Email: Berlin-Amsterdam-London

Wow! I haven't written a group email since Berlin! (Our favourite city). Since then we've been to Hannover for a day, Amsterdam for about 5 days and London for a month or so. Not too much has been happening, which is why I haven't written much. Our last days in Berlin were great, we enjoyed it very very much. We saw The Ladybug Transistor play and I recommend their music to everyone, we also saw Adam Green play on our last night there and he was worth staying the extra few days in Berlin for. Very entertaining, but seems like an odd guy.

Amsterdam library was great. I would love to work there, or just live close to it. More dvds than any video shop I've seen, more cds than Polyester Records (though probably not as good, though I did check to see if they had anything great and they actually did). The other highlight of Amsterdam was Anne Frank's house which was very sad and interesting, and there was no huge queue which I'd heard so much about so that was nice. We did a canal tour as well. Overall though we didn't like Amsterdam. It was booked out everywhere due to a special Queen's day thing or something and we had to stay in a hostel in the red light district. We had to walk through it every time we wanted to go somewhere and the novelty wore off fairly quickly. Another favourite time in Amsterdam was when we left! We caught the bus from London which Liz had booked. She had told me we would be driving to a ferry and going across the England on that. It turned out though that there was no ferry, and we drove through Belgium and France and then the tunnel to England. It's not everyday you end up going to a couple of countries you had no idea you'd be visiting when you woke up that day.

We were very excited when we got to London. (Some) People speak English as a first language here!! We stayed in a hostel in Kensall Green for a night while we got in contact with Kate (an old housemate) to organise to stay with her for a bit while we looked for something more permanent. The next day we random went into the city... or looked for the city, we walked near Westminster Abbey and saw a few streets that we recognised from the monopoly board, but didn't really see too much of London.

Since we've been here we haven't really done any tourist things. We've been staying in Acton, and looking for work and a place to live. We eventually found a nice place in Acton, close to Central Acton station, and if you disregard the 2 muggings that have happened to people we know very close to here (one with a gun), then it's a very nice area. It took a bit longer to find work. Liz has a nice job which she starts on Monday and I have been given a temporary (2 weeks) position as a finance officer for Octavia Housing. I've had 2 days "training" though apparently 2 weeks training would have been what the trainer would have preferred. On Monday I'll be on my own, with the person that trained me gone on maternity leave, and no one else there who knows her job very well so it should be interesting to see how I go. Basically my job involves handling invoices and things for 20 charity shops (I work in the "shops" division) and reconciling all the money from all the shops and making sure everything balances. It sounds easy when I fit my job into one sentence but it looked complicated when I was learning all the spreadsheets. My temp agency thinks I must know all about financing because I did well on the excel test I did?!

I will soon put up some photos onto facebook of our new house, and any other London photos I can find. Make sure you check out some of the other albums up there if your interested, I've put on quite a few (and comment on pictures occasionally, I like to know that people have actually been looking at them). If you've missed any of my previous emails you can check them on http://www.glenngreening.blogspot.com/ - and forward this on to anyone that would be interested. If I've missed anything that anyone wants to know, write back to me. If not, write back to me anyway.

Glenn (and Liz, but she's not actually here, she's on her way back from Wales)