Taunted by the Scottish (15 January)

Today was an everyday type of day full of basic living: paying our rent, buying groceries, and going to Tesco to return a printer that we thought was a great deal until we read online how horrible it was. Instead of showcasing all the cultural offerings of London, today’s photos are both simple reminders that we are very far away from home:

There’s nothing like not knowing how to do the simple things, like writing a cheque, to remind you that you’re in a foreign country! The main body of the cheque looks more like a tic-tac-toe grid to us than something we’d use to sign over £££. And while I’ve covered up our names and pertinent account info in the photo, our address doesn’t appear anywhere on the cheque itself—quite a difference from Canadian cheques which usually include an address and phone number on each cheque. In fact, the cover of the batch of cheques we received says, “If your address is shown correctly, please destroy this page for security reasons.” I wonder why? So far, banking here is very different from banking in Canada, in a good way. First of all, banking is free. Completely free. Did I mention it was free? For those of you lucky enough not to know how Canadian banks work, you basically have three choices, none of which translates into free banking:

1. maintain a minimum balance (usually $1000 or more) for the privilege of “free” banking, with some limits,
2. pay a monthly fee (around $15.00 depending on your plan) that includes a certain number of “free” withdrawals, deposits, cheques, and debit transactions, or
3. pay a fee for every transaction (typically $0.75 and up) made on your account.
In addition to this glorious system, interest rates offered by Canadian banks are dismal. Unless you go with a high-interest, primarily internet bank like ING (which offers 3.5% interest, and which I highly, highly recommend; the UK ING even offers 4.75% interest!) which necessitates also having a conventional account at another bank, a typical interest rate on a standard Canadian chequing account is anywhere from absolutely nothing to a whopping very-close-to-absolutely-nothing 0.05%, depending on your balance and the bank. By comparison, in addition to our account here being free, we’re earning 4.0% interest (and that’s not considered especially high). Anyway, I've gotten slightly off topic, so I shall try to veer back . . .

Reminder number two that we’re not in our West End Vancouver apartment is our London flat's “entertainment centre”:

Bob got an excellent deal on a secondhand pair of speakers (again thanks to gumtree and the tube), but we have yet to buy an amplifier to hook up to the speakers and our laptop to make music sound anything but tinny (there’s only so much that our built-in laptop speakers can do). As for the television end of things, well, you’re looking at it! Our undecorated Christmas tree is keeping a spot warm for the TV that we have yet to get . . . which reminds me of something that happened on Sunday when we were coming home after our Highgate walking tour: we were sitting at the front of the upper level of our double-decker bus, across from two people who were talking about the stadium we could see in front of us. When Bob asked which stadium it was, the woman answered, paused, and then asked, “What part of Canada are you from?” We were shocked, since she was the first person we’ve met during our London wanderings who hasn’t assumed that we’re American—and in addition, she confidently identified us as Canadian! Well, it turned out that she had lived in Toronto for a while and we ended up chatting with her and her dad (who was visiting from Glasgow) for the entire length of the bus ride. The woman used to live right in our neighbourhood and thought we’d made an excellent choice (which, thankfully, seems to happen a lot when we meet people), missed Toronto terribly, laughed when we told her how impressed we were that she knew we were Canadian, laughed even harder when we told her how everyone thought we were American (“Oh, I get that all the time: people ask me, ‘What part of Ireland are you from?’ and I say, ‘The Scottish part!’”), and was interested to hear about Vancouver, since she had meant to go there during her time in Toronto, but never made it out west. Her dad is planning a trip to Vancouver in the fall and is also considering a train trip through the Rockies (something I told him he should definitely do—the Rockies are so glorious, after all), and we talked about Vancouver and Toronto and London and Glasgow and and and . . . They were very nice—and funny too! During our talk, we mentioned the fact that we still had several things to buy for our flat, including a TV. When we saw our stop coming up, we said our goodbyes and thanked them for the conversation. Bob went down the stairs first, and I was just heading down to the main level of the bus when the man remembered one last thing he wanted to tell us, turned around to get my attention, and said, with a smirk lighting up his face: “Bye then, nice talking with you, and you know, tonight’s a VERY GOOD NIGHT on the telly!”