New Hobbies Arising

The Sports Centre

I applied for a premier membership for Basingstoke Sports Centre. I never thought I would be interested about become a member of the sports club, but apparently this is what happens when you have enough free time to think about how to spend your time. The Sports Centre is located conveniently only 15 min walk from the home, so I can easily go there every day if I wanted. There is a well equipped gym, swimming pool and you can attend to different types of classes there. And what is really the most exciting thing there for me? There is a sauna! Oh, I have to say that this is what I've been waiting for even I never thought that I would miss a sauna at all. When I was in Finland, I wasn't a heavy user of sauna, it was okay for me if I went there occasionally, maybe once or twice in a week. But this new opportunity to have sauna here made me quite delighted. Yesterday I went to the Sports Centre for first time, I spent sweaty one hour in a gym by using cross trainer as it is a device that I used to have at home in Finland. Let's see how my new hobby starts working in future. Right now I'm really interested and excited about it.

Licence to sport, £44 per month with zero contract.

Gardening

Some serious gardening should be done in here?

The other day I looked at our backyard and thought myself that it really needs care. There are basically loads of different plants, flowers etc., which most of them are not familiar to me at all. The climate in British Isles is so different comparing to Finland, that my little knowledge about plants has basically no use in here. Bearing in mind that earlier I wasn't even interested about gardening. The garden in my previous home in Finland basically meant only some unpleasant jobs for me, and I always tried to avoid them. However, now I don't know what is it, but I actually think seriously about doing some gardening stuff in our backyard. I went to a library and borrowed a book about it. And as a proof of my geek level I even installed an app called Grow Your Own, provided by the Royal Hortocultural Society. Actually it is a useful app for learning gardening in a new environment. I will probably start with herbs as they are very useful in food preparing.

Grow your own app.
Wow, there really is an app for
everything you can ever imagine.

A Guitar

Last time when we visited West Midlands, Kayleigh brought her guitar from her parents' house. This acoustic, handmade Rikter & Sierra guitar gives me a great opportunity to start playing a music instrument again. When I was a teenager, I used to play clarinet and piano, I also took lessons on music theory for few years. Unfortunately I quit this hobby soon after leaving my parents' home, and forgot that part of my history for decades. But when I took this new guitar into my hands, I thought maybe this old interest for playing music will start rising again... So I want to learn how to play guitar now. And because I now have time at least a year to do that every day, so why not? So, this is my goal: one day I will play the Love Theme from the Godfather film, just like Michael Mark does in this Youtube video. I believe some of my friends from work will easily understand the reason for why I picked up this particular song for my ultimate goal of this hobby.

English Food

The Sunday Roast (by the White Swan Inn)

Guess what one of my friend in Oulu said when I told him about moving to England for a year? Well, he said with very sarcastic voice that I picked up the worst possible country in terms of weather and food experiences. Is it only Fish and Chips or Full English breakfast that people eat here from the day after day, or is there something else which may be worth of trying? I can tell you YES, there is a full range of different kind of meals, which are actually very good and honestly worth of trying. Like for instance, Sunday roast is a good example of very nice meal which is served in most pubs on Sundays, just like in this randomly selected pub in Newcastle, the White Swan Inn. 

However, I think the biggest difference between Finnish and English meals is the fact that Finnish meals include often salad (lettuce) and other raw vegetables like cucumber and tomato, which isn't the case in here. And secondly, the lunch is totally different, traditional English lunch deal includes just sandwich, crisps and a drink (or maybe a soup), whereas in Finland it is often the most fulfilling meal of the day. I'm not surprised why Finland is the World's biggest coffee consuming nation per capita. Nobody keeps him/herself awake after such enormous lunches there are in Finland, and that happens even in the middle of the every workday.  

It would be very interested to know what English people actually eat, and if it's not too difficult I can learn to prepare English food myself too. Good food (and brave tasting of different kinds of strange things abroad) has always been in my interest. Maybe my new hobbies, gardening of herbs (and other useful plants) in addition to my new sport activities will supplement each other in the end of the day. All in all, I will try to keep these new hobbies in good balance, as I think they can help me to live healthier and more valuable life in here.

The Dishwasher: Final Episode

Oh and by the way: the dishwasher broke again this Monday, this time there was both internal and external water leak. Finally I got our letting agent convinced that machine needs to be changed into the new one. Thanks to Rayner's Appliance Care, they fitted the brand new British made dishwasher into our kitchen. Beko, the devil's machine as I call it, is now in a dumpster and I never have to see it again. Case closed.

The Bank Account - Part 3

Floody Monday

I just can't believe this. The NI number interview is a joke. They just rang me from Southampton JobCentre Plus and said they have water flooding accident in the office and they need to cancel all interviews for today. They asked me to rearrange the appointment by calling that damn phone service again! After queuing yet another 10 minutes I managed to get another appointment. The interview for having the NI number will be held on 4th August 10:15am, so yet another two weeks of waiting to ge my bank account issues solved. I had already some plans to travel to Finland to see relatives during that week, but that must be postponed now, luckily I didn't book flights to Finland yet. Anyway, I'm going to try to reimburse my already paid train tickets to Southampton for today from the JobCentre. Let's see what happens next.

This is definitely not the best Monday so far. The dishwasher stopped working again, and that happened soon after the phone call from the JobCentre. The dishwasher power went off and it left all water flooding to the bottom of it. So I rang to the Rayner Appliance Care again to get some help. The bloke asked me to leave the dishwasher as it is, and he will come to see it tomorrow. So there will be now 24 hours of waiting that cursed dishwasher to come back alive again. Which it apparently does, as it has always started working properly on the next day. More embarrassing happenings to come...

The Secret Cultural Index

Do you know what is my secret cultural index? Remember, in my last blog I was wondering about real ale culture dying in Southern parts of England. The other day I found an excellent website for searching for pubs, it's called http://whatpub.com/, and it truly offers very comprehensive database for all types of pubs in UK. Just enter your location (postcode) and it tells you where you can find the nearest pubs which offer great ales for all beer lovers. The more importantly, it also tells the number of pubs around you. The default radius of the search is 10 km (6.2 miles), and the the number of pubs is my secret cultural index. The search tells me now, that there are 71 pubs around me. It also makes me wonder why I'm writing my blog here at home now?

Right now I really need a pint. My attempts to get British bank account, NI numbers and clean dishes can wait. Besides Oak pub just around the corner offers minimum of withdrawal £10 of cash while purchasing some of their excellent products (Marston's Pedigree for instance), so that gives me a really good excuse to explore more about British living culture. It also helps me to forget all bank and money issues, flooding problems or national insurance numbers.

As a first initial test of finding the best place for cultural index in UK, I searched pubs in Tipton, which is in the heart of the Black Country area in West Midlands. The index there was 406. This really tells something about differences between northern and southern regions, maybe I should soon consider moving?

Bits and Pieces of Daily Life

A Proper Night Out in Stafford

A night out in Stafford with friends.

I got an invitation to a night out in Stafford with Kayleigh and her best friends. That was a kind of event that I've really looked forward to happen: a proper night out with English friends. And the evening was successful, I found the way of having fun similar in both England and Finland. It's a multicultural habit to go out, visit several pubs and finally enter into a night club for dancing and having more fun! I got new Facebook friends, we had really nice talks and also lots of laughs and jokes together. I felt myself very homely with these lovely people.

While having a great time I was surprised about the amount of pubs and bars in Stafford. Our home town Basingstoke is double sized, but the amount of pubs is very limited, whereas in Stafford you could find nice beer havens in almost every corner of the town centre. And as far as I know that trend seems to be the same in other places in central part of England. I wonder why is it so, maybe the pub culture is more or less dying in southern cities and towns - or even in England? This finding requires more observation in near future (read: more visits in the pubs).

By the way, I can recommend the Travelodge hotel for the short stay in Stafford, it offers reasonable priced accommodation in the walking distance from the town centre.

The Bank Account - Part 2

I finally managed to get a reservation for an NI number interview, yayyyy!!! This time I got much better service than during my previous attempts to solve the issue (remember my last blog text about struggling with the bureaucracy?). The officer lady in the phone had a really strong indian accent, but it didn't bother me at all, because things started to work out pretty easily. The interview will be held in Southampton Job Centre on Monday next week, how exciting! I have to bring with me there: 1) a valid passport, 2) another official ID card and 3) the utility bill from my current address in England. While moving to England I had a gut feeling, that it would be wise to have both passport and the official ID card available. I was right, this time the investment for the extra ID card is really needed, because I guess my Finnish driving licence might not be good enough for proving your identity, as it lacks English translation. I'm also really happy that the utility bills (water, electricity & gas) have my name on it - even if they are not paid from my own bank account. For those who wonder how payments work here in general: the most common way to pay bills is to use the system called Direct debit. And it doesn't work for international bank accounts as I've noticed. This really causes the chicken & egg situation for foreigners in most cases here. Anyway, my saga of getting an own bank account continues on Monday, so more to come...

The Dishwasher

Beko, the devil's machine.

As you know our flat is fully furnished, and as a bonus we have a dishwasher. I was really delighted about having one, because it didn't seem to be a common device in those places we saw while looking for a flat to rent. Unluckily, this particular Beko DFSF 1531 W dishwasher we have here has become a true nightmare. I don't know what's wrong, but it seems to malfunction every second time I try to use it. I've done everything: reseted, rebooted, even drained it manually etc., but nothing seems to work out. It has an own will, it seems to work whenever it wants to. Yesterday, after manually draining it three times, I finally got really annoyed and wrote a letter to our letting agent to fix or replace the damn machine. This morning very nice repairman from Rayner Appliance Care came to see it, and the machine worked like a charm! We tried several times to get it malfunction but no, that machine was really working. The repairman left and I felt really embarrassed and humiliated. So, we will see how that cursed machine will work in the following days. All I wanted is to have clean dishes, but that seems to be one of those things that won't work in easy way. However, it seems now that everything is pretty much okay if the fairly unreliable dishwasher is the only serious thing to moan about.

Library & Museums

I applied for the local library card three days ago. Surprisingly that was really easy thing to do, no utility bills or whatsoever needed, all I had to do was to enter my address details in to online application form and that's it! I got the card number on the next day and yesterday the card came by post. On top of letting me use the library, it offers also quite convenient eBook loaning system with an Overdrive app, which works smoothly in my iPad. I'm not sure if Finnish libraries have similar eBook systems, but this system is very convenient. I have now large selection of free books available in my iPad. And what's more important, there also seems to be enough time to read those books now. Reading books is one of the things that I really waited for while starting my year off, as the previous work periods have been too busy for that kind of activity.

Today I visited in Willis Museum and Sainsbury Gallery which had a exhibition of Basingstoke history. Interesting piece of show, but for the moment I was the only visitor in the whole museum. And later on the same thing happened in the local pub called the Rising Sun: there were nobody else but me and relatively bored bartender. I wonder if the real culture is dying here... The weather wasn't the problem, today was the nicest day so far: no rain at all.

Licence to educate yourself.