Pros and Cons

I recently wrote the gist of this in an email to a friend back home, and I thought it made a good summary of our feelings right now.  Because I'm still an engineer at heart, of course it has to be in list form!


Our Life in London, (almost) Four Weeks In


Pros:

• Everything here is beautiful and quaint and historic and awesome, including our house.
• The food is really good!  We've had the traditional English stuff at pubs which is actually good (contrary to popular belief), amazing Indian food, Italian food, sushi.  There are literally dozens of great restaurants within walking distance, which is dangerous. Why cook? ;o)
• People have been really friendly and welcoming.  I've made three groups of friends - people at church, an older lady American expat club, and a younger lady American expat club.  Everyone is quick to plan events, invite us out to do stuff, etc.  It has really helped the adjustment.
• I'm getting lots of exercise walking everywhere!
• Public transportation is super fun and easy.

Cons:

• It's COLD!!!
• I can't get a lot of American ingredients, so cooking is tough.  I'm still learning what I can substitute, where to find specific things, etc.  Plus, I'm quite homesick for some good Mexican food!
• I miss my friends terribly.  I think it's easy to take real, deep friendships for granted until you don't have those friends around you.  The new people I've met are all really nice, but I wouldn't say I've completely clicked with anybody.  It just confirms what I said at our going-away party - I am so blessed to have some incredibly special friends in my life!  Friends like that don't come around very often!  I miss all of you soooo much!
• Sometimes I just don't feel like walking.
• I miss the freedom of getting in the car and driving where I want to go.  Public transportation and walking have been great 99% of the time, but we've run into one specific situation where they let us down.  We got invited to a church group at this couple's house who live about 2.5 miles away.  It's too far to walk, they live a mile from the train station, and no buses go between our house and theirs.  Yet it's a straight shot by road!  So it's a 4-minute drive, or a 30-minute trip by public transportation plus a long walk.  Grrr...

So there you have it!  It's kind of a mixed bag of emotions right now, but no adventure is complete without some challenges, right?  And I know that several of these challenges are simply because we haven't been here long enough.  I can't expect to have best friends in (almost) 4 weeks, know where to find every ingredient I'd ever want, have transportation to every possible corner of London licked, or be perfectly adapted to a vastly different climate.  I'm just impatient sometimes.  :o)

Lessons Learned From a Two-Week Londoner

Well, really two and half weeks.  That's probably why I'm such an expert now on London life.  ;o)

• It doesn't matter what you wear.  If you have a cute coat and cute boots, you'll look great all the time.
• Do not hesitate to push yourself onto a train, or the doors will close and you'll miss it.
• The faster you walk, the warmer you'll get.
• To look like a true Londoner, never make eye contact with anyone, ever.  Never acknowledge another person's presence.  Pretend you're alone in the middle of a meadow, instead of smooshed with 50 other people on a subway car or navigating a crowded sidewalk.  Sound lonely?  It kind of is.
• No matter the occasion, expect tea.  Breakfast, lunch, before church, after church, afternoon hangout with friends, evening get-together, appetizer, dessert.  Tea.
• It is absolutely okay to order beer or wine with lunch, and kind of weird if you don't.
• The pints here are about 20% larger than US pints.  Just keep that in mind.
• Never bring up house size in conversation, whether you're talking about your old place in the US or your new, tiny place here in London.  We are living so extravagantly here compared to others that it's kind of embarrassing.
• Don't expect to shop here AT ALL.  $150 for rain boots?  Sure, that seems reasonable. (?!?!?!)

Well, that's all I've got so far. More to come!

Back in Action!

We're here!  We're in our home!  We have internet (finally)!  I am so woefully behind on telling our story that it almost isn't even worth doing a summary. But I'll try to make it very short, and maybe later come back with more details...

The past 2 months have been absolute chaos in my eyes.  I prefer to be a methodical, planning sort of person.  I don't like to be rushed, and if it means I get half as much done in a day as the average person, that's fine with me.  That was unfortunately not an option in the weeks leading up to our big move.  We inventoried our entire home - every possession with its own line item, monetary value, and destination (air freight, sea freight, or storage).  We requested and received visas.  We did copious immigration paperwork.  We took our dogs to numerous vet appointments and priority overnighted paperwork for their own immigration.  We made several improvements and repairs to our house to prepare it for sale.  There were a million other little things we did that have now faded from memory. We absolutely could not have done this without the help of our families; they were incredible and truly self-sacrificing!

In the midst of this craziness, we made it a priority to spend time with friends and almost every living relative we have, who all came down to Houston for Christmas.  We are so glad we made the time; it truly was a wonderful Christmas and New Year, and we felt truly special by our friends who sent us off with tons of love.

Fast-forward to Sunday, January 22nd - we arrived in London and hit the ground running.  We lived in a hotel for about 5 days while we took possession of the house, got rental furniture delivered, did the first grocery shopping, etc.  We had 9 suitcases between the two of us, and since we had no car (and few taxis are large enough to carry that haul), we took three trips on the city bus lugging our bags from our hotel to our new home.  I kept wondering if we ever got the same bus driver, and if he ever thought, "I could have sworn I've seen those two before carrying different suitcases...what the heck are they doing?!"  But it all worked out great, and we eventually got it all transferred to the house.

I got a new UK phone (technically a new SIM card for my semi-legal unlocked iPhone, which I did myself - pretty proud of my hacking abilities), so we finally had a phone number we could provide to the numerous local groups who needed one - electric company, internet provider, air freight delivery, etc.  Really funny observation related to that - there is no consistency (that I can see) to how phone numbers are written.  The UK has an 11-number phone number (basically same as the US except with a 0 at the beginning instead of a 1).  In various places, I've seen the numbers written all these ways: xxxx xxx xxxx, xx xxx xxxxxx, xxxxx xxxxxx, xxx xxxx xxxx, and more.  Literally every combination you can think of.

On Sunday we tried a new church just down the street from us in Richmond.  It was very different from The Waters, but not in a bad way!  Churches tend to be smaller here (except for a few American-style megachurches in central London), and as we learned, tend not to have a full-time pastor.  This particular church has five leaders/elders who all have full-time jobs outside the church and take turns preaching.  In addition, if any church member (I think male only) feels led to preach, he can petition the elders, they pray about it, and most likely that member will get his own Sunday to preach.  The church had about 50 in attendance and met in an 18th century manor house that they had come to own by some amazing story we have yet to hear.  Despite the small size, they had quite a large group of young adults, maybe 15-20 out of the 50.  One couple invited us to lunch at their home, which was so wonderful, and then we came back Sunday evening for their young adult Bible study.  We felt incredibly welcome, really learned a lot (the study was just great), and we are definitely going back this Sunday!  It was funny; everyone we met just loved that we were American, said they always had one American couple in attendance and the last one had just moved away, and basically gave the impression that they wanted to adopt us as their token Americans.  That's fine with us!

Lots of progress happened this week.  Adam started work on Monday and has already established some friendships there.  I continued to work on setting up the house, searching out recipes for which I can actually find all the ingredients, learning to do laundry in tiny tiny machines, only shopping for what I can carry home, etc.  It feels more natural every day.  I too have made some connections.  I joined a Bible study in central London at Westminster Chapel and had an awesome time.  The wife of Adam's boss invited me to her expat ladies wine club on Wednesday.  Wow.  It was about 15 ladies my mother's age, all quite saucy and boisterous.  We met at a pub, and I'm pretty sure we cleared out the place for being so loud.  It really was a lot of fun, though! They all joked that I can set my mom at ease for me being over here, because I now have 15 moms to watch over me.  :o)

Our air freight arrived Wednesday, we got internet set up yesterday (now I no longer have to be that uncomfortable-looking girl sitting alone in a pub using their wifi!), and our dogs arrive today!  We absolutely cannot wait to see them; I think it will really start to feel like home when they get here.

Okay seriously, that was my "short" summary of the last several weeks.  Now that I'm all set up with internet, I'll try to make these blogs shorter and more frequent!

Love to all of you, we miss you dearly and hope all is well in the States!

Erin

Forward Progress

What do my recent Target purchases signify?

...we booked our house-hunting trip!

That's right, things are really starting to happen around here.  Since Monday, we've gotten our housing allowance numbers, initiated immigration paperwork, been briefed on everything from bank accounts to driving lessons, been put in touch with a relocation specialist (a.k.a. realtor) and sent him our list of housing preferences, and booked the flights and hotel for the reconnaissance trip.  Whew, I get tired just looking at that list!

We are leaving in a week and will be gone for 8 days.  We're hoping the house-hunting part doesn't take too long, and we'll have some time to relax and explore the area.  One very nice way we'll be able to relax is on the flight - Adam's company is flying us business class!  This will be a first for both of us on an international flight.  Of course we had to research what it will be like.  Seriously, you have to see this to believe it.

(Click here for more photos if you're interested.  Seriously, it's awesome.)

I hope it's as nice as it looks - I'll definitely write about our flight when we get back.  I have a whole plan worked out on how not to end up jet-lagged, involving Dramamine, a sleep mask, ear plugs, and if I'm feeling crazy, a glass of wine.  We'll see - I may be having too much fun in my high-tech seat to get a full night's sleep!

Baby Steps

Well, we have finally received a little more information from Adam's company on the big move.  Unfortunately, it was a list of things we have to do that we previously didn't know about!  Who knew moving across the world would be so complicated?

Here are a few of the random tasks we must complete for the move:

• Get medical and dental assessments
• Get Adam's work permit
• Open a UK bank account
• Obtain permission to leave USA from British Consulate
• Meet with tax advisors to understand how to pay both US and UK taxes
• Rent furniture in the UK to have while we wait the 4-6 weeks for our furniture to arrive
• Take UK driving courses
• Register with a doctor in our new local area (part of socialized medicine, I guess)

There's probably more, but that's all I remember off the top of my head.  I'm so grateful that Adam's company is walking us through most of this and initiating a lot of it for us.  Just the list is overwhelming enough; figuring out how to do all this stuff on our own would be crazy!

Patience is a Virtue

...and I am being given a great opportunity to practice it right now!

We are moving in a little less than two months, and we haven't taken a house-hunting trip, haven't found a place to rent, haven't spoken to a realtor, haven't booked any flights.  In fact, we don't even know yet how much money we'll have to spend on rent.  You might think, "Wow, that's pretty soon.  Shouldn't you guys be getting some of that going?"

Yeah.  That's what I think, too.

You also might have observed that those two months between now and our move include two major holidays.

Yeah.  I observed that, too.

But alas, as we had been warned, the cogs of HR turn slowly, and we are still waiting for financial approval to move forward with any logistics.  So, in the meantime, we've been doing everything we can think of to prepare without actually spending any money:

• We've researched online real estate websites and narrowed down our search to our favorite few areas.
• We've looked into train, tube and bus passes and formed a tentative plan of how best to cover our transportation in London.
• We've looked up bed-and-breakfasts in the most gorgeous parts of the UK and driving times to get there from London.  (Okay, so that wasn't exactly necessary.  But it is fun!) :o)
• We've set up the shipping for our dogs.  (See last post.)
• We've donated tons of extra stuff from our home in preparation for the down-size.
• We've researched churches, grocery stores, parks, train and tube maps, Bible studies, pubs, local points of interest, and so much more, to get a feel for what daily life might look like once we arrive.

I know that we'll get our approval before we know it, and everything will somehow get done when we need it.  I know that if all else fails, we can live in a hotel for a while in London while we find a flat.  I know that not everything with this move is going to go perfectly, and that's part of the adventure.  And I know that no matter what, we are in this together, and we are going to have rich stories and memories to hold onto!

But really, HR.  You could hurry up a little.  :o)

The Business of Dog-Shipping

Hi, we're Brinkley and Buster!  Will you let us into England, please?

When Adam and I first found out about the possibility of moving to London, we immediately thought of our dogs.  We are both total dog people, both grew up with dogs, and those two cutie pies in the picture are our best buddies.  We had heard horror stories about trying to get dogs into the UK -- months of quarantine, shots, endless paperwork, and the sobering truth that many owners simply choose to give away their dogs rather than face the hassle of moving with them.

There was no way we were going to do that; our dogs are part of the family!  So we set to work figuring out how to make this happen.

First of all, we discovered that the mandatory six-month quarantine was a thing of the past.  The whole point of these crazy regulations is that England is an island and has no rabies, so they are very careful to make sure no dogs coming into the country have any symptoms of rabies.  A couple of years ago they changed the rules so that the six months of waiting between rabies shot and England could happen in the home country INSTEAD of quarantine.  So the process would look like this: rabies shot, wait six months, blood test confirming negative for rabies, Welcome to the UK!

Well, we just found out for sure that we're moving to London about a week ago, and we have to be there in January!  Oh no!  THANKFULLY, the regulations are changing again in January - no six-month wait if you're coming from an approved country, one of which is the U.S.  Whew!  So we'll be able to bring them immediately!

Oh, I wish that were the only concern.  The biggest hurdle now is the paperwork -- the confusing, extensive paperwork to get them through UK customs.  If you get there, and any of the paperwork is missing or wrongly worded, they end up in quarantine.  If the airport microchip reader can't find their microchips, they end up in quarantine.  If they lick the customs agent, they end up in quarantine.  (Okay, I made that last part up.  But seriously, it seems that ridiculous at times.)

After mildly freaking out about this for several hours, we decided to enlist the help of a pet relocation service.  Didn't know those existed till a few days ago!  For a (quite hefty) fee, they arrange all the vet appointments and approvals prior to shipping, book the flights for our dogs, pick them up at our house in Katy, get them through customs on both the U.S. and UK side, take care of all the paperwork, and deliver them to our new flat in London.  Is it pricey?  Yes.  Do I feel a little silly for not being able to handle this myself?  Oh yes.  Worth it?  Definitely!

We are just starting the process of making all the arrangements for their big move.  Brinkley and Buster, you sure are high-maintenance and expensive, but we love you!!