Housing and British Food

Well...we have found some flats that we absolutely love! Hopefully all the paperwork will go through soon and we are able to get them. As soon as we do we will post pictures...don;t want to jinx anything!

On the food front...The food is not bad. My first real taste of a proper pub was Thursday while I was in London meeting with some people. We went to a pub called "The Coal Hole." It was extremely authentic, lots of pies and ales. I had the traditional fish and chips with mushy peas and Shai had the steak and ale pie. The both were really good. Mushy peas aren't as bad as they sound. They are basically mushed up english peas, very green though. I took a couple of pictures of the food as Shai's plate was something to look at! The hotel food is quite delicious. We have made a great friend, "G", which has hooked us up with anything that we need, most of the time...no charge! In the mornings we usually have a breakfast bap- a fried egg, ham and cheese on a bun with hasbrowns. Really good, but it is a lot of food so Ken and I share it. The ketchup is Heinz, but it still tastes like Jamaican ketchup to me...a little too sweet. The last couple of days my diet has consisted of fruit, water and juice. My stomache is dictating everything I even think about. I have also found that bickies...shortbread cookies have helped too. This afternoon, I sent Ken down to the lobby to get some fruit and ice and our friend "G" came through with 4 oranges and a whole bucket of ICE!!! I was so happy!! As most of you know, ice is very scarce around London, let alone Europe in general.

We also wanted to go and get some extra fruit, drinks and breakfast foods from a store down the road called Asda because spending 6 pounds on a breakfast sandwich and 3.50 pounds on a bottle of water, we needed to do something. Asda is in the Wal-Mart family and is just as busy! I think Ken was more nervous in there than driving. We have also learned that our credit cards, debit cards are not well taken in certain stores, mostly larger chains. Your cards now have to have the "chip and pin" feature to be taken. So we are going to have to figure out how to obtain one of those through our card companies. We have heard that Amex and Visa have an option to get them.

Tonight my tummy let me venture out of the hotel and Robert, Ken and I went to a local mall to eat. This mall is like no other mall we have ever been to. It is called Bluewater. I think it has everything from 3 food courts and a cinema to a CVS like store. It is absolutely HUGE! It is pretty cool to look at too. I think it has to be bigger than Lenox. We ate an Italian place called Carluccios. It was really good. I had a prosciutto and cheese panini and soup. Ken had prosciutto wrapped breadsticks and ravioli. After dinner we walked around the mall to walk off dinner and look around to see what kind of shops were there. WOW, do they take Christmas seriously around here!

Well we are going back out tomorrow to find the Costco. We will update tomorrow night!

Cheers!