May, June and July 2007 Update

o, where were we, oh yes... here's the highlights:

In May we were still in Auckland, we had a lovely party at Manu's sisters place where we caught up with a bunch of friends and their expanding families. Then we were very happy to spend Mothers Day with our Mums (it's been awhile since we've done that).

Our final week in Auckland, went by the quickest, and we were kept busy with family dinners and we even managed to squeeze in a Megazone (Laser Tag) outing for Miles (Manu's nephew), Anita's cousin (Cody) and a bunch of their 8 year old friends.

Before we knew it we were whisked off to the airport and got to Melbourne just in time to have a fun dinner with Goce, Stacey, Atish & Nisha. We spent the next week dividing our time between friends and especially enjoyed spending time with Goce, Stace and the kids.

We were scheduled to visit Bangkok for 4 days but flagged it cause there was some political disruptions going on. We ended up spending one night there on our way to London.

Arrived in London on the 1st of June, just in time for Matt and Moni's leaving party (and our welcome party). Met some new folks and drunk away our jet lag.

Matt and Moni were relocating to Moscow, so we have taken over renting their apartment in West Hampstead. It's a great little spot with excellent public transport access plus a few restaurants and bars up the road. There's also a supermarket and cinema that is about a 5-10 min walk away. Especially great is the close proximity to Manu's best friends, it's been a much easier transition into a new country/city having established friends around to make you feel welcome and show you the ropes.

So transitioning into London went fairly smoothly, the only stress we had was trying to find jobs. We seemed to pick the worst time to go job hunting (according to everyone we spoke to). Manu had a bit of a head start with his Salesforce interview already being set up from San Francisco, but even that process seemed to take ages.

We did end up securing jobs in the end - Manu is still in the negotiation process, but he's had a verbal offer and we're just waiting for the contract to be signed. He will be working for Salesforce as a Senior Consultant and he's over the moon about the job. Salesforce's head office is in Camberley which is about an hours drive away but luckily he shouldn't need to go out there too often as he'll be working on 2-3 month projects around London (or maybe even with a bit of travelling). Currently Manu's travelling between London and Edinburgh doing 2 weeks work for an independent Salesforce contractor, so we can keep a bit of money coming in while he waits for the Salesforce job to firm up. He has decided to not explore Edinburgh because we want to travel there at some point.

Anita is working for GlaxoSmithKline on a 6 month project as a Documentation Analyst (writing up process maps and documentation), it's an hours commute every morning on the Jubilee and Picadilly lines - apparently not too bad by London standards. She's working in head office and the facilities are amazing - the building houses 3,000 employees, 2 cafes, 1 restaurant, a hairdressing salon, ATM machines, gym, squash courts and a dairy with discounted GSK products - this is all for employees only, none of it is open to the general public. It's a fantastic setup, although being a contractor the gym is not free like it is for permanent employees, but it is subsidised and still kicks butt. Work is pretty good too, the boss is very hands off and lets you get on with what you need to do, so Anita is pretty happy with the role.

That's about all our news really. We did squeeze in a trip to see Stonehenge last weekend (refer the pics) - it was absolutely hosing down with rain, but we figure that's how the ancients would have experienced it !

Thanks for checking out our update.

Luff and big Manu hugs
Anita & Manu
xx