Living on our own has certainly been a huge learning experience. We have really challenged ourselves by just doing ‘the simple things’. We have both had it really easy living at home. Now we have to do it all by ourselves…
Lesson 1: Keep keys on you at all times
It is really cold in London, but only outside. When you are inside the central heating gets so hot it feels like you are in Brisbane during the summer. When you are in the house you wear clothes to match. Nektarios normally wears boardies and a singlet and i just wear shorts and a top. The other day we had to dust the rug. I had already dusted everything else in the house so i suggested that we go outside to dust the rug. Because i didn’t want any of the rug dust to go back inside the house, I closed the front door.
BIG MISTAKE.
The front door automatically locks when you close it for security reasons. So here we were, standing in the freezing cold wearing only shorts, singlets and thongs and we were locked out of the flat. Everything was still inside including all our cash, phones, phone numbers and stupidly the front door keys.
To cut a long story short, there was another estate agency about a 10 minute walk up the street who still had a spare set of keys. Lucky for us all we had to do was walk there, pick up the keys and walk back.
Nektarios was not happy that day. I just laughed at the situation and thought it would end up being a funny story (so i hope you are laughing when you read this).
Now i always keep a set of keys in my pocket, no matter where i am or what im doing 🙂
Lesson 2: Put butter on the fry pan when cooking eggs
So we finally got all our new stuff and Nektarios wanted to cook something. It was about 2.30 in the arvo but he felt like breakfast so he decided to cook fried eggs and toast. Our new pots and pans are kinda cheap so they don’t compare to the ‘no stick’ pans that our mum’s have at home. With that in mind, Nektarios only used a little ity bitti bit of oil in the pan before cracking the eggs in. Not too long after, the entire flat was full of smoke and all you could smell was burnt food. The eggs stuck to the fryer and the bottom pan is now permanently burnt. The heat was on too high and there wasn’t enough oil.
I suggested using butter in the pan for our second attempt and it worked fine. (Smug smile)
Lesson 3: Don’t expect cheap stuff to be any good
We needed hangers to hang our clothes. Simple right? Well not here in London. We could not find hangers anywhere. All we wanted was those simple black plastic ones like we have at home but you’d be lucky to find any over here. When i saw them in IKEA i jumped for joy. How exciting, now we could finally hang up our clothes. We bought a few. In fact we bought heaps cause they we super cheap. Weird looking, but cheap enough so we just thought they’ll do. When we brought them home every single hanger had a sticker on them and the sticky stuff would not come off. We tried everything, we even tried soaking them in the bath for a while but no luck. So now we are stuck with sticky hangers to hang our clothes.
Lesson 4: Only buy groceries that you can carry home
Tesco is the name of our Woolies here. Luckly for us our local Tesco is only a 5 minute walk up the street. We don’t have a car so we rely on public transport for everything. I could not imagine anything worse than carrying all our shopping bags on the train home so im glad the shops are so close.
Our first grocery shop took us over 3 hours. Im not sure if it was because we had so much to buy or if it was because Nektarios and I spent so much time deciding what we wanted to buy. Our shopping trolley was full. We bought everything from milk & bread to chucks & paper towel.
We thought we would be a little sneaky and just push the trolley home. It was only down the street and we would have brought it straight back but Tesco was just too smart. They have this fancy trolley detector on the bottom of the wheels. We soon realised that once the trolley goes past a certain point the wheels automatically lock and then you can’t go anywhere. We had to opt for carrying all our grocery bags home.
OMIGOSH, it was so heavy. Both Nektarios and I piled the grocery bags all the way up our arms and began a quick walk home. We were almost there… almost.. and then one of my bags broke. The bottle of olive oil smashed and went all over a BMW X5 parked in our street. It was a mess. My arms felt like they were going to fall off.
Next time i am only going to buy what i can carry home.
(HEY MUM CAN YOU PLEASE SEND ME SOME OF THOSE GREEN BAGS?)
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