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.