Five new English expressions!

• pinky promise: an unbreakable promise sealed with interlocking your pinkies (little fingers)
• handle with kid gloves: handle with too much care (kid gloves - gloves made of the finest leather which comes from an offspring of an animal (e.g. calf))
• the last straw: the last one little think which makes it all unbearable (full story goes that there is a camel, and you load stuff on his back, and then you add the one last straw and the poor animal's back breaks)
• a square peg in a round hole: something that does not fit (just imagine how well a square peg fits in a round hole)
• no-brainer: something that is so easy (obvious) you don't have to think about it

Have you ever received a cheque? Well, until I came here, I have never imagined that I would receive something like this, but here in the UK, funny things happen all the time, and I have got one the other day!

It was from Barclays, the bank that made me so much angry with their attitude when I wanted to set an account with them. I filed a complaint, and after maybe three months, I got an apologetic letter telling me how sorry they were that I have been treated badly, and how sorry they were for the delays in dealing with my complaint. They sent me compensation... which took a form of an enclosed cheque. Saying that I was surprised would be a huge underestimation of my feelings.

Anyway. Cheques are here to be turned into money asap (everyone who's ever watched a gangster film knows this), so I wanted to do that this weekend. The bad thing is that it was my first cheque ever, and I had no idea how to do it. (Obviously, compared to the UK, the Czech Republic is a modern, progressive country, which just does not engage in archaic activities like exchanging cheques. We rather pay contactless.)

So I went to Barclays, with the intent to ask there. Because that is the bank which issued it, and I expected them to be able to tell me. There was an old lady behind the counter, who misunderstood me completely, and insisted that I couldn't possibly set an account in their bank because I had no proof of address. (I have heard this stuff before!)

I misunderstood as well, and thought it was obligatory to have a proof of address just to get my money. So I started thinking - first, what is this country where you obviously cannot do nothing without six difficult-to-get papers, and second, what is this bank which knows by now that I have no proof of address (I've mentioned this in my complaint) and still sends me cheque which cannot be cashed without it?

Luckily I asked again, and then the situation clarified. I could have my money without proof of address, but not in cash, it must be paid into a bank account. (Well, what is the point of cheques, I ask myself. Why not just send the money into a bank account, without processing a funny coloured piece of paper?)

However, I was sent to my bank instead of the bank which issued the cheque, so that my bank can put my money into my account. Cool. Fortunately HSBC has a branch just across the street, and so I went there. An assistant told me what to do.

First, you have to fill in a white paper slip, where you write your name, account number, and the total amount of money for all the cheques you are submitting. Then, you input this paper and all cheques you want to cash (= 1 in my case) into a machine. The machine asks you to either insert your debit card, or to input your name and account number. (Why did I have to fill in the white slip when I have to input the same info again?) Then the machine issues you a bill, which looks like a normal Tesco bill but there is a tiny (illegible) photocopy of your cheque and the white slip on it. And that's it, finished. Your money will arrive in approx. 4 days.

Wait, what! In four days?! Like, seriously?

Pfff, buses!

Few days/weeks ago, I criticized the trams here, and while I still insist that the trams are far from optimal, they are probably still much (much much) better than the buses. As mentioned already in some of the previous posts, the trams do not really cover all Greater Manchester (i.e. Manchester, Salford, and all the suburbs). There are many places where there are no trams, and no trains, and just nothing more than the buses. Therefore, there are many people (yours truly included) who just have no other option than bus - or car, if you happen to have one (or bike, if you are Dutch crazy enough to ride a bike in this weather & traffic).

Anyway. Yesterday, I have set a new record. I waited for the f. bus for 45 (yes, forty five) minutes. It was cold, and when I came to the bus stop, there were already many people, which is always a sign that there was no bus for some time. However, there was no bus nowhere to be seen. As I would have to walk few miles (in office shoes!), I decided to wait; it seemed that the bus would come every second now. However, only new people arrived, no bus. Not even different lines - nothing.

After some 20 minutes, some buses started to arrive, and guess what - none of them was my bus. So I waited and waited. I was freezing, tired, and more and more angry. And when the bus finally arrived, it was a small bus only - not a doubledecker, and not this long bus which can bend. Just a small, short bus. Consequence - people waiting on my station could go in. People on the next stations could not. The driver kept repeating to them, 'only one please'. I can only guess how so very angry they had to be after 45 min of waiting...

Anyway, I did not really expect the way home to be easy. After all, if the buses are not coming, they are obviously stuck somewhere, and this somewhere must be a traffic jam, and if this traffic jam is not really in the city centre, then it has to be somewhere else, for example on my way home - and oh yes, it was there. Magnificent again, superb, and occupying even places which it never occupied before!

So it took me another 45 min to arrive to my station.

I left the bus, and as I was walking home, I said many, many Czech swear words. Really many of them.

My husband had to go to Edinburgh on Monday. He got a train ticket, which was for a specific train at 7.45 am from Manchester Piccadilly.

He is a cautious man, and so on Sunday evening he wanted to check whether the train would really go as scheduled, especially in the light of all the fun we've had already with the railways here. He tried to find a website which would inform about the train departures, but was not very successful; all the websites he's found seemed to only display part of the information. And none of them had the 7.45 Edinburgh train.

That was suspicious of course, but we did not panic. There may be some info missing somewhere, or who knows what. That would be no surprise here. However, there was the little doubt inside his head already.

On Monday morning, it was finally confirmed: there is no 7.45 Edinburgh train. Instead, there is another train which goes to York, and there you have to change and go by another train. Which arrives approx. 1 hr later than the original (nonexistent) train.

Well, at first, I thought, this cannot be possibly serious. How come that the railway people sell tickets for trains they know wouldn't go? Seriously? The ticket was only purchased few days before the travel, and they had to know already.

Well, I am just adding this to the list of the UK funny railway stuff.

And now for something completely different. I think I've mentioned already that English people come to work dressed casually, and they only change into dress-code-compliant stuff once in the office. Well, you'd expect them to do such thing somewhere in private, right?

Ha ha! No. Today, I have seen one guy walking the corridor and trying to put a belt into its place. O_o Imagine how ridiculous it looks, a guy in suit and everything, trying to wrestle his belt and put it in the tiny loops provided on the trousers, while walking an office corridor during an ordinary morning...

Happy new year to everyone!

The New Year's celebrations seem to be much calmer here (in our middle-class neighbourhood) than it used to be in the Czech Republic (in the middle-class neighbourhood we used to live previously). Here, around midnight, many people fired some fireworks, and made a lot of noise, but at 12.30 am, everything was dead calm, and people were probably safe in their beds. In Prague, the amateur firework show usually lasted until 3 am!

(Maybe it has to do with the fact that the bus transport was once again very funny, and it was very difficult to get anywhere, and back. Therefore, people maybe did not drink that much at home, and there were not many really drunken people. In the Czech Republic, people do not limit their drinking to pubs, they are perfectly capable of partying hard at home, and therefore there is much more noise in the streets at 2 in the morning.)

We wanted to go for a long walk here in one of the parks. Ha ha! People often say, we do things differently here in Manchester, and it obviously also applies to parks and public places.

First thing is that there are not exactly many parks in our place. There is one very small, and one approx. 1 km from our house. Today, we checked Google Maps and found another park approx. 1 km from here. So we've decided to check it out.

In our cell phones, we use maps from Here (not Google Maps). However, Here just has no idea that there is a park, and lead us to a re-cultivated landfill instead. Of course the landfill a) is ugly, b) has an incredibly ugly surrounding, with discarded fridges and tires and things like that, c) cannot be entered.

Instead of a nice walk in a park, we've spent 1 hr trying to find the park, enter the park, and avoid the landfill. The road was surrounded by garbage, and there has obviously been some flooding in past few days / weeks, so there was also a lot of stinking mud. Nice, Here, thank you very much!

When we've finally discovered an entrance into the park, we've found that there are fences everywhere (because of the neighbouring landfill), and that the park itself is also full of unwanted stuff. We have seen for example:
- old shopping carts (one of them thrown into a small pond, it looked almost like a modern art project),
- decomposed motor scooter (the metal skeleton covered in rust lying between trees, with no tires and no other components than just the metal stuff - very post-apocalyptic),
- several burnt dustbins (some of them obviously used to be the blue paper-recycling bins),
- a little memorial made of burnt cans,
- meat, potatoes, oranges and grapes (all fresh, or 'fresh'), placed on a former campfire place together with the burnt remnants of some wood,
- something that looked like drugstore waste: pile of shampoos, single use shavers, and things like that, all arranged under one bench.

I am not even mentioning an endless stream of beer bottles, cider bottles, beer cans, cider cans, and other alcoholic beverages containers. All of them empty, of course.

Well, if this were our first similar experience, I would not draw any conclusion from this. But we have seen things like this before, with so much mess, so many broken things and garbage in some places! Including, of course. parks and gardens. I just wonder why a) people create such a mess, b) people tolerate it, c) city council tolerates it. And, speaking about the city council: where are all the high-viz clothes of the cleaning people?

I just don't get it.