Where you live/where you grew up

Woohoo!! I love it when I find other Stokies on here - for years I was pretty much alone, but now there's loads of us!? (sorry, got a bit over excited there!)

A friend of ours runs The Rigger - it's a fabulous place!

Panj - The Full Moon as you probably knew it, shut down a few years ago. He (another friend of ours!) has since reopened it in what used to be The Rendezvous (on one of the side roads off the main road that runs from Fezzy Park, back up to the MFI roundabout (although MFI is, also, no longer there). DYKWIM? WHere the gas works are.)

Penkhull (mostly) rocks, but your H is right CO, there are sooooo many other dodgy areas too.

I grew up in Kent, don't miss it much as all my friends have moved away now and still go to visit parents. Moved up to Yorkshire for uni, then followed OH even further north for almost 4 years in the NE. Now we've gone further afield and are currently living in Brazil! OH job means lots of moving around.

Been here a month now, missing all friends and family back home, but at least we've missed the cold snap you guys have been having recently!

Anybody else currently living abroad and trying to plan a wedding back home?

What part of Brazil? I've been to Floreanapolis which is in Santa Catarina - beautiful. Loved being there, the people are so friendly - still keep in touch with friends I made there.

We're in Sao Carlos in Sao Paulo state. You're right the people are really friendly, although I am struggling a bit with my lack of Portuguese....we're a long way off the tourist track so hardly anybody speaks English! How long we're you in Santa Catarina for?

Not long - three weeks one year where we travelled around Floreanapolis and then because I met such lovely people that first time we stayed in touch and I visited them two years later again for three weeks and taught English in the primary school that my friend ran. I travelled around the state a bit more the second time and also went to Foz Do Iguazu falls where brazil, meets Arentina and Paraguay. I spent a day in each. I learnt Spanish at school which is similar to Portugise so managed to dredge some of that up and pretty much managed to converse the basics with most people, picked up some Portugise too so ended up mixing that in with the Spanish to get by!

You are so lucky to be there!

I live in Coventry in the same house i grew up in ! I moved out and came back and moved my h2b and baby in!

I don't particularly love Coventry but its all I've ever know and all my friends and family are here!

i laughed at this..when i was a young naive 17/18 yr old, i visited the uni at northampton (boughton green) and thought the place was so new and fresh and modern, and didnt look any further, didnt go into the town or anything

after a year there i realised how much of a dive it was lol

I moved from my home town to move in with my OH whilst doing my PGCE - I did this at Cambridge, and only lived 30 minutes away so technically could have stayed at home, but we wanted to move in together and it seemed the perfect time. We've moved out of Cambridge now to one of the south villages, which I love. Close to decent shops (well, 20 minutes) but our garden backs onto open fields and we don't have a proper fence so it really feels like we are in the country. I don't think I'd ever go back to my home town - a lot of my friends have moved away from there because it isn't great and where we are is fab for OHs work and pretty good for mine too.