Our little family is still trying to understand how to ride buses, and more importantly, which buses will take us to which places the quickest. On Saturday, we wanted to go to Willen Lake, which is a nice, uh, lake with all sorts of family attractions. We rode the 8 bus. I had heard about the 8 bus during orientation as being the bus that goes 'everywhere'. This is not an exaggeration, and all the turning and twisting made both Yoko and Naomi sick, so that when we arrived at Willen Lake, we had to make a pit stop in the buses. Yoko may have the world record of taking a pit stop in the bushes in the most countries. I can count five.
Willen Lake is nice, and also has a Buddhist Temple which we visited and felt a little bit at home.
After that, we had lunch, and then took the 22 to the centre of town and went to the mobile phone store. And the Apple store. And the cookie store. As much as I want a Macbook, as I am using this program Endnote to organize all of my citations for my PhD and as Endnote is not made for Mac, I don't think I will end up getting one and if I do end up getting a new computer in the next four years, it will likely be a PC.
After that, we took the 20 bus home. All this bus riding was done for only £6.20, a small sum. I figure a car (after we sunk £1,000 to get it up and running) would cost us £80-£100 a month. I don't think that it's worth it, especially if we only really need it twice a week and can get around it if we order things on the Internet. You can order groceries and have them delivered to your house on Tues.-Thurs. for only £3.50. So the bus system should be fine for now. We also found that the 26E bus will take us to the Japanese church, so really have nothing else to want for. Basically, within a ten minute walk of our house we have access to four bus lines, so even if one bus (the most convenient one, unfortunately) only runs once an hour, the others seem to work.
Money, it seems has a lot of say in what we do or don't do.
On Sunday, we went to the Anglican church that we have gone to twice now, and which I thoroughly enjoy as it is much lighter than your average US or Japanese church, and the people are very kind to Yoko and Naomi and me. We skipped out on coffee so that I could ride my bicycle to Ikea and do some shopping for Yoko, which was more or less successful. We are punting and going to get a different mattress as the one that came with the apartment is killing us. Ikea has some nice ones, but I would like to spend less than £200 if at all possible.
We are also trying to decide how we are going to convert the apartment to fit one more child and I think we are just going to have to move to a two bedroom flat. This will be fine, slightly more expensive, but since my grant will go up when the second baby is born, it'll all work out. And the Internet should be on today.