Since last Saturday (and my last post), I went through many adventures. :-)

One of them was moving to my new place. The house is located about 20 min by bus from the city centre, which is not that bad, but local people are already making funny faces when they hear that. On Sunday, my big moving day, I knew exactly which bus to take, and where this bus usually departs from... and all my knowledge was totally useless!

I came to the bus stop, and found a funny paper sellotaped to the booth, saying that due to reconstruction, the station was not operational, please use the next station which is on Oxford Street. Fine, well. Such notice generally triggers two possible questions: where exactly is Oxford Street? And, more importantly: where exactly on Oxford Street (which is very long) the station is supposed to be?

I was lucky, there was a guy in high viz clothes, shouting at people ('What are you waiting for here? There's no bus from this station today! My throat hurts so much from having to tell people all the time!') to go away, who was also able to tell me what to do. Basically, he initially wanted to explain to me how to get to the next station, then had a long look on all the stuff I was carrying, and then decided to tell me that there was a free shuttle bus to that next station. So I followed his advice...

...wrongly, of course. I left the shuttle bus approx. 1 station before I should've, so I had to carry all my stuff through the streets anyway. Then, I did not know where exactly my bus was supposed to stop (and it was a bigger crossroads...). So I decided to just stand on one corner and watch the buses, see where they go, and chase them when it comes - and in the worst case miss one bus and then jump into the next one. I was lucky, there was a nice driver who's seen me with all the stuff, waited for me to board the bus, and then waited for me to find the £1 for the ticket! I think I must've looked ridiculous and very foreign, because he was waving at me when I left the bus. (On the right station! Success!)

Then, I got to know better the girlfriend of my landlady. She is very nice!

Of course, I am Czech, and so I have to have beer with everything, including things like moving. So I got some Budweiser (the real one! I checked, and it was 'brewed and bottled in České Budějovice') in one of the shops in the city centre, and brought the beer here. We drank it together with my landlady, to celebrate that I've moved in. :-)

Next adventure was morning, and getting to work.

I got up, had coffee (marvelous coffee my landlady makes), and went for a bus. Of course one bus left just before I got to the station (no comment), and the next one took long time to come - that was not the worst. I was stupid enough to go upstairs, to the upper deck. It was cold and humid, the windows were all wet, and the bus is basically only a bit better than a ship sailing past Tierra del Fuego. Result? Motion sickness, of course. I was very glad I was able to get off the f. bus! Never again, ever!

Third adventure was actually getting back. Yesterday, when I came here with all my stuff, all the notices only informed about the station on Piccadilly Gdns being closed on Sunday. You'd expect everything to be sorted on Sunday, then, and a normal operation from Monday, right?  Because if there were any issues expected for the whole next week, they'd tell you straight away, right? They would not put the notice for Sunday only, right?

No. This is not how Manchester and its TfGM works. No no, you've been too naive! Of course that today, when I came there to that station, I found that the station is moved somewhere again... I did not have map to find where exactly to go... and I was short of time already! But fine, I went for, like, 15 minutes walk to find the next station (also because I had to cross two totally traffic-jammed streets and one huge construction site which is impossible to go through) - exactly the thing I want to do on Monday evening, when the only thing I want is to be at home already.

Well, this enhances my zen attitude to things.