j and i had to madly rush around london as we only had a few days in our hotel and with our trusty tourist map and tube travel card we set out to try and find a flat to let ...
well first day we wandered around some neighborhoods we thought we'd like to live in and were disappointed at the prospects ... too far away from school, too shady looking, too close to all the pubs and really loud touristy areas ... so we restructured our plan and decided to focus on the bloomsbury area as that is where my school is ... we emailed some letting agents in the area and tried to set up some appointments ...
second day woke up to some emails and tried to organize some viewings and many of them couldn't meet until the next day ... by fluke we found an ad and phoned the letting agent and we could meet them in 20 minutes ... we ran over in the rain and met our lady and had a look around ... all i can say is the photographer was amazing at making the studio flat appear deceptively spacious ... we looked at 3 in this cartwright gardens building and it wasn't too bad ... extremely secure buildings that are well taken care of, the flats are furnished, laundry on site and super clean ... 2 out of the 3 were in the basement and the third was on the 3rd floor overlooking the tennis courts and green space and about 2 feet larger than the others ... we considered putting a deposit down but as it was nonrefundable and it was our very first flat we looked at we went on our way and tried to find our next viewing down by hyde park in paddington area ...
we caught the wrong tube line and ended up on the opposite side of the park and we ran to the neighborhood in the pouring rain only to find that our letting agent wasn't even there and when we phoned him he said he was on his way to meet us and after waiting for 45 minutes he still didn't show so we left ... we phoned to secure the flat on the third floor at cartwright gardens and within the 45 minutes of leaving the place someone had already secured a lease on it ... we decided to put a deposit on the slightly larger basement flat and went home somewhat happily that we found a place that would work for me to walk to school ... i'll admit we still we a little unsure if that was the right thing to do ...
the next morning we went to put all the paperwork through and it was confirmed that this was the right spot to live because transport for london decided to have a tube strike and it really showed us the nightmare of trying to get around when one of the major routes of transport gets shut down ... i felt much better that i had a 10 minute walk to school and a quick trip around the neighborhood we found a beautiful grocery store and a shopping centre that has a market on the weekends ...
thinking we were good to move in the next day we tried to set up the money transfer with the bank and the nightmare began ... we could only transfer an amount that large if we were there in person (well obviously that was not going to happen) the next option was we could transfer up to $1000 a day over to the company and at that rate we would be moving in the following week ... so the next best solution was to get one of our parents to go down to their bank in canada and force them to transfer the money over as soon as possible ... it actually worked but of course we had to delay moving in by 2 days because of the slowness of this whole process ...
in the midst of all of this i had to go enroll in person at the institute of education ... stand in many queues and find out at the end of it all that my canada student loan didn't really count for my status as a sponsored student and i was expected to pay a third of my tuition right then and there ... i managed to talk them into signing my loan papers and granting me an extension though ...
no pictures yet of the interior of our spacious flat at cartwright gardens but a view of the exterior of our lovely building ...
yup that's our ground floor flat ... what a lovely view :)
our gigantic door and awesome tiled stairs
one of the best parts about walking home is the fantastic curved street completely lined with baskets of flowers and planter boxes ... it really does make the tight living quarters more bearable and a little more dreamy :)
cheers ~n
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