On Sunday my Dad headed back home north to Sheffield after his week off with us down here. That evening my Grandparents took Sheryl and I for a ‘carvery roast’ at a nearby pub. Reasonable price (£8) for a sort of self serve roast and the food was ok. However, their Yorkshire puddings left a lot to be desired. They were small and crispy and looked like popadums. The water-like gravy left a very soggy pudding. Not a pretty sight.
This week we house sitting John & Angie’s place as they’re up in Glasgow for the week – I think we’ll be floating between there and my Grandparent’s place. We found it especially cute that the family left little notes for us everywhere!Our tickets arrived from National Express this week. National Express are the largest inter-city coach company in the UK. We’ve done plenty of research when we had spare time up in Sheffield and found a coach from London to Paris was our cheapest option, and understandably the slowest too. But we don’t mind that.
Getting from Bournemouth to London is a three hour journey (can usually be done in two) and we’ll be using the fantastic Megabus (www.megabus.com). These guys offer dirt cheap inter-city travel on brightly coloured double-decker buses and if you book well in advance (usually four weeks or more) you can travel for just £1 (that’s NZ$3).
Our coach from London leaves at 8.30pm on a Monday and travels to Paris via the ferry at Dover and arrives at our destination ten hours later bright and early the following morning. All in all it’s costing us £19 each to get from Bournemouth to Paris. After Paris we’ll be visiting the following in order: Madrid, Lisbon, Barcelona, Nice, Rome (via Genoa), Venice and Berlin. Five countries in two and a bit months and a hell of a lot of mileage to be clocked up on the European rail networks.
Between now and then we’re hoping one of the banks over here will let us open an account and pop a few bob in. Due to the money laundering problems they have in the UK they’re just not interested in non-UK residents.
HSBC have been the worse. After sending us on a wild goose chase with the forms of ID they would accept, only to later not actually accept them, we finally got told we would only be allowed their most very basic bank account. This account would not even satisfy a techno phobic pensioner. They’ll give us a debit card that allows you to withdraw cash from their machines and that’s it. We wouldn’t even be able to make transactions in shops. Bugger that. We wanted the ‘Current Account’ we were told we could have in Sheffield but now told we would not be allowed those facilities for at least six months under their Basic Banking package.
We tried other banks with the same amount of enthusiasm towards us although Natwest would at least let us open something with a degree of flexibility. Even the Lloyds bank, who not so long ago owned our current bank National, said they would not let us open an account if we didn’t have a job. And even then it would be a year until they would offer us a proper Current Account.
It’s true what they say over here – the customer service in this country is generally pretty awful. All these problems and I’m UK born and bred with family living here. Kiwi’s travelling to the UK, you have been warned.
2 comments:
That's ridiculous, really ,I've had bank accounts in Germany, Sweden, Korea, all no problem. In Korea I didn't even know my address and was on a toursit visa when I opened the account...
Well done on the cheap fare to Paris, sounds like your research is paying off :)
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