Friday 31 March 2006

Books can travel too

I love to read – you will rarely find me with out at least one book in my bag. This however poses a problem for prolonged travelling as I can’t bear not to have books to read – a bored Yli is not a pretty sight, but I like to keep them – have boxes and boxes of them in storage – the poor things – I’m sure they miss their sunny shelves in my spare room in Perth.

So to spare me many thousands of dollars in excess luggage I’ve come up with a 2 part solution – the first part is to buy cheap books to read. My local news agency is great for this they have stand with 3 books for $12.95 – cheaper than magazines or daily paper as a book will generally last me a week of commuting. And when I'm actually travelling well beggars can't be choosers.

The second part of the solution is to then release these books into the wild for others to enjoy.

If you’ve never heard of book releases this is were you leave (release) a book at a public place (the wild) for someone else to read, and if you register your book with Bookcrossing and leave it with a short note of explanation then you may even get to find out where you book travels to if the person goes to the website and adds to the books journal.

I’m doing my first book release today on my way home from work - will be interesting to see how far it will travel.

Monday 20 March 2006

And a Mission is begun

One thing I have been warned of is the difficulties involved in obtaining a UK - based bank account – as I am intending to work legally while in the UK figured that I would get started on this sooner rather than later.

So having picked out a bank HSBC – attempted to ring my local branch – a 1300 number and 12 press this button prompts later I get to speak to a “REAL PERSON” - I had a very simple question – did I need to make an appointment to open a new account – either Australian or UK.

10 minutes later the answer was finally produced – no – I could just walk into the nearest branch and open a local account – but would have to brave the automated phone system *gulp* to open a UK account once my local account is open.

Now I just have to find (apparently they are somewhere on the website) and decipher the forms that I have to take with me to open the local account

Monday 6 March 2006

Full steam ahead and damn the luggage

Well there is no going back now - my ticket is now paid for in full!!

Now all I have to do is work out how to pack enough belongings to get me through a year of life and travels in the UK, Europe and beyond in 20kgs!

I long for a luggage of my own


The Luggage had an elemental nature, absolutely no brain, a homicidal attitude towards anything that threatened it's master, and he wasn't quite sure that it's inside occupied the same space-time frame work as it's outside.