What will I miss about London?

The following is a list of things I will miss when (in just over 2 months) we leave London, in no particular order:

1. Ferrari *
2. Lamborghini
3. Maserati **
4. Bentley *
5. Rolls Royce
6. Aston Martin
7. Porsche *
8. Jaguar, BMW and Mercedes***

* Spotted last night while I was ducking, dodging and zipping through traffic on the Vespa**** The others may have been there, too, I was just too focused on the task at hand to notice them all
** There was one parked out front of our flat this week. I pretended it was mine
*** The super versions of these that you don't normally see on the streets of, say, Gananoque
**** Another thing I will miss - both the Vespa itself, as well as the ability to "filter" through traffic and effectively get across town faster than the above

I'm sure there will be other things, but that's all for now.

The Perks

Suggestion: If you want to move to another country for awhile to live and work, and then want to move home again, try to arrange it so you transfer within a large company. When we moved here, Noise's firm covered a lot of the costs - flights, visas, shipping of our personal belongings, temporary accommodation, a small stipend to cover initial expenses, etc. This despite the fact that Noise had requested and applied for the job in London, nobody made him go. So now two years have passed and it is time to move home again. So again, Noise had to apply for a job within the Canadian firm, nobody made him go home again. And what do they tell him this week? They will, once again, cover our flights, shipping (plus 10% because they seem to think that we might have accumulated things over here - perhaps they know about Noise's habit of purchasing musical instruments in countries we've visited), our three months of health insurance (see last post), temporary accommodation the first month in Toronto, a lump sum to cover expenses such as deposits on hydro, etc, and so on and so forth. And, ironically, this time they have also offered to cover the cost of transporting a pet. (Which some of you may remember from 2 years ago - it costs two or three times as much to fly a dog as it does to fly a person. Hello? You don't have to feed them or offer them drinks or blankets or movies.) Of course it no longer applies to us, but it sure would have been a nice bonus had we still been expecting to pay 1500 pounds to fly Buggy home.

Now some of you may ask - when they say they'll pay for our flights home, do they mean via India, Thailand, Vietnam and China? Wouldn't that be beautiful? Of course not, but we're assuming they'll cover the equivalent cost of a London-Toronto flight, even though we're not flying directly there.

So the lesson learned here is to that there are major perks to working for a large company. Which I don't, of course. I just bask in the fallout.

Leaving on a jet plane...

It's actually happening! We spent a whole whack of money this weekend. :) We booked our flights home, via Delhi, Mumbai, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Phuket, Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Shanghai, Beijing, Vancouver and finally arriving in Toronto late July. We still need to arrange some rail transport in all 4 countries, but we can't book India and Thailand until a couple of months before, and both the Vietnamese and Chinese rail systems don't really allow for easy online pre-booking so we'll likely book those trains when we arrive. That goes against my preferred method of doing things, which is to have everything arranged and organized in advance, but maybe it's time for me to branch out a bit. Live a little.

I've been having some fun looking at various accommodation options. We've booked a room in Chiang Mai for only 13 pounds a night. Such fun. We're also arranging a few activities in advance. We've booked a day at an elephant breeding farm to learn how to care for the elephants, and go for a bareback ride through the jungle. And we're planning to book a 2-night cruise on Halong Bay on a Chinese junk boat, including a trek in the jungle on Cat Ba Island.

Major stress this week as we tried to sort out insurance. The problem is that we will basically be in limbo for the time that we're traveling - not technically considered to be permanent residents of any country. We will have left the UK (and our visas will expire) yet not have re-established residency in Canada, having been gone for more than a year. In Ontario there is a 3-month waiting period before anyone emigrating to (or returning to) the province is eligible for OHIP. The problem is that in order to get travel insurance, the insurer wants to be able to return you to somewhere where you can then get long term health care if necessary. So we're not eligible for any travel insurance. Explain this to me - if we're willing to pay their premium, shouldn't someone be willing to cover us for medical insurance? Some tense moments ensued as we tried to figure out how to establish ourselves as residents in one country or the other. But a google search and travel forum later and I found a company which offers exactly what we need - 3 month visitor insurance for people emigrating to Canada or Canadians returning from an extended absence, with optional pay-by-the-day travel insurance to cover the period of time (up to 2 months) that it takes you to get there. Their example is suppose you are moving to Canada from the UK and want to spend a week in Hong Kong on the way - much dancing and cheering in our house when we found this. Problem solved. Hurrah!

Next step is we need to arrange visas for each country - apparently India and China can both be a little bit tricky. Let's hope it works out or we'll be out a lot of money for plane tickets! And we also need to be vaccinated (and be able to show proof) for yellow fever. So next stop is to the Trailfinders visa centre and travel clinic!

However! Before all of that - I am off to the Canary Islands with some girlfriends next weekend, and Noise and I are going to Amsterdam the weekend after that. And I do believe that will be the end of our European Travel Adventure. Off to Asia instead, just for a change. ;)

And even more fun - The Singer is winging her way here over Easter for a visit! And we've got tickets to see Love Never Dies - Andrew Lloyd Webber's sequel to the Phantom of the Opera - which has just opened in London last week. So we'll be on the cutting edge of musical theatre. Go us.

Song of the week: Defying Gravity as a duet recorded by the cast of Glee. Enjoy it!