My new Bicycle

Before Tony and I headed over to London, we did a bunch of research on folding bicycles, as we wanted to have the urban bike experience, and because space is a premium and bicycle theft is incredibly common in London, a lot of people opt for folding bikes that can be minimized and brought into the office or apt and stored.


We liked the Dahon bicycles as they were a moderated priced folding bicycle that got great reviews. I came to London planning to buy a Dahon Espresso. Unfortunately, they are all sold out in the city, but we were told that stores might get more by the beginning of September. Mind you the best weather in London is June-August. Since I couldn't get the bike at that time, I did the next best thing, I got a bid from the store for what is called the Bicycle to Work Scheme. This is a great system, whereby the British government, as an incentive for people to ride a bike to work will do a monthly withdrawal from your paycheck, pre-tax, thereby giving people a small tax relief, and allow people to pay off the bicycle in installments.

Luckily, a coworker of mine posted an add for a Dahon Dragon (yes the name made the bicycle destined to end up with a geek like me). It is a little different from the larger Espresso, and has only 20" wheels as opposed to the 26" wheels on the Espresso. 20" wheels are the largest size they allow in the tubes, and actually, there aren't many tube lines that allow bikes. However, the price savings of buying a used bike, not to mention that I could have the bike for my commute right away, made it an obviously better choice. So far it has proven to be a great bicycle.

London Ikea

Now that we have an apt, the first order of business is to get a couple essential furnishings to go with it so I can live there for the next 4 months without the rest of the house. The best and quickest solution - IKEA - of which I'm told there are 5 in the London Area.

Our friend Jeff lives just south of London in an area called Surbiton, and there is an IKEA not far from him. It was funny to go to IKEA as the exterior and interior feel very universal. It was the most familiar place I've seen in London since I arrived. Even the food looks virtually the same. Of course it is all Swedish. We had a quick cup of coffee and a danish and off we went to do some shopping.

We bought a fold out futon like couch a lamp and a coffee table. We also bought a couple kitchen essentials. The landlord is providing a bed and a office desk and chair for me to use until our furniture arrives. I'm actually better furnished than I expected for the next 4 months. Jeff had rented a truck, so we loaded everything in and hauled it back to the Apartment. It looks pretty cute.

Our old neighbor Mark who lived next door to us, then a block away from us, and who now resides in Memphis Tennesee, was in London. We have a history of rendezvousing with him in exotic foreign cities. He swung by the apartment, and we all went out for dinner to celebrate. Sadly, tomorrow Tony heads back to Los Angeles. Mission accomplished, but I'll be sad to see him leave.

Apartment Hunting in London

On Monday, Tony had appointments with several letting agents. He went to look at the inventory that they had. Some of it was in some of the newer buildings to the west of London on the south side of the river. They are very modern, but they are a little removed from the main part of London, and would be a bit of a schlep to get anywhere. He was also faced with the realities of what a flat is like in London. They are very small, and most are very, very old. I could tell he was getting discouraged when he called me at work to tell me that he'd just seen a flat where you had to step over the toilet to get to the sink. I'm willing to bet that in someplaces you can actually wash your hands while sitting on the toilet. CRAZY!

By Wednesday night, Tony was starting to feel very discouraged. We had dinner with our friend Dr. David Draper, a professor from LA who was in London for the summer. It was a nice evening, but as we drank 2 bottles of wine between the 3 of us, it was clear that the house hunting was stressing Tony out. I planned to take the afternoon off on Thursday to look at flats with tony and lend a hand. I'd been speaking with a couple agents while at work, and I had some appointments setup for us for that afternoon.

We looked at a beautiful 2 bedroom up in Hampstead, which is right next to the Heath, which is a park that allows dogs to go off leash. It was a recommended area. The building was a new building built in a classic style, and the rooms were surprisingly spacious. By this time our budget of £300 had been replaced by the more realistic £400 a week. Hampstead is a cute village like neighborhood in North London. I'd highly recommend this neighborhood to anyone. It feels almost like you aren't in London, but in a more laidback residential village. The only downside of the place was the mini dorm-style refridgeratorf. Not uncommon for a flat in London.

From there, we met an agent in Islington to look at this one modern apartment. Tony was very excited by this flat. It had a largeish living/dining (what the brits call a reception) room. The kitchen is small, but adequate, and the bedrooms were moderate in size as opposed to many bedrooms where the room is much larger than a bed.








We also looked at a Muse property, which is a collection of small apartments built around an alley. These were often either the servants quarters, or the stables for the wealthy. In some cases, modern versions of these are built, where Muse simply means an apartment with immediate outdoor groundfloor access. The apt was 2 stories and beautiful. It has a great enclosed outdoor area that would be perfect to let the dogs run around in when we get home from work. It even had parking should we ever get a car. It was HUGE in london terms. We could easily fit our furniture from LA. It even had a great Artist loft with a slanted ceiling window. I really loved this place!. . . But. . . And you knew this was coming - it is located on one of those scary 3rd worldish areas of London. When we left the flat with the agent, and they took us on a brief driving tour, you could feel Tony's excitement diminish by the minute.

We went out for dinner that night, and thought a lot about our choices. In order for us to stay on our schedule of locking in a flat before Tony left, we had to decide the following morning. Ultimately, we went for the 2 bedroom modern apartment in Islington, and Saturday morning, we moved out of the hotel and took up residence in our new apartment in Islington.

Pricilla: Queen of the London Desert

Theater is very big here in London, and as a treat for Tony and I while he is here in London, I bought us 2 tickets to see Pricilla: Queen of the Desert. It is a fun and racous show, almost a literal translation of the movie (BTW: What's up with this remaking Movies into Plays - Is there nothing new?). We got in late, and inadvertently ended up being a joke in the show!

The costumes are certainly the star of the show, though the actors were all excellent. It made for a wonderful evening. The theater is literally 2 blocks from where I work. I'd highly recommend it, in fact, if you can do weeknight tickets, they can be fairly reasonable. I plan to see a lot of theater while Tony is still in Los Angeles. A lot of it, I'll have to wait to see because he'd kill me if I go to see Billy Elliot without him - (Another remake)


Of course there is always Les Miz, it is only one block from my work in the other direction. . .

Our "grand" tour of London

Tony flew into London with the mission to find us an apartment that he'd like to live in. Our original budget was £300 a week (approx $460 a week). Most places price out by the week. One thing to realize in advance, is that you will pay by the month, and that a month is not made up of 4 weeks. Actually, you will be prorated by the price per week times the number of weeks in the year, and then that number will be divided by 12 to get the monthly rate.

In order to prepare for this in advance, Tony had been speaking with some letting agents (the equivalent of a rental agency in the US). As renting an apt in the UK is incredibly common, there are numerous agents that are anxious to work with you and show you around the different properties they represent. The only downside of the system, is that the agents are fairly restrictive to the neighborhood they represent, so in a quest to find an apartment, you may work with numerous agents. I think Tony met with at least 8. It was definitely a full time job. In watching some of my coworkers working with agents completely on their own, I feel incredibly fortunate to have Tony here to look at properties. I also threatened him that if he did not find a property during the week while he was here, that I would either have to live in a flop house until his return, or that I would most likely select a property that would not be to his high standard.

In preparation for meeting with agents, it was suggested that we wander around the different neighborhoods and check them out to see if there were any in particular that we liked, and then stop in with the different agents in those neighborhoods to see what apartments they might have.

Several neighborhoods were recommended to us by friends. Among them were Maide Vale, Clapham, Kensington, Islington, Little Venice, Camden, Hampstead, and Regents Park. Tony and I had a grand tube and walking tour of London the weekend that he arrived. It was a tour that most tourists would never get of London. It is interesting that in London there are nice streets, and then not so nice streets right next to each other. You can go from classic georgian row houses to scary ghetto inside of a block. We had been warned in advance that there was a real housing shortage right after WWII, and that a lot of inexpensive, quick to build, housing was created. Some of this "counsel" housing is very scary looking. You'd swear you were in a 3rd world country, not the premiere cosmopolitan city of London (more on that later). One tool that proved tremendously useful was Tony's iPhone. It has a built in GPS, that in combination with it's tube map app made for easier navigation in this new city.

I think Tony and I were starting to feel a little disappointed until we found Angel/Islington, which is London's answer to an LA residents prayers. It is a lovely pedestrian mall area, with quaint clean Georgian Row houses. Most of them look clean and upscale. It has a Starbucks on every block and many fun restaurants. It even has a burrito shop!

We grabbed phone numbers for every Letting/Estate agent in that area, and made calls to them. Unlike the US, letting agents do now work on Sundays, so we could not get in to see any properties that day. We then traveled through many more neighborhoods, but nothing seemed to strike our fancy as much as the are of Angel.

Tony Arrives in London

Tony arrived today to begin our search for an apartment to live in. I picked him up at Heathrow Airport by taking the Heathrow Express from Paddington Station. There are two express services from Paddington to Heathrow: The Express and the Connect. The Express is £19, and the Connect is £7.5. The Express is the train that is right in the middle of Paddington for all the Tourists to see and use. It gets one to Heathrow in about 15 minutes. The Connect is off to the side and out of site a little bit. It makes only 4 stops and takes about 30 minutes. I made a mental note that when it was time for Tony to leave, I would be sure to book him on the Heathrow Connect as it is the better deal. I believe it's slogan is "Smart Londoners take the Heathrow Connect". What they should say is "Stupid Tourists pay over twice as much to take the Heathrow Express". Both services use great trains, and can get you to Heathrow very quickly.

When I picked up Tony at the Airport, there was some massive paperazi photo thing for some celebrity that was arriving on Tony's flight. Utter craziness. I asked someone who the person was, but when they told me their name, I had no idea who the were. Guess I'm just a typical geek that wouldn't know a real celebrity if I saw them. I'll have to tell you my Paris Hilton stories sometime.

Anyway, I got Tony back to the hotel, and though he'd been unable to sleep on the plane very well, he wanted to get right out and start his assigned task for the week - finding us a new place to live!

My new Office

I started my new job at Double Negative on July 15th. It is in the heart of Soho, just across the street from Chinatown and just a few blocks away from Piccadilly Circus. It" is a younger visual effects house that is just celebrating its 10th Anniversary. I remember that the first film I saw that they did the effects for was Pitch Black. I interviewed with them at what was called the "reverse recruitment" event at Sony. It was an opportunity for outside employers to come to Sony and "cherry pick" some of the best people that Sony was laying off. I interviewed with them for an undisclosed project, but one they felt would be right up my alley.

Now that I'm officially an employee, and it is public knowledge, they have revealed that I am going to be working on John Carter of Mars based upon the books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It has the potential of being a trillogy. The film is going to be directed by Andrew Stanton of Finding Nemo and Wall-E fame. I've seen many attempts at making this project over the years, and it has always looked very exciting.

My desk has a great view over Shaftesbury Ave, and in the distance, I can see the Millennium Wheel. If I look out the back of the building, I have a great view of what I can only describe as Mary Poppin's style rooftops. Only in London. So far they have been great in getting me any of the software I've needed, and it looks like I'll be building a lot of Monsters for them. This year looks to flyby quickly, and then we'll see about what happens after that.

Jet Lag, Debit and Oyster Cards

So it might not have been the brightest thing in the world to do, but after I checked into my hotel, I decided to go down to Picadilly/Circus to Double Negative, and pick up the letter that would allow me to setup my Local London Bank Account. As a foreigner, it's evidently not easy to set up an account without the sponsorship of a local business, so I had to go to the bank that my company is with and show the bank the letter that vouches for my character.

Just so you know the importance of the London Debit Card. Almost everything in London requires that you have Automatic Debit payments. If you want a phone, you need to have a Debit card. I wanted to have the new iPhone, but in order to buy it, I would need to purchase a Payment plan, and that would require the Debit card. In order to rent an apt, you need a debit card to prove that you are a responcible person. It's almost like being a non-person to not have one. One little detail, unlike the states where it takes 2 days to get a bank card, it takes 6 days in the UK for them to mail you a debit card. Heaven help you if something happens to the card in the mail, it then would take an additional 6 days to get a replacement sent out.

Oyster Cards, which are the passports to the public transportation system here are also essential equipment. I purchased a month pass, which at £102($164) was actually a lot more expensive than I was prepared for. For a first month, it has been very useful, though in hindsite, I probably didn't end up using it to its fullest extent. It has been nice to be able to swipe it and go anywhere in Zones 1 and 2, and I have been jetting around a bunch.

The Departure

So my car is sold to Tony, with the plan to split whatever he makes from selling the car before he heads over in December. Tony had to sell his new Nissan Rouge (he bought it last October - we didn't know we'd be relocating to London back then) at a loss of $1,700.

He drove me to the airport, and I was feeling a little scattered. We get to the terminal, in fact almost to the ticket counter, and only then did I realize I'd forgotten my Passport. Okay, so it was a pretty stupid mistake, but I'd had a lot on my plate over the past couple weeks. Tony raced back to the house to pick it up, while I waited at the counter to check in. They wouldn't let me check in without it!


He got back just in time, and I checked in. I had to pay an extra $100 to ship a third bag, but it was well worth it when you consider what it would cost to mail it.



I had to make my farewell calls from inside the plane as I just got on in time for it to leave.

I tried to sleep, but wasn't able to. I watched Monsters Vs. Aliens. A cute movie

I arrived in London with all my stuff, and took the Dot2Dot shuttle service to my hotel, the Shaftesbury Hyde Park at Paddington. Double Negative is putting me up there for 2 weeks while I settle in and find an apartment. Like most of London, it has no air conditioning, which in the summer months can make rooms very stuffy and hot. It is on a fairly noisy street, but the beautiful trees make for a nice walk to the convenient tube station at Paddington.

Last Meal - The Night Before

PACO'S TACOS turned out to be the place Tony and I ate at for our last meal in California together. It is an awesome Mexican food place, and since I hear you can't get good Mexican food in London, it seemed like a natural for our last meal. They make homemade tortillas there, and there is a woman making them right in the middle of the restaurant. And doesn't she look happy about it! "



Tony had Chimichangas, and I had the Tamale and Chile Relleno. A few margaritas later, and stress levels were in check.

It's been a crazy week, packing and shipping stuff. I found that the US Postal service is the most cost effective way to send a box or two of stuff. I'm going to have to ship my computer through UPS, but that is much, much more expensive.

The LAST Thai Tuesday on Monday

The computer has been shipped off, and I'm heading to lunch with a bunch of friends that I've worked with over the last 14 years. We've had a tradition of going to a specific Thai Restaurant called, Emerald Thai. It's fun restaurant, and the owner, Nid, has gotten to know us very well to the point that we don't need to see menus, and he'll set the table up upon seeing us walking across the street. It's very nice to have such a good rapor with a local restaurant. Nid ,after 12 years of eating almost the same thing every week at his restaurant, bought me my final meal in Los Angeles.



In fact, the week previous, when my mother was in town, I dragged her to the traditional Thai Tuesday lunch to meet my fellow "geek" friends.








This Monday, as my flight to London is at 4:30, we elected to have Thai Tuesday on Monday. It was great seeing the gang for my last meal in LA. They are all very special people to me, and it was wonderful seeing all of them. It was very empowering to spend that hour with all of them, and then head off to the airport with Tony.

Packing for the Adventure

My plan for getting my stuff to London is this. I'm mailing a bunch of stuff to myself at the new company. US Post is the cheapest way to mail things, but they limit to 70 pounds, and specific dimensions. So the items that won't fit their criteria (My Computer), will have to go to UPS. I packed a bunch of work related items, reference books, my anatomical model, some kitchen and food provisions, and I've mailed them off today. I plan to ship the computer on the 13th along with the monitor and a couple last minute items.

I'm wrapping up some work on a project called Dinoshark, which has been a lot of fun, and am trying to complete a couple other outstanding projects so that when I get to London, I'm able to focus on settling in at work and a new country.

It's a little daunting, but it will be an amazing adventure.

Mammoth Mountain for the 4th of July

It was a beautiful trip up to Mammoth for our last weekend up here for the next little while. The weather was great. For people who have only been to Mammoth in the winter, Summer is a whole other great experience. The 4th of July in particular is a great time to be here. I even had the chance to ski on the 4th one year. But not this year.



It is small town Americana at its best. The local chapter of the Lion's Club has a pancake breakfast in a parking lot. They even have "sprayable" butter!









I finally got to try a Deep Fried Twinkie. It was much better than I thought it would be. Very decadent, and not the hideous treat I was expecting.






One of our favorite summer things to do is to drive up to Mono Lake to the Mobil Gas Station at Tioga Pass. In the summer. Tioga Toomey, a gourmet chef, takes over the deli in the gas station and turns it into the "Woah Nellie Deli". You will have the best meal you've ever had at a gas station there - Buffalo Meatloaf, Lobster Tacos - everything is wonderful! You can't beat the view either.

Malibu Seafood with Mom

My Mother flew out to Los Angeles to spend a week with me before I fly off to London. I picked her up at the airport and because she is from Arizona, I figured she'd like to see the ocean.

We drove out to one of my favorite getaways, "Malibu Seafood". It is on PCH just north of Pepperdine. It was a hazy day, but the June Gloom cleared and we had a blue sky when we got up the coast. It was a lovely time talking with my mother and getting caught up on her life.

We had some of Malibu Seafood's amazing Fish and Chips - a portend of the adventure that lays ahead.