As time goes by

Called my solicitor today, as Saturday morning I received a letter from her with questions I had to answer regarding the house. Some of the questions were quite straight forward however some of them were about building consent regulations with some of the work that has been carried out at my house. The thing with this is the work mentioned was all carried out before I bought the house, so over 10 years ago, so I explained that I couldn’t give them any planning permission documents, so she said this would probably be ok, but I may have to pay for an indemnity insurance policy, I don’t know how much this would be but at the moment I have to wait for the solicitor to pass back my comments and await more of the questions from the buyers legal team.

I have such an impatient nature that the process is driving me mad.

still waiting

Things are moving a long quite slowly at the moment, I have recently sent back to my solicitor the property details of my home, the fixtures and fittings list and the signed sale agreement, however, I have received a letter with a number of questions I have to answer for the buyers solicitor, a couple of them are easy but a couple of them are about the building permissions required for a couple of alterations at the house, the issue is not easy for me to solve as the questioned building work was carried out before I moved in and so I have no certificates of permission, I have referred this back to my solicitor to advise me on.  Hopefully I will be a little more educated on the matter by Tuesday and informed on how to proceed.

I am still excited to move to Prague but a little anxious about the sale of my house.  So tomorrow I have to go to work, as I booked Saturday off to help my brother move to his new home.  He will now be living in Sittingbourne with Helen, the house will be lovely when they complete the decorating and stuff they want to do, it’s a nice house from the 1920’s or 30’s, and is really cosy.

Eliza also moved to her new flat in Putney on Saturday, she will be starting her new job in London, so it was better for her to live closer, Petra helped move and then stayed in London with Eliza for the evening.  She had a night out with them and a little dance at a local club, she was a little hungover today, but I don’t think she wanted to admit it.

Yesterday I felt very ill myself as I had a night out on Friday, with a couple of ex colleagues from David Lloyd, but I got really drunk early in the evening, and spoilt the night, because I had to come home, but I got ill to so had a bad night.  Thankfully I feel better now.

Been Away

Things are so crazy at the moment; my head is spinning with thought of the number of things we have to do in the short term. It’s great news that we have sold the house, this was about 3 weeks ago that we agreed a price with the buyer, the process is following It’s path and I am finding very little else is filling my mind. I am desperate for the completion to happen quickly but anxious that it will drag on. So far the paperwork from my solicitors has been completed and they are in possession of the deeds to my property and my redemption figure on the mortgage, the only thing they have cocked up so far is losing the property details papers that I sent them. So I will have to do another lot when they post them to me. The only thing we are waiting on now is for the buyers to agree the contract and return it, I think they have applied for the searches etc, but every day seems like a week to me at the moment so I keep wanting to pester them and get some kind of date for completion. Tomorrow couldn’t be soon enough! I guess it’s because we feel totally distracted by the thoughts of our near future over the drudgery of day to day processes here, neither of us enjoy our jobs and we have plenty to be getting sorted out for the move, for example, we have to get rid of pretty much every thing we have in the house because we won’t be taking it with us, it would have cost about £3,500 to move everything over, and I decided that it wasn’t worth it and may as well buy new when we got there, none of the electrical items could be taken anyway. One or two things would be ok because I could get new leads to plug them in. All the other stuff and my furniture is being donated to my brothers new house fund. At least it will go to a good home. We have even got the packing underway, seriously we have done about 75% of it and I have been to the council dump twice already to clear out all the crap that I have built up over the ten years that I have been here. The other day I took 5 bags of clothes to the charity collection point to get rid of them, it was heart breaking! (but well overdue anyway).

We may have found a temporary flat to rent in Prague whilst we look for the flat we want to buy, Janas’ colleague has one for rent without commissions and one of Petras’ friends has one both at reasonable prices. Which is a stroke of luck because I was thinking we may not have anywhere to go to, the few things we will be taking might have ended up, (could still) in the middle of old town square with the homeless sleeping on them. It would be just like the advert that the airline company ran for a while with a person getting into a bed that was in the middle of a roundabout.

A change of subject now, just had a very scary experience on the way home from work, Petra picked me up, and as we drove home I spotted a bloody huge spider on the dashboard of the car. I got a little worried because the roads were very busy, so I said to Petra, don’t panic but there is a large spider on the dash, she spotted it and started to scream and wanted to get out of the car, but we were still moving so I started saying, stop the car, stop the car, and she basically just rammed it up onto the kerb and stamped on the brake. The spider dropped off the dash onto the foot well on her side and that was carnage, she didn’t bother taking the car out of gear and just climbed across the seats, so I put the car in park and run round to the driver side to try and remove the spider which had legged it under the driver seat. I knew that we wouldn’t be going anywhere as long as the spider was around so I had to search for it and get rid of it, which I eventually did. Then we casually got back into the car and continued home. I was quite angry though, although I understand the fear of spiders, I don’t understand how a spider walking around the car can be worse than killing us both in a car crash.

Czech Spa Towns and Castles

The last couple of days have been interesting, here is a run down of our activities since arriving at the Czech Spa town of Marianske Lazne.

we got here on Saturday afternoon and had a little walk around the town. at the ;centre is the spa taps where you can take a cup and try various different fresh spring waters, some of which come readily heated! a couple of them were really nice and even had bubbles au naturale. but there were a couple that were gross. they are apparently good for healing! yeh right. i think it's a good marketing ploy to make you buy the cups that you drink the water from. at the centre is a 'Singing Fountain' which is basically a decorative fountain with hundreds of well placed jets that propel water in time to classical music tracks piped from the fountain. each day, every 2 hours is another performance to a different classical track. quite amusing, really.

on Sunday we had a bit of rain, we went in the car to Tepla Monastary about 10km from our base, the monastary was taken over by the communists and the army where based there, the communists had a killing spree and murdered the monks that originally lived there. after the fall of communism the monastary was given back the the Order and today 12 monks still live there. The Monastary also houses the second largest library in the Czech Republic, and i must say it is pretty impressive. if you read a book a day you would have to spend 300 years there to get through all the books. in the afternoon we spent time back at Marianske Lazne with more friends having a walk and then went back to the car again to drive to Kynzvart Chateau where we had a tour of the rooms, it was very interesting, however, we forgot to get the english text for the tour so i hadn't the faintest idea what was going on, later we had some dinner back at Marianske Lazne.

Monday was a really good day, we drove to another spa town called Frantiskovy Lazne for some reason this gave me the feeling of entering a wild west cowboy town, although there were no cowboys. plenty of germans though. i had a great couple of hours here at the waterpark, it was basically a modern leisure centre with fantastic pools. All the systems were really hi-tec, firstly for 2 quid you get 1.5 hours in the pools, the receptionist gives you a wrist watch, this will allow you through the gate then lock and unlock your locker for you, they are individually coded. It has a kind of proximity chip in it. it will also give you further information when you hold it up to one of the information stands. clever eh! The pools where all stainless steel so they were easy to shape and form. and where incredibly clean, but the very best part about them was that they reflected the light from above far better than a normal pool so you could see clear as anything when you swam underwater or front crawl, probably an unexpected benefit in the design. The pools also had great edgings, moulded like 'W' so that you could sit back into them and relax, some parts had jacuzzi sections to. They also had a jacuzzi cave and superb outdoor water features, fountains, waterfalls, slides etc. From here we went to Seeberg Castle where we see some antique farm equipment the kitchens and the original 'hang mans noose' which i had to have a go of, of course! The views over the valleys were a pleasure. We spent the evening playing Yatzee with dumn rules that Petra made up and a game of Piggies, which i have never even seen before but i am told it is a traditional english game!

Today we visited 2 castles and another large spa town, Kralovy Vary. The first one was Becov nad Teplou, which was a beautiful castle, lovely gardens and views, but it was closed when we got there so we spent some time in the gardens then moved on to Kralovy Vary. This town has a large populatoin of Russians, Petra tells me as much as 50%, Also here you will find fountains of natural spring water and taps for tasting it. here the water came out of the ground very hot, it was infact 72 degrees which surprised me, naive as i am, it was bloody hot and i couldn't keep my hand under it. The other main feature that stayed in my mind was the river that ran right through the centre and split the town, it was very fast flowing and had the biggest carp in that i have ever seen, they were about 80cm long (2.5 ft) and that's no fishermans tale! it had so many too, and nobody was trying to catch them.

something else from today i must tell you about, on the drive to these wonderful places i had the fortune of seeing Eagles, hawkes and a Czech Stork all in their wild habitat, which i feel very lucky for as i have only seen these in Zoos or Falconry places before, the kind that are hand reared. Today i see them going about their business and looking magnificent in the process. They were literally sitting in fields on the hay bales, looking about for some food, i reckon i saw more than 10 in total.

When we got back we had another walk around the town and grabbed dinner, nice and cheap, chicken, with vegetables and rice, garlic and cheese soup, caprese with bread, and 2 beers and a coke for 7.50 and an icecream nearby the singing fountain which was dipped in chocolate and coconut. mmmmhhhhhhhh!

I'm not the only one

i feel like a complete freak, however, this feeling is completely unfounded anywhere other than Czech! So, this evening i decide to have a little snack, as soon as i mention this my wife dutifully grabs the menu from the waitress and reads to me the desriptions (the menu is in Czech). I promptly decide and say "i'll have the chips with a roll and butter". Now, for all you reading this I'm guessing you haven't noticed anything unusual yet, well, you should have been sitting with me! At this point i am being looked at as if i have just asked for a dog shit cake. The 3 Czech faces staring at me are screwed up and incredulous. I say "whats wrong with that?" "thats not a normal combination" they say. "you are kidding me? it's practically a tradition in england to have a chip butty!" But quite clearly is not here.

my wife then calls the waitress and relays my order, again the incredulous look. so immediately without missing a beat my wife continues to explain in Czech "I know it is a strange combination, but he likes it! He will cut the bread, put the butter in, then add the chips." as if i am some special child who she has to placate with acceptace of my strange eating habits.

i felt humiliated and ridiculed as they all then fell about laughing and shrugging shoulders as the waitress went off to the kitchen with my order.

At least it tasted fantastic when i munched away. even if all eyes were on me as silence fell upon the maly hospoda (little pub) in a spa town in Czech!