a photo with him (when we could get him to stop talking for 30 seconds).
• Going out on Friday night and taking hours to walk the 10 minutes home as the boys were chatting and the girls were chatting and no one was paying any attention to where we were going until we were on the wrong side of York after walking circles. 
• All the wonky old cobbled streets and houses. York is ancient (medieval actually!) and the roads are wonky so in time, all the houses and pubs have become wonky too, like in Amsterdam. Gives it a lot character though. 
• There are 365 ale houses in York, one for every day of the year. Two of our favourites were the Golden Fleece (super wonky) and the Guy Fawkes Inn, where Guy actually plotted some of the House ofLords  bombings! Guy was born in York so he features regularly. 
• Doing a tour of the walls, and walking along them. Our guide explained how some sections of the walls were built by Vikings, before being invaded and added to by the Romans, before the English completed and preserved them. You can see clearly where each addition was made, and they've been turned into an amazing walk along the walls looking into York. 
• It was such a beautiful sunny day (though still really cold) that all the squirrels were out! You can't help but be happy when you see a squirrel bouncing through the daffodils. 
• Visiting the York Dungeons to learn about witches being burned, executioners and torture instruments, the plague and Guy Fawkes. Seriously scary!
• It was The Viking Festival Week in York, so there were heaps of people in Jorvik costumes! Our favorite was a little boy with a Viking shield and axe, a skeleton tracksuit and a transformers mask. So medieval!

 

York is as awesome as everyone says, it's a shame we didn't have longer to just wander around. We're about to embark on the drive home, fingers crossed for the traffic!

Love and Yorkshire puddings, 

Kobi & Brian

Xxx

Bruce, our B&B host.

Bruce has met the queen!

 

Our B&B departure gift

Having Alaskan waffles!

The river through York

The walls from a distance

A corner of the medieval walls. The tiny slits in the arches at the top were for bow and arrow shooters to shoot through.

Brian helping our guide, Malcolm

 

The ruins of St Mary's Abbey. 

 

One of the watch towers along the wall

 

The York Minster. 

The walls. In WW2 the thousands if panels of stained glass windows from the Minster were stored in the arches under the wall incase the Minster was bombed. 

 

Walking the walls

 

Wonky old streets

 

Little Shambles street

 

Trafford Castle in the middle of town.

Guy Fawkes Inn, where he plotted with his friends. 

Squirrel!!

Just trying to get a photo of the minster in the background when this pulled in!

 

The walls

 

Typical York pub!

Les Deux Alpes

One of the 'definites' on our travel list was a snow trip, as Brian hasn't been in snow before and I hadn't been since I was 16. After some research we settled on a package holiday which are huge over here, and booked a week in Les Deux Alpes (meaning 'the two alps') two hours from Grenoble in the French Alps.

After a rocky start (3 hour delay as something in the plane broke) we were off. First stop Grenoble, where we boarded a coach for the two hour transfer to the resort. When I say resort, it's not one huge hotel in the mountains - the 'resort' of Les Deux is the entire village and surrounding slopes, which were unbelievable! We had both been up since 4am getting to the airport, but we couldn't close our eyes for a second on the drive through the mountains!

 

The rep from the package company we used came to see us about our lessons, equipment, lift passes (more valuable and expensive than gold!) and to help us check in to our hotel. While only a little B&B, you could ski up to the door of the room and the floors were heated so we were happy!

 

Things we loved about Les Deux Alpes:

• Snow, snow and more snow. It snowed every night, so that every morning everything was covered in a thick layer of powder. It made everything look magical, and we never got used to opening the curtains in the morning and seeing white trees everywhere. It actually snowed for two days straight as well, so when we were out on the slopes it was piling up in our hair and in our hoods!
• Skyping everyone for my birthday - thank you for all your lovely gifts and messages! Brian took me out for an awesome French dinner that evening, and we had escargot, beef bourgignon and vanilla infused duck. It was one of the best meals I've ever eaten. 
• Our snowboarding lessons were a big highlight, despite some spills and a few tears (mine). I did a decent stack backwards downhill but damage was minimised due to Brian's smart thinking by making us both hire helmets. After the first day neither of us could move without groaning and grabbing parts of our bodies (Brian- tailbone, me- arms, knees and neck). The fresh snow helped a lot though, it made the landings really soft. Brian did an awesome stack which looked more like a cartwheel but it was into waist deep soft snow so it was just funny. I laughed so hard I crashed into the same snow bank. It took the full week the get the hang of it, but towards the end Brian was flying along and linking his turns, and I even managed to do a whole slope linking turns without falling over. It was the best feeling ever, but a bit disappointing that we finally nailed it and had to go home the next day! Oh well, we will just have to go back. 
• Our snowboarding instructors were great, made us laugh when we felt like giving up, and pointed out people who were falling more than us. Although Guytan yelling in a French accent "watch where you are going Ko-biiii" will haunt my nightmares I heard it that often. We both got our logbooks with comments from our instructors in them which was lovely, they presented us with them on the last night at the pub, then had a drink with us before we went home. 
• The ski lifts were very entertaining, mainly for people watching me. On several occasions I fell getting off the lift, on one occasion I even fell over while on the lift, and all you have to do then is stand still! 
• We made some awesome friends in our beginners class. Can you believe a couple in our class are Aussies living in Clapham Common - in the same estate of flats as us!! Ridiculous, London really is that small. We will definitely catch up with them once we're home. But it was really nice to finish our classes, head to the pub to compare bruises and successes, and have people to experience all these funny things with. 
• The village itself was like a fairytale - all wooden buildings with icicles coming off them, a fire inside, and usually selling crepes and fondue. We tried both and they were so so good. The fondue especially - three types of cheese melted in a pot together with all sorts of things to dip in it! Definitely a 'sometimes' food! 
• Seeing as we hadn't been to the snow together before, there were many important things to tend to - including making snow angels, having a snowball fight, and building a snowman. We couldn't do the rolling method for the snowman as the snow was too powdery, but we managed a good one and named him Cecil. We checked on him every day and he was still there when we left. At one point there was some yellow snow on him which was devastating but Brian fixed him up. The suspects are in the next point...
• We loved the resort dogs who roamed around town (despite them compromising Cecil). Each belonged to a hotel, with one of them being the Les Lutins dog (our accommodation). We tried to take photos of them because they would be sniffing the snow and would run around with snow beards, but they were too quick!

There were so many things we loved about Les Deux Alpes, but I think the photos say it better than we can! It was a week of baguettes, fondue, crepes, new friends and snowboarding - doesn't really get much better than that!

Au revoir!

Kobi & Brian

xxx

Just one of them many slopes. We boarded this one during one of our lessons. 

At the top of midstation, 2300m up. 

 

The chill out zone at Midstation. You get seriously dehydrated exercising in the cold air (-12) so they serve beer here.

The deck chairs with a few hours snow on them.

 

Heading to the pub after the lesson

 

Les Deux Alpes resort from the ski lift.

Rachel and Frankie from our classes.

On the lifts with Rachel and Frankie. Getting off was terrifying as you had to be strapped into your board. 

The view of Les Deux

 

Crazy icicles

 

More icicles. Brian was worried if one fell on him he might get stabbed.

Making light of his fear. 

Brian during the lesson 

Getting the hang of linking his turns

Right before I fell

 

I'm surprised Brian managed to get two shots of me upright.

 

Managed to rip my pants on day two from falling. But ever the thrifty one, I refused to buy new pants. I bought a €5 sewing kit and fixed them. They were fine after that! 

On the slopes

 

Cecil!

Cecil tells the best jokes

Arm wrestle with Cecil

He's just a top bloke

Brian fixing Cecil after a few days of being snowed on. He was starting to lose body definitition and looked like he was wearing a wedding dress. 

The Les Lutins dog who may have peed on Cecil

 

With my other beginners, Gemma and Rach

The boys - Brian, Aaron and Dave.

Ontop of the world - 3600m up, on the glacier.

Our beginners group with our instructors after being presented with our log books. 

Crepes again!

Giant crepe with chestnut cream

Cheese!

Couldn't drag Brian out of here!

Where we had fondue!

 

Fondue!

He is rocking the skirt!

 

My birthday onesie from Aisling and Anthony

Walking in the snow at night

This seemed like an excellent idea after a few drinks. Hilarious!!

Brrrr

 

Our hotel

The first morning in the snow

 

Making snow angels

Our view every morning