Off white, like spring.
Saturday, March 20, 2010 at 12:56PM It has been a long time since I have updated this! So the Autumn ‘monthly update’ pledge has been broken. My only excuse is the Travelodge.
Ok so that needs a bit of an explanation, I am back at work, my retirement sadly retired. It was a good trial and I think I will retire again one day, infact, I highly recommend it. The only real problem with retirement was worrying about how quickly saved money turns into gone money…jobs are quite useful for hiding this phenomenon. Where was I? The Travelodge and Webbsite updates. I started working again in January…a full 3 months after my original planned comeback. I took a short contract with a local council near Newcastle. This meant I would be up in Newcastle area 3 or 4 nights a week. Local council’s don’t like to pay expenses (read won’t) so I was looking for ‘affordable’ lodging to stay at during my 8 week assignment. The Silverlink Travelodge was the answer. It was an easy walk to the North Tyneside Council offices, had a good bus service to Newcastle and had, get this, a McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Frankie and Bennie’s AND a Marks & Spencers across the road…I would not starve. Oh and a Bookstore (Waterstones…similar to Chapters) a Curry’s (think Future Shop), HMV (same everywhere) and a movie theatre! I would not get too bored!
The issue with the Travelodge was (is) that it is a cheapie roadside hotel…very affordable, very basic and of course no inter-mo-net (as Homer would say). How was I to update!!! The hotel was actually pretty fun for some other reasons too.
It was, at one time, a niceish (two star?!?) hotel, local rumour has it that it was a Hilton!!! Ooohh! Those days are gone, the interior has the look of having once been nice. The rooms are actually down-right funny. I have some pictures here from my iPhone <pictures here soon>. The rooms all are about as empty as can be with actually having a bed, desk, chair and some sort of (very) small tv. The décor is great too…off white. The walls are off white, the carpet is off white, the chair is off white, the desk is…white fake birch?, off white anyway, the bedding is off white and of course the bathroom fixtures are…BLACK!!!! No just kidding, off white again, if only they were black. It has the feel of a mental ward.
The beds are lumpy too. Oh but my very favourite thing is that the ultra thin duvets are stuffed into the cheapest duvet covers available (they may be custom made by the staff who have access to a sewing machine, some scissors and a couple of yards of thin off white cloth (possibly sail cloth). The duvet covers don’t even close up, they are open at one end (usually but not always at the foot of the bed). The staff covers this up by keeping the duvets super tucked in every time they make the bed. Of course when I undo all there good work (I hate tucked in...poor Emma we have epic battles over this at home) usually all the under sheets get untucked too. I should mention that the undersheets are fitted, in that they ‘just’ fit the bed and you can tuck in exactly 2cm of sheet. Makes me happy though as it makes it pretty easy to get the bed all properly un-tucked!
Hmm feels like I may have gone off on a rant. Actually the Travelodge has been dead reliable, clean friendly and cheap…you get what you pay for. Oh and they allow pets (Emma and I took Cassie to one last summer when we were exploring Somerset).
Pretty lame excuse for the lack of updates…it was also a crappy cold rainy snowy winter…pretty much took the wind out of my sails…
Anywho, I have been working up in Newcastle since late January, it has been good work and I have been enjoying it. Living away from home is not great but it is nice to ease back into work and the money is ok and I do need to replace some of my savings and pay back a person or two who has helped me out over the last 3 months.
I actually got the work because a friend of mine who I worked with at Deloitte has been doing contracting up here for a little while and made the introduction between me and the Council to get me the work…thanks Marshall!
Marshall and I have both been living in the Travelodge and making use of the easy bus service into Newcastle. We are both football fans and have gone to two Newcastle United home games over the last 4 weeks. Newcastle is an iconic club and their home stadium St James Park and their Geordie fans are legendary. Newcastle is having a bit of hard luck and are currently in the 2nd tier division (called the CocaCola Championship Division) rather than the better know Premier League (where they normally are) but they will back next year, the upside to this is that tickets to their games are very affordable. Premier league tickets, if you can get them can easily cost £100 or more! We have been going to games getting very good ‘premium’ seats for £30-40. Best of all the games we have seen have all been romps, with Newcastle winning easily with lots of flashy football…I think we have seen 8 or 9 goals in two games!
One very odd thing about St. James Park is however, the lack of a scoreboard! It has very small clocks in the corners of the field to show the game time but nowhere can you see the score! Of course a Geordie Newcastle fan would never lose track anyway so maybe it makes sense.
Marshall and I even went to Shearer’s bar, attached to the stadium…classy.
We have also found some really good restaurants in Newcastle. We both found this surprising, we even found a pretty good tex-mex place! Best natchos I have had in a long time! The real find however was an Indian restaurant called Sachins http://www.sachins.co.uk/ It is a Punjabi restaurant and easily one of the best Indian food places I have ever eaten at!!!
Sadly my time up north, and wow is Newcastle ever way up north, is pretty much over. I have about a week off before I start a new permanent job with CSC. I am looking forward to that too now that I am back in the swing of work.
I think I will spend a lot of my time off looking for a new Flat (apartment for those who are not bilingual in English and well English). Emma and I would like to get a bigger nicer place. London is very frustrating in that to buy a nice place is prohibitively expensive…so you end up renting a nice place for an amount that you would really prefer to have gone to ownership! It is a real problem here. Part of the problem is also both mine and Emma’s expectations. I suppose the English are less fussy about housing while I can’t help but compare it to Canadian standards. With any luck by the next update we will have nice new digs!
Ok that has exhausted me…more later, hopefull not more than a week or two!
I may even get some photos up…I am on the train coming back from Newcastle doing this update so I can’t post any photos…they are not on this computer!
Cheerio, hip hip and all that!
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