Entry #2: It Feels Like Winter - Westside Story - The Last Long Walk

We found our own place in record time. From the day we arrived in Birmingham it was five more until we had not only found but moved into our very own apartment. It’s a good thing too – we couldn’t have lasted much longer at the guesthouse. Or should I say, the igloo.

To get a true sense of what our room in the guesthouse was like, imagine a large box, the only deviation from its rectangular nature being a curious smaller box, shaped somewhat like a phone booth, that served as a fire door for the room. Due to its confusing array of inswinging and outswinging doors, the only possible purpose for these firedoors, if ever there was a fire, was to trap victims inside. The rest of the room consisted of two single beds arranged so as to block any possible movement around them and a double bed placed coincidently enough in the centre of the rear half of the room. There were also two old fashioned bureaus, a small table and chairs and a television placed in such a way as to always be bumped into by large backpacks, or more commonly by my head. The television of course was the pay variety as well. It cost a pound to watch who knows how many channels for who knows how long as we never decided to find out. The room stretched from one end of the old house to the other. It had high ceilings that gave the impression that it was formerly a grand parlour or library that had been ill-converted into this strange hotel room some years before. The two single beds always gave us the impression that at any moment two new guests might swing open the door and join us in our igloo.

I say igloo because that is what it felt like. Arriving on Thursday, the temperature dropped each day through the weekend until it was around 10 degrees by Sunday (coincidently the day of our one year anniversary). It was also damp and windy, all of which made our walks into town to visit the library or to use the internet quite interesting. We began to wonder if these sorts of temperatures were common in the English summertime. If they were common we could begin to understand a bit why the British like hot tea and warm beer so much. Normally under these circumstances one would look forward to coming back to a house at the end of a cold walk and basking in its warmth. This was not the case in our guest house. In fact, due to its drafty nature, I often thought it was actually colder in the room than outside. We took to wearing four or five layers and extra thick socks. Over our five days there were developed a nighttime routine of undressing, climbing under the four layers of blankets we amassed (at least two more than we normally had in the worst of the Canadian winter) and rubbing each others arms and legs until they regained feeling or we stopped convulsively shivering. Needless to say, despite enjoying how cheap it was we were glad to move out and into our new, and might I say downright hot, apartment.

But how did we get this apartment you might ask? Well that is an interesting story in itself. Our second day in Birmingham began with a meeting with Adrian, our portly, joyful Irish agency man, in which he went over all the TimePlan mumbo-jumbo in his comically scrambled way. He then drove us at breakneck speed to the bank where we waited for an attendant to become free in order to set up our new British bank account. Unfortunately the attendant was tied up by an elderly gentleman who took out bag after bag of small change, each one causing Adrian to utter a minor expletive. After getting our accounts sorted out we headed back to TimePlan where Adrian made suggestions for finding apartments which included, amongst other things, another breakneck tour of the neighbourhood looking at some. We asked him about the apartments right across the street from the office, to which he responded that “you couldn’t swing a cat in there”. We wondered whether this counted as a tick in the positive or the negative column for the apartment. He then suggested a letting agent and went so far as to dial the number into his phone and hand it to me before I could even think about saying no.

The letting agent turned out to be an English man of Indian descent who was willing to show us an apartment later that day. I say this not because it is out of the ordinary for letting agents to show people apartments but more because it was out of the ordinary for him, as the boss of the company, to show them. Our first meeting with Rav was like most of our later meetings: scattered. He both sold the place shamelessly, telling us how good the location and the price were and randomly shared his life story with us in such a way that made one feel both like an anonymous customer and an old friend talking over coffee. At one point in a later discussion he asked me for advice on how he should go about firing one of his employees and told Jenn how he woke up every morning thanking God for his wife, whom he happened to marry on the same day as Jenn and I, twenty three years earlier. This was Rav’s way and as we got to know him, we found it thoroughly charming.

The visit to the apartment was strange to say the least. After we got over the stumbling block of getting off on the wrong floor and actually found the apartment, Rav knocked three times and called out, getting no response. Now normally seeing an apartment that is occupied, especially when the occupants are home, gives one a weird feeling, but walking in on a couple that has clearly ignored three knocks makes it downright awkward. The tour of the apartment was therefore brief as we sort of just looked around and followed Rav as he opened various doors. At one point Jenn was about to ask what was through a door off the main hallway but decided not to when she noted a pair of blue underwear hanging off the doorknob. As we left the apartment, Rav gave one last push, promising to break all the rules for us if need be. We thanked him but said we wanted to see a few more apartments before picking one.

Clearly this last sentiment was easier said than done. We went to three other letting agencies that afternoon, all of whom told us in varying degrees of caring that we wouldn’t be able to see any apartments until the following week, around the time when we could actually be moved into the apartment we saw that morning. We therefore threw all caution to the wind and decided to take the first and only apartment we saw, at what really was quite an excellent price. The price however was also a snag. Although we had a bank account, all of our money was still in Canada awaiting our call to send it flying across the ocean to our new account. When we spoke to Rav he said he was willing to bend a bit on the deposit and asked for whatever we could give him in cash which turned out to be a mere quarter of what we owed him. He accepted this and took the apartment off the market.

We waited a few days in nervous anticipation for the rest of our money to arrive. By Monday morning it had left our Canadian account but with bankcards and internet passwords yet to arrive from our British bank, we had no way of knowing if the money had gone through, leaving us effectively penniless. On Tuesday morning we called Rav who gave us the happy news that we could move into our new apartment. I said that was great but that our money hadn’t arrived yet. He asked for whatever we could give him just to “top it up a bit”. Since we literally had no money in our Canadian account and no access to our British account we were at a loss. Eventually we emptied Jenn’s Canadian account and brought our figure up to a third of the total amount. Although he was clearly nervous about this Rav let us move in anyway and we happily paid him the next day when our bank information arrived and we realized our money had been sitting in Britain for two days already.

Moving in however required us first to move out of the igloo that had become our home. Our landlord, however, set strange rules that made us have to leave our ice hut before ten in the morning or face the penalty of paying for another night. This didn’t actually bother us much as we felt fairly sure a certain Irish bloke we knew would be willing to drive – or should I say catapult – us from our guest house to the TimePlan office at that time. We were mistaken however, Adrian wouldn’t be available until after 11:30. We therefore stood on the steps of the guesthouse at five to ten dumbstruck. We had as luggage everything that we thought we would need for a year. The walk to our new place was a good forty five minutes when not heavily laden and we were definitely heavily laden. I carried a large expedition pack that weighed at least double the twenty kilos that I lugged around Europe. We also had an equally heavy wheeled suitcase, two completely full normal sized backpacks, and several shopping bags of excess stuff. Now at this point any normal people would have done one of two things: called a cab or waited for our Irish friend but we, as readers may have already noted, neither had money for a cab nor are normal so we decided to walk.

We had taken many a long walk during our trip through Europe. The last long walk we had taken was from a train station in Rome along the side of a highway to an airport. Although I loved every minute of that walk, I noted at the time that it was the dumbest of all the dumb walks we had ever taken. I may have been mistaken however; this walk may have been dumber. We arrived at TimePlan just in time to see Adrian off to his 11:15 appointment after which he was to pick us up. Oh well, it was one last long walk and we were finally, for the first time in two months, going home.