Settling in
Trip Start
Sep 19, 2006
1
11
36
Trip End
Ongoing
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Cambridge,
United Kingdom
Monday, October 9, 2006
It will be interesting to see how the cost of living pans out... I asked for what seemed pretty much the middle of the range salary over here for media/PR jobs, and got it (damn I should have asked for more!). It's more than what I was earning in Australia , but everything seems to be three times more expensive anyway so we'll see how I go.
Ian and I's little flat is coming along nicely and I have a cheerful red bicycle with a basket, as you do in Cambridge. There's so many stupid things you have to buy when decking out a house that are awfully hard to handle when you don't have a car, like ironing boards and shelving. We got a big lot of stuff delivered but Ian decided we could get an ironing board cheaper elsewhere, and is now planning to somehow strap it to his back and cycle home with it (if he does I'll try and get a photo of Ironboard Man).
The place we got is university owned and furnished... but that's just the basics. And they're certainly not the basics we would have chosen (we have to use mattress protectors! Eeeew!), so now we have to work around these things. It is probably a lot cheaper in the long run though, being furnished, and made it a lot easier when Ian moved in. In fact I suppose that if it weren't furnished we would have just gone and bought the crappiest cheapest possible items anyway, as we've done with the extra basics like phone and shelves, so in fact I shouldn't be complaining after all.
Our place is in a lovely part of town just by a big, unkempt vegetation area left for sheep grazing, which the Cam river passes through, with trails I can walk along to the very centre of town in ten minutes. We also have great Indian and Thai restaurants just around the corner which we've succumbed to already, despite our best home cooking intentions. The only downside is it's on the ring road, so the traffic gets noisy at peak hour, but across the road there's another huge park with lots of trees, with tennis courts nestled amongst them, which you can see from our living room window.
