Bath - Friday

As one might have noticed from Mitza's last post, the last weekend was very special for us, as we had our first wedding anniversary. Therefore we decided to do a romantic short trip to get away from our busy lifestyle! 

We had booked a trip to Bath, known already to the Romans because of the only natural hot springs in England, and the center of social life during the Georgian era, today home to one of the better universities in the UK. 

As I am lazy today and I know you can't wait to read news about us, I decided to divide the report, better divided work for me, more days to read for you!

Friday

Because Mitza had to buy some Flipflops, and finally found a shop that had the original ones we decided to meet at Oxford Circus and jump from there on the Bakerloo line to Paddington. The scences in the underground station gave already an idea what to expect in the train station. Maybe not so easy to see, but there is a traffic light over the exit indicating that the escalators are congested and one should wait on the platform!

As it was Friday and everybody on the way home, the station was full as expected.

After we picked up or pre-booked tickets we had some time to eat, and decided to go to the nearest Pret, a common sandwich/coffe place. It was a little bit outside of the station at Regent's Canal (Or to be more precise at Paddington Basin). Unfortunately the store had closed at 16.30 o'clock already! Maybe we should move to a bigger, more international city... Wait! In contrast to our expectations a lot of stores in "working areas" just have opened during office hours, closing at some point between 16 and 18 o'clock, an experience we also had to make with "Trotilla" in Canary Wharf. Therefore, always check the opening hours before you go somewhere!

Nevertheless we found something to eat, but going into the train brought the next bad surprise. The carriage was so crowded that we couldn't reach our reserved seats at the beginning, but after a little bit of squeezing and pushing we made it. Sitting beside a Mum and her daughter returning from a shoppint trip in London, we received some hints and tips were to go for eating in Bath. 

As you will see from the pictures, our trip turned into a walk from one dining place to the other, so their advice was very valuable! 

After a 90 minute train ride and a 15 minute walk we arrived at the guest house, cute, simple, and very nice people. Have a look to get an impression: http://www.radnorguesthouse.co.uk/ Then even have very lovely guests... 

First we still wanted to take a walk, but in the end we were so tired that we just stayed at the hotel and went to bed early - especially because breakfast was served between 8 and 9 o'clock!

Ao meu Amor

My dear Husband,

today is our first Wedding Anniversary! It's a very special day, although being with you feels like celebrating anniversary everyday as it's to be constantly feeling happy! You give me reasons to smile when I'm down. You support me on any possible thing. You make me feel so loved and special. You show me how life is in a different perspective. With you I am a better person... I have always a reason to wake up smiling: I know you're there beside me! And I hope I can always be there for you too - to love you, to take care of you, to laugh with you... "till Death Do Us Part"! Eu te amo, meu amor!

Sua Mitza.

Fish and Chips

As good christian I am always eating fish on Friday, and what would come in more handy as one of the best examples of English cuisine, Fish and Chips?

I was told by colleagues that the one from our canteen at the office is good, and honestly I didn't have the guts yet to try one from the local pub, probably even wrapped in newspaper? :)

And always remember, with "remoulade" you can eat everything!

London: Oxford Street and Surroundings

I needed to buy a present the other day and I thought, "well, there are sales everywhere so I might as well just go to a place full of stores to search for something". Well, then I decided to go to one of the busiest locations in Central London: Oxford Circus Station. 

The thing is, the place is so packed, that I kinda regretted afterwards. You need at least half an hour to walk one block! hehe As I told my beloved husband that I was planning to go there, he recommended me to take some pictures, and that was what I did. Even though I forgot the camera at home, I still took some using the mobile.

The pictures bellow show a little bit of the Regents Street and Oxford Street crossing. The Oxford Circus Station is located there. Parallel to the Oxford Street, there's the Great Marlborough Str., where some "German style houses" can be found. Besides this big building, starts the Carnaby Str., a pedestrian street full of bars, shops and of course, tourists.

I hope you enjoy the pictures! Have a nice weekend!

Oxford Str. and Regents Street crossing

Regents Str.

House at the Great Marlborough Str.

Don't you just feel like you're in Germany? :o)

Carnaby Street

To be a tourist, or not to be a tourist!

Again, I am torturing you with a boring post without pictures - but you haven't expected an easy comic strip anyways, eh?

This time I am translating (Yeah, be impressed with my mighty Portuguese skills - anyone interested in the truth, send me some money!) a post from Mitza's blog (http://mitzabr.blogspot.com/ -just to generate some traffic, and no, I don't get any commission!), where she described quite nicely the difference of living in and visiting a city! Here we go... (Comments by the translator are blue and smaller)

As I have visited the city twice before, I thought I knew it already. But two facts proved me wrong. First, London is way bigger than you normally think, it is gigantic. Second, my knowledge as a tourist did not help at all when looking for flats.

It is the first time that I am living in a touristic city, as Frankfurt is well known, but for other reasons. And it is interesting to see how people can't leave there stereotypes behind. What I mean is, whatever you tell your friends, the advice is to do some touristic stuff! Weird... I tell people that we don't have a 42inch HD LED (Sorry, could not resist to mention these important technical details) - TV yet, and they advise me to go out and take pictures of the city? We have problems with the flat and they tell me to visit some famous place! Visiting attractions does not lead to the disappearance of problems! Sometimes you just want to sit on your couch, watch TV and relax (Sometimes?), and not to go out and take pictures.

Being in London does not mean I am a tourist, I'm living here! These are two different things, ridiculous different! People from Brazil sometimes have a distorted picture from Europe. E.g. they think Paris is a glamorous city, being confronted with ugly, smelly and rude people (Was really hard to add not any jokes here...) and mass-tourism when actually going there. The same for London, as long as you can't afford to live somewhere really expensive, it is not as fancy as many believe.

Visitors see the beauty of the city, but not what is behind it. You will understand when reading the following posts! London will reveal for you the same way as it did for us. Many surprises can be expected, and hopefully you won't be traumatized, as the city is still very cool!

Not much to add here for now, and of course we will concentrate on the positive things, but once in a while we will for sure have some funny stories to tell - as someone said, sometimes England is like a Third-World-Country!

Cultural Differences #1

While walking to work (might sound like a hike, but everybody who knows me will know what I am talking about: Man, a translation can be f*cking long!) I saw something that made me think about cultural differences. And as Mitza is responsible for the nice travel descriptions, I will just scribble down my (hopefully not too political incorrect) observations. I am afraid most of the time I will just confirm prejudices, but there must be a reason for these, or?

In this case I saw a woman with at least 15 cm (or 6 inch for our non-metric friends) heels on their glossy-red shoes, obviously walking to another hard working day in the office. I could describe the outfit more (As I did not want to spend a day in jail as a pervert I couldn't take a picture), but I don't want to be the next Sanguinetti. It is quite common though, to see women in the office dressed in a way Germans would not even go to a club. (I am not going to talk about men, they are normally on the other side of the scale!) I think in future I will just describe what I saw, without writing it in with a certain thinking in mind...  

London: Regents Canal - day 2

So as I wrote on the previous post, Sven and I were quite curious to walk along the Regents Canal after Camden Town. So as the weather was really good on Sunday, we just decided to do it.

We took the overground train until Camden Road and started from there our walk. Actually, we walked around Camden Town a little bit, there's a lot going on there, many shops, many alternative people and of course, zillions of tourists. I heard that someone sells Brazilian Churros there and I was very eager to eat. We searched and searched, but found nothing. Then we just bought ourselves some iced coffee and a toffee Cooler from Costa Coffee and also some mini muffins to eat during the walk.

After we could finally pass through all the people, we found ourselves again on the Canal's path and took some interesting pictures of cool stuff we found on the way, such as this pirate castle and this Chinese restaurant over a boat. Houses around that area are good, people made some kind of pier and put chairs and tables on their garden area. It should be quite nice to have breakfast in such a place during the summer.

 Pirate Castle near Camden Town

Chinese Restaurant

A little bit further, the Canal passes through Regents Park and there we could also find the Zoo where we could see some animals here and there. After the Zoo, a pleasant surprise: the “posh” area starts! The houses in that region are huge and wonderful, the gardens are so cute and the grass like green carpets... Just as an example, this picture of the smallest house we found... They have more or less the same style and look quite similar.

After this part, the Canal was still nice but not as fancy, with many buildings and even some community houses. We kept on walking and found a place where many many boats were parked and the people put tables outside, planted all kinds of stuff, herbs, flowers, etc. 

Then the canal meets a long tunnel with no space to walk, so we had to walk up there on the street area, until the tunnel ended and we went back to our path. By this point, we have walked over 5 km already and wee almost in the end of the Regents Canal, where the so called “Little Venice” can be found. We don't really understand why is it called Little Venice: it's just like a small lake with an island in the middle and a bunch of ducks swimming. There were hardly boats there (they are not allowed to park there), except the ones that make tours on the Canal, taking people up and down. Also no cute houses could be found there, so I don't get the nickname.

Little Venice

Perpendicular to the Regents Canal, starts the Grand Union Canal, which we followed until we reached Paddington Station from where we took the underground back home, as we were already a bit tired in the end of that day.

A great walk, a great day and a great Canal. Hope you enjoyed the story and the pictures!

London: Regents Canal

Sign in front of the entrance to the Regents Canal

Sven and I were walking around Angel station on Friday when we looked in one of those street maps and realized that not far from there was the Regents Canal, which we decided to go take a closer look.

There are many canals in London, river waterways inside of a giant city such as London. It's amazing when we think that we are inside of such a huge city, but yet with so many little canals, with trees, cute boats and silence at the same time. It's like if the life outside stooped and we forget how busy it is out there. We found the place so charming and picturesque, that we decided to keep walking along the Canal until the next closer station, which would be King's Cross St. Pancras.

The Canal – from Angel until St. Pancras Station – was quite beautiful, with little forests, nice boats and flats on the riverbank. We were quite curious to know how much a person has to pay for a rent to live there. We kept on walking and saw the St. Pancras Station in the back, an elegant building, it looks kinda like a church to be honest (see picture). But the walk was so pleasant that we decided to keep on walking until Camden Town.

From St. Pancras until Camden Town, the Canal is not so beautiful anymore, cause there are a lot of abandoned buildings with broken windows, trash, plants but also some construction, because they have a project to make that area more developed.

Around Camden Town, the Canal is beautiful again, with buildings and people living in the area. Until this point, we had already walked 3,5 km and as the sun would set not so later on, we decided to stop for the day and do the rest of the walking some other time. The underground station was only two blocks away from that point. We then decided to come back on Sunday, if the weather was good, to keep walking on the other undiscovered part of the Canal until Paddington, cause a colleague told us that it was a really nice walk on that side too. The Regents Canal goes through Regents Park, Little Venice and there should be also some pretty good houses along.

Anyways, that is a good travel tip: when you come to London, take some time for a walk in any of the Canals spreaded around the city. This on the post is called Regents Canal, but there are others, as you can see in the Waterways map of London (see map).

If you would like more information about the Canals in London or in the UK, there are two interesting websites, it's worth to take a look: 

• http://www.londoncanals.co.uk/
• http://www.canalmuseum.org.uk/history/index.html

Greetings to all readers and 'till the next post!

Regents Canal around "Angel" Station.

Then I will add my mustard here too...

...to use a common German expression. As you might be aware, English is not our first language, so please excuse any mistakes! As Mi* is writing quite a while in her other blog in Portuguese, it will be of course her first duty to translate at least (Depends on the length of the English "winter") the posts about London and our relocation into English, if that is done and we found some interested readers, I may ask her kindly to transfer the posts about our German trips too! :D

Very first post!

Hello everyone!

We are a german and a brazilian living in London at the moment. Here we can tell a bit about our lives, our trips, experiences, impressions as well as keep our friends updated on the latest news!

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