Room with a view

Yesterday everything went right. Today, everything is going not so right. Yesterday, the plight of finding car, flat, etc seemed a piece of cake. But then I saw a couple of flats today, one that was not nice enough and bang on my target budget, which made me determined to up it a little. Then I saw a flat with the most ridiculous view over the whole bay, with large windows to take it all in. But the flat was too big. The lounge was like a ballroom, with a floor to ceiling mirror at one end. It had something of 1970s bachelor pad over it, which is not quite what I want to emulate.

Well, maybe I can sleep in the office for a while...

As for transport, I had some guy from a garage (don't ask how he got my number) phone me up and start going on about how I was screwed if I didn't have credit records. Ok, so what do I do? He said, build up a paper trail. Get credit rating. But it was the way he said it that made me annoyed. He - as we say in Swedish - painted Satan on the wall. Voice dripping with schadenfreude, he explained that the whole starting up business like a baptism of fire that all expats need to go through before settling and boy did I have some uphill struggles ahead. I didn't need that. Just tell me the best way to get round all the difficulties, and I'll get on with it, thanks.

It's hard to concentrate on 'real' work when everything is so up in the air. Tomorrow I'm going to Pretoria for 3 days, hopefully that will give me space to get some stories and contacts down. I do have a newspaper to set up...