Listen up, I've got an announcement. I have just accepted a job at Novartis Pharmaceuticals as a Production Engineering Management Graduate (whew, what a mouthful). After going through an interview and an assessment centre, the powers that be have decided I'm the one for the job.

The basic outline is that Novartis have been looking for a new production manager to join their team and having little luck (after interviewing like 20 people), so they have gone back a step and looked for a graduate. The theory is that I will start out learning the ropes and as I go on, will be given more and more responsibility. They are hoping that I will slide into the production manager position within 18 months, so I feel I have big shoes to fill.

The downside is a bit of a commute. It is based in Horsham (about an hour on the train each way from our house) but I'm hoping to be able to work on the train. The upside is that I will be going against the flow of commuters so will have the train to myself most of the time.

There were 8 initial candidates that were interviewed, 3 got to the assessment centre, and I'm not sure if they hired 1 or 2 of us (will have to wait til I get there). The assessment centre involved an hour interview, a 20 minute presentation, a team exercise, a numerical reasoning test, an oral reasoning test and a factory tour (I was very tired by the end of the day) The annoying thing about the way that hiring is done in this country is that it is all through a recruitment agency, so finding out about the terms of the contract involved a lot of phonecalls from me to my recruitment lady to Novartis to my recruitment lady and finally back to me.

I will definitely be sad to leave behind my job at Conoco Phillips as I have made quite a few friends here and it is a great environment with great benefits, but working here has made me realise that I'm not really thrilled about finance.

They wanted me to start ASAP, but I feel a bit obligated to help out my boss, Katy, at Conoco Phillips and then we are off to Spain for a week at the end of the month and off to Germany mid September, so I'll start on the 27th of September.

Once again us and the flatties managed to go most of the month without seeing much of each other... it's not intentional, just seems to happen like that with us all leading busy lives. After putting the flat dinner off 3 weeks in a row seen as someone always seemed to have something on, we finally got around to it last Tuesday (ok so this post is a week late - things have been busy.)

It was a wonderful evening in Brockey that should have been spent around Kate's flash new BBQ that Aaron, Richard and I spent about 2 hours putting together the night before. (Upon arriving at work the next day, we discovered we had been very lucky indeed with many others being caught in torrential downpours and enduring journey's of up to 5 hours to get home)

Unfortunately a lack of gas bottle meant that we had to revert to a poxy English disposable BBQ, but it ended up being a great evening spent with great people (including the 4 of us that live here and Ang, an Ozzie friend of Kates, who is an honourary flatmate), a lot of beer and a lot of food.

Finally, we'd like to thank Fosters for their sponsorship of this event (Kate won the BBQ and a years supply of Fosters among other things in a radio competition).

Just wanted to say a big Hi to Tori and hope that the rest of your travels in England are going well. Tori stayed with us on Wednesday and Thursday nights, and it was awesome to catch up and hear all her stories about Prague (she was just happy to see TV in English). Unfortunately I was working during the day, but she managed to pack a whole heap in (Westminster Abbey, Tower of London, Baker St etc) and I got to see her in the evenings.

Was also fantastic to spend Friday lunchtime with Tori and Charlotte (been here 2 weeks now) in Hyde Park. We've been having wonderful weather the last week, and I was so depressed to have to go back to work that arvo while they went off to see some more sights. Unfortunately I was a bit slack in remembering to take some photos, but those that know Tori knows what she looks like anyway and I'm sure she'll be sending out a big e-mail about England when she gets back to Prague.

11 August 2004. Well after me saying I was slack in taking photos, Tori decided to come back and stay for another couple of days the following week. Once again I was working during the day, but Tori managed to catch Romeo and Juliet at the globe (which is what she came back for) so I think she was pretty happy.

Last week, I got taken up to Leeds with work to run a recruitment centre with work. Caught a train up Monday, came back on Friday. Shocking thing was it cost £140 for transport. Leeds seems like a nice city, but then I only got to see the city at night. Work consisted of ferrying applicants into waiting rooms, into interviews and into technical scenario test rooms. I felt like a bellhop for the week.

Saturday morning, we headed to a Walkabout. It is a chain of pubs established for Ex-pat Kiwis, Ozzies, Boks and slowly integrating Zims. It is cheap booze, large tv screens and good atmosphere. Anyway, we headed in to watch the South Africa vs Australia rugby game. Ozzie won, good time by all.

In the after noon we headed to Portobello road. A famous street market I hear, you might have seen it in the movie Notting Hill. We had a good look around, there are some very cool nics 'n' knacks there, but nothing you would really want to buy or need. It was an exceptionally hot day, and after our up tenth drink, we decided it was to go home and lay in some sunshine or at least find some shade.

Over the last week or two, I have had a bit of a blocked ear, with every now and again some pain when there is a sudden pressure change like when in a train and the train goes trough a tunnel. Yesterday and last night it climaxed in all out agony. I was bearing through it, till it got to midnight, I realised there was no hope; I was not going to get any sleep, it was effecting my balance and I was clenching my fists in pain. Something obviously not quite right. So, in not so pleasant terms I told myself to go get help. So after a quick ring around, I realise there is no 24 hour / after hours surgery in the UK and my only option was A&E at the local hospital.

Carmen in her generosity and kindness accompanied me to the hospital. Of course we have no transport, so had to walk. It is about 20-minute walk to the nearest hospital. We sign in, I get seen by a nurse who basically assesses if you are going to die while waiting for a doctor. Then you wait. Wait a bit longer. And wait. 150 minutes later, I get called into the doctor, who looks in my ear. Says "woo that’s nasty infection". Walks away gets antibiotics, and painkillers. Problem solved. It annoys me a bit, when was the last time you had an ear infection, umm when I was like 5? Must be this English winter, I mean summer.

Waiting time to time with doctor ratio: ~75:1. We walked home at about 4am. It did make getting up at 7am for work this morning difficult.

To be honest I would have been pretty upset about the whole experience, if it wasn't for the fact it was free. Free consultation, and free drugs. They have numerous nurses, who see you very quickly, but obviously are not allowed to do anything. And two doctors. There was about a constant 7-10 people in the A&E, almost all minor stuff, and the odd ambulance trucks on up and everyone gets pushed down the waiting list while the new emergency gets seen to. A dedicated doctor (like a normal GP) for walk-in A&E cases would solve all waiting problems, well it would have for last night but apparently it was a slow night.

Last Thursday, the sun stayed out long enough for us to have a work BBQ in the park just down the road. I do say the sun stayed out long enough because it was raining half an hour before the BBQ started.

Basically the BBQ involved standing around drinking wine out of plastic Starbucks cups (that hold twice as much as a wine glass, and Sabrina insisted on them being full), eating burnt patties, and once the patties had gone down and the wine had kicked in, the sumo wrestling and horizontal bungee started.

My big boss, Wes, decided that my boss, Katy, and I should give sumo wrestling a go. We get on pretty well, and so figured - why not? (as you do after a few glasses of wine). Everyone else spent the entire time laughing at us, but not as much as we were laughing at ourselves. It's funny how hard it is to get up off the floor in these huge suits. In the end we called it quits and still have no idea who won (cos we were giggling too much to figure it out).

Things have settled well, even better that we now have broadband wireless in the flat. I am again complete. I have decided to stick out my temping job at the Environment Agency until the end of the contract which is in October, I now have enough to do and it is keeping me busy. I have settled into a PA role, editing, writing reports, organising meeting etc, its not glamorous but it is paying well enough and it is not at all hard/stressful or challenging which gives me time to find other things to do (while not get bored). Although I found the engineering degree both interesting and challenging, I cannot find an application or job in the field which really interests me. So, I am thinking about applying to finance/banking/trading positions as the end of the contract draws nearer. Partly because the pay seems to be good, but also because I am actually interested in the field. I had an interview for an engineering technical sales position this week and found myself screaming on the inside run away, it is good to be narrowing the field. Sales is not even an option now.

So we have done a quick catch up session this evening, the last two posts were backdated to give some close reference to when we went on the trips. I will now tie up some lose ends of things we have done over the last week.

Science Museum
London has a Science Museum, which in short rocks. It is very cool, we spent about 5 hours there and I think we covered about 40% of the museum (keep in mind we are engineers). It is really well laid out and lots of interactive exhibits which keeps you interested. We are going back in a week or two to finish it off. We will give a full post then..

Canary Wharf and Bollywood Dancers
We went for a walk around Canary Wharf, which is the new mini Manhattan of London. It doesn’t fit in with the old, stone history of London at all. It is very nice (and expensive, you get the impression a water might cost £3). Anyhoo… we stumbled across a Bollywood dance exhibit, they were the performers from a recently ended stage production of Bombay Dream. The show was pretty well done and good to watch.

Water Puppets
Finally, last night we went to Greenwich to watch Vietnamese water puppetry. What’s that you ask, as did we, hence why we went. It was a full on production, with lighting, music and choreography. It was done at night, hence the photos didn’t come out to flash (pun intended). First, look at the photos more closely (i.e. click on them and this one). You can see the back drop, in front of that is a pool about 1m deep and 5m from front to the back drop. They control these puppets from behind the drop, though the water, now this in its self does not sound very impressive, but it is once you watch it. The puppets are able to cross over each other, move various limbs, breath fire (dragons), climb on each other… The two pictures there are of three boats with small team of people which actually row. They were having races in that skit. The one pictured (right) is of a group of woman dancing, they were all doing twirls, and line dancing.. it was very impressive, but hard to convey. The commentary was in Vietnamese, which wasn’t annoying but we didn’t get the obvious jokes when half the crowd started to laugh.

Don’t know if you guys have heard the latest news over there or not? The Mayor of London is highly keen on having a Formula 1 Grand Prix grace the streets of downtown London once Silverstone’s contract expires in 2006. In an effort to show dedication to this idea, promote the British Grand Prix and show that London is capable of handling hoards of people (also in hoping to get the Olympics in 2012), Regent Street was closed for all of Tuesday, to set up for the 6pm blitz around the streets by a few F1 cars.

There were 9 F1 cars and half a million people (there were only 250,000 expected) there, and they ran individually just for public display, however a few of them managed to get in donuts and smoke up the wheels more than once. There were a few of the big names as well as some drivers from the past with Juan Pablo Montoya, Martin Brundle, Lucio someone (Ferrari test driver) and David Coulthard to name a few.

Aaron and Gary were a bit jealous that I managed to make my way right to the barrier when they were only about 6 deep in the field. To make matters worse, I made friends with some of the people on the way through and came away with free beers and earplugs. Following the race, Aaron, Gary and I braved the crowds and headed for Piccadilly circus for a pizza before heading home.

Soho for Dinner with the Grandparents(Carmens)
It was great to see my Nan and Granddad while they were passing through on some more of their travels (I swear I’ll never catch up)! They’ve just come through China, Mongolia, Siberia, Russia, Paris etc etc on the Trans-Siberian train. Justine (my auntie) and I organised to head out for dinner in Soho (Chinatown) which is in the centre of London. We chose a Chinese restaurant from the hundreds and spent the evening chatting about everyone’s travels and our ‘settling-in’. Nan and Granddad are off tripping round the Southwest of England for a couple of weeks before heading home, and hopefully we’ll get another chance to catch up with them before they leave the country. Walking back to the tube station, we passed Trafalgar Square – which really looks much more magical at night time than during the day.

Where do you work?
For no particular reason except we were bored, we went and had a look at each others work places and decided you guys should know as well. We are in theory pointing to our offices. Of particular joy, the other day the tube workers had a strike, they are sick of only getting paid approx £30k, working 35 hours a week. They want more, more money, 4 days a week working.. so we had to catch the bus (picture) (with the other millions of Londoners trying to get to work)

Flat life
Flat life is going well. You start to learn the really annoying habits of your flatmates (anger is building, oh yes, anger is building). Our flatmates are Kate and Richard. We had our first flat dinner last week. We are planning on having them once a month and take turn on what course we are cooking. We got the dessert, so I cooked a picture). What I didn't realise is that a Pavlova doesn't rise. I should have figured it out, as there isn't anything to rise. But I spread it out nice and thin and made a big flat meringue.

Soon we will take you on a photo-tour of our flat. But Carmens side of the bedroom is still a bombsite. We got a computer desk last week for £30, which I skilfully managed to assemble. From pieces to table in two minutes flat.

Well, England is out of the Euro 2004 here now, and man do they bitch and complain about it. I swear there whole society revolves around soccer (sorry 'Football') and the pub, preferably together. One of my work collegues should be quoted for saying, 'England loves to lose, it's what we do best! We are just waiting for Tim Henman to be out of Wimbledon and for someone to take the Rugby World Cup back off us...'

Anyhow, thought this picture was pretty good... The England rugby tour to NZ and Oz is something else, the English would prefer we don't mention.

Great to see people leaving comments and filling in our guest book. If you haven't already, get in there!!! Also, note that you can view old entries that have slipped off the bottom of the screen in the 'Categories' and 'Archives' sections on the right of this page.

Now that we are semi-settled, the next exciting bit is TRAVEL. I'm after suggestions or ideas or tours or websites that might help us narrow down the best places to visit to start with (keeping in mind that the money situation is still pretty tight)...

So post your comments with advice or stories of where you've been before or where you are dying to go (that way we can post photos and stories and make you insanely jealous...) and hopefully we will have some good travel stories coming your way soon!

Well it's Monday again and come tomorrow, we will have been here 2 weeks. There is good and bad news (isn't there always). The good news is that we have found ourselves a new home, so we can stop taking over Gary's study and having to make ourselves scarce for his romantic interludes. The bad news (which will hopefully soon be resurrected) is that British people seem to have a hard time recognising our talent and hence, giving us a job.

Saturday was spent in a state of confusion as we were continuously late in getting to appointments to see flats. Now, I can tell you first hand that when you hear horror stories of peole living in flats with a billion other people, and only 2 feet on either side of the bed - they aren't joking! Before looking at these places, we'd politely declined about half a dozen others that involved living with more than 5 other people.

On the way to the first flat we looked at, Aaron almost got mugged in broad daylight by some guy who asked him if he could give two 10p for a 20p. Aaron has learned a very important rule about trusting big, black, homeless, scary looking guys. The flat itself, was ok I guess. Two reasonable sized bedrooms, kitchen and bathroom, but it was wildly obvious that the inhabitants were a bunch of hippies, and when we asked about local shopping facilities - the girl pointed out the 'After-hours' (kiwi translation: liquor store). We walked back to the train shaking our heads at each other (and Aaron kept his wallet tightly closed).

The second place, the girl never showed up to meet us at the tube station, so we had a brief look about the area - the conversion of balconies into rooms and the bars on the ground floor windows put us off that one. Oh, and the graffiti on EVERYTHING!

A friend of a friend of Gary's was next on the list. Aaron had already talked to her on the phone, and said she sounded pretty cool, but the proof is in seeing the place. It was such a relief to see that the place was normal and actually really really nice, as was Kate. It is a 4 story terrace house, with a self-contained flat on the ground floor, and 3 bedrooms in the top 3 floors. The kitchen and bathroom are less than a year old, and it has a backyard perfect for BBQ's. Our room is pretty big, and we'll post photos later in the week. Kate also has all the episodes of 'Sex in the City' and 'Friends' on VCR, so I'm set...

After promising Kate that we were pretty much sold, we thought it was only fair to show up at the last flat we'd arranged to see. Afterall, we were only a little over 2 hours late. Daisy, 'a 45 year old, spiritual lady' who was most worried about the 'vibes' she got off her soon to be inhabitants managed to talk to us for about 2 hours and take us on a tour of the town in her tiny little car. Her definition of a double bedroom was a bit of a stretch, yes there was a double bed in the room, but god knows how they got it in. The kitchen was the size of my wardrobe, and Aaron hit his head on the windchime thingys hanging over every door.

By this time it was 4ish, and we hadn't even got around to having lunch. We jumped on the train and texted Kate to confirm, before heading all the way home to Staines on the train.