And did those feet in ancient times...

So I moved to the UK! And I'm living north of the centre of London, in what's called the Hampstead Garden Suburb. This is a pretty cool suburb to live in because it was planned out by a woman in the late 1800s to be a sort of village with lots of greenery and other health and well-being promoting areas. Nicholas and I are living here in a 3br apartment, which is lovely and quiet, with lots of greenery around, squirrels and birds in the garden, and a lovely old building that probably dates to the early 1900s.

There's a lot of history about the suburb here: Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust

For my birthday I got an iPhone4, (thanks grandmothers!) and so I've been messing around with apps for it -- here's a "Hipstamatic" photo of the view out my window at home:

The nearest shopping area (about 5-10 mins walk away) is Golders Green. It's a distinctly Jewish area, so there are lots of Kosher restaurants and delis. There is also a decidedly large population of Japanese and Koreans, so the area boasts 3 asian supermarkets, and a seriously large number of Japanese and Korean restaurants. Sadly they're really not into being vegetarian :( There is, however, a delicious Chinese restaurant that has a huge array of vege dishes, many of which are of the "fake meat" type which are delicious but often a little off-putting. Still, mostly delicious :D There's also 2 Polish supermarkets and a good old fashioned Sainsbury's to round out the multi-culturalism in the shops department.

Here's a photo of the main street down Golders Green:

Sadly, there's no Pret, or Waitrose :(

However, we're about 15-20 mins away from the city centre, which is great! Also I'm about a 10-15 minute bus trip from work (or a shorter tube but longer walk) which makes things very convenient for me.

Work's going very well. I'm working on a very interesting project, which I may write more about later, looking at surveillance and monitoring of paedophile activities on the internet. At the moment I'm working on sorting out the hype and hysteria from the actual facts, and discovering some of what people think about online paedophiles is not necessarily backed up by the literature, or based on probably biased studies of self-selecting populations. It'll be very interesting to tease out what's really going on, because it's an important issue that needs to be addressed, and in a way that means that counter-measures will be effective and fair to everyone involved. But yes, definitely more on that later!

I'm heading back to Australia for Christmas/NY. I'm super excited about this because I haven't been back in well over a year, and I'm missing people and places a lot! It'll be lovely to see my friends and relatives at Christmas, and to go to the beach and swim, and to smell that wonderful fresh sea air again! Please let me know if you'd like to catch up with me while I'm back -- I will be around for two weeks but probably before Christmas will be the best time to catch me! I might organise a lunch or something, if you're on facebook or twitter I'll keep you posted there, but if you're not, please let me know and I'll send you a super special email :D