There's No Place Like Home...

Or should I say, I have no place to call home? Corporate housing is just that - an impersonal space that offers all the necessities of everyday living without any of those "offensive" personal touches. I'm not complaining, this place is like a freaking palace compared to some of the places we saw yesterday that were charging obscene amounts of money that almost made me cry.

For anyone thinking LA real estate is bad, London is oh so much worse. How much worse, you ask? Well, you can have the grand privilege of paying over $5k US per month for 900 square feet of outdated living. Honest to goodness, I saw a wooden tub. Honestly, who lives here? The queen?! Well, yes, yes she does, along with a bunch of other aristocrats that own a lot of the property around the nice part of London. Thank you very much, Duke of Buckingham!

So J and I set out on our second day of house-hunting today. We crawled all around Marylebone yesterday and viewed a couple of properties and came home disappointed and exhausted. After a 4 hour power nap (hey, we're still trying to recover from jet lag), we resumed the search online and came up with a few properties we wanted to look at in Kensington.

I did a ton of research before we got here, and that's how we narrowed our search down to Kensington and Marylebone, but I figured you could only know for sure after actually visiting the neighborhoods in person. Google Earth can only do so much.

After having explored Marylebone for a day, we were ready to move onto Kensington today. Just in case, we paid another visit to the estate agent in Marylebone and he showed us two(!) amazing spaces that were just too good to be true. I can't describe it here since I don't want to jinx it - but I've got my fingers breath and J is waiting with breath that is bated.

Marylebone Village, Photo by: Stephen McKay

 Anyway, we then moved on to Kensington, and the feeling was all just wrong. We walked into a couple of estate agents and made appointments to view properties later in the afternoon, but after walking about a bit, it just couldn't compare to Marylebone. We ended up sitting on a park bench in Kensington Gardens (Kensington Palace was behind us, and a Spanish band was singing - you can't make these things up), and canceling our viewing appointments.

Kensington High Street, Photo by Thomas Blomberg

So all of our eggs are in one basket, and we're waiting to hear back on our offer.

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Some English things I did today:

1. Ordered a cheeseburger without cheese at Mark & Spencer's food hall in Kensington - I was told that I couldn't order a hamburger, which wasn't on the menu, but had to order a cheeseburger without cheese. Um, okay.
2. Went grocery shopping at Waitrose, bought their reusable grocery bags, and bagged my own groceries