Terrace house living

We are getting quite good at setting up houses now and have a taken a short lease on a terrace house in Norwich, about 3 hours north of London. We have been here for a couple of weeks already but house sitting and cat feeding which has been very comfortable. During that time I managed to get some casual English teaching so it seemed sensible to hang around. It seems funny that an Australian is teaching English to French, Italian, Spanish and Chinese teenagers in England. 3 hours/day for a month helps to ease the pain of the poor exchange rate ( 1 pound = $2.40 Australian!)

Max has made friends with a lot of English teenagers and is enjoying the chance to speak English and spend their summer holiday with them – visits to the beach, movies, parties etc.

So our new house is a 2 bedroom terrace – old, wooden floors, 2 bathrooms. The drawback is that it is not furnished but we have managed to beg and borrow enough to get by even though it still feels a bit like camping. It is pretty comfortable really and very nice to be in our own space for a while. The other feature is the backyard. Although it is only the width of the house – one room – it goes forever. We could easily fit several 50m single lane lap pools in if we wanted to. Most of this is wasteland or stinging nettles at the moment. The house is up for sale so someone will snap it up and see the potential in a backyard of that size or rather length. The location is good as we are directly opposite a Jasmine Palace Chinese Takeaway. Max and friends have already given it a try and gave it the thumbs up. There is also a pub on the corner.

We are newcomers and not in the garbage collection routine yet. Yesterday morning we were woken at about 7am to men talking at our backdoor. As we discovered later the garbos in this area go past each back door and collect any bags of rubbish they can identify. We happened to have some sitting there just by accident. Then we saw that there are garden gates in identical positions in each side fence so they can walk straight through each back yard. Pretty good service eh?