Please bear with us!!

Hello all! We moved into our apartment this past Tuesday! Never have I ever seen so many boxes in my life. All the furniture showed up in boxes and we had to put together everything. A co-worker and myself went to IKEA and furnished 5 apartments! You could imagine the amount of cardboard we recycled! I think we filled up Tesco's recycle bin numerous times between all 5 of the apartments. Never in a million years would I have thought that it would have taken as much mental and physical strength as it did. We were exhausted by the time that we got everything handled. But I do say that our apartment looks really good! I was talking to someone the other day and I have decided that I would have to have 4 different houses to satisfy all of my decorating tastes.

1. Classic/Traditional with antiques- most likely my all around favorite and will probably be the house that we buy
2. Comfortable/Clean Modern
3. Elegant but Rustic- lake or mountain cabin
4. Beachy with bright and bold colors, seashells

So, as Jenny pointed out, I can satisfy my Modern urge now and not worry about being stuck with it! Now I just have to work on the other three!

Wehave found the local grocery and we were able to cook for a couple of nights! Spaghetti was first, then mexican and now we are stocked for the rest of the week. Hopefully we will pick up some really good recipes to try out of people when they visit. It is so nice to be out of the hotel and have a little bit of a routine now that we are in the apartment.

Well, a little bit about English living. First of all, we have a much smaller frig/freezer space than back in the US, especially freezer space! We have three tiny ice trays that we are filling up constantly! The milk jug are a lot smaller, I think closer to .5 gallon. If any of you know how much Ken drinks milk, that is just not going to cut it. So I bet we will be in the Tesco buying milk 2-3 times a week. Take your fridge and maybe 1/3 it and that is about how big we have. It is a nice frig, but not very roomy. The wahser and dryer is a washer/dryer combo. It washes, dryes, or wash/dry combo. It can hold 3 towels or two sheets or maybe a couple pairs of pants and three shirts or so and maybe some undies. Needless to say we do laundry a lot!!! The heating system is actually an underfloor heating. Hot water runs under the floor and heats each room. This is really common in newer construction here. Every room has a different thermostat. It is really nice to wake up and the bathroom tiles and kitchen tiles are warm. There is no air conditioning-we are hoping for a mild summer. Over all we are very comfortable and can't wait to explore the little towns near us!

We went to the grocery today and the food at the grocery has a very short shelf life! I am pretty sure most of them have no preservatives. So hoping that a loaf of bread will last even 5 days is a far stretch. We were hoping to find some smoked sausage, but it looks like we will have to go on the search. We are craving red beans and rice, it will have to wait. They have just about everything though. It just takes a little looking around to find what you need. No real short trips to pick up something until we get used to the new packaging. They aren't real into convienence foods, like shredded cheese. We will just have to adapt and grate it ourselves. Nothing wrong with a little elbow grease! I was looking for shredded mozzarella today and had to settle for the real thing- buffalo mozzarella...DARN!! For those who don't know me and buffalo mozzarella, I love it!!! It is the total opposite in the US, you can't find a great variety of mozz except the block or shredded kind, but here I had to choose between 6-7 kinds of buffalo mozz. Little things like that I really love to figure out.

Well, we will hopefully get internet by next week. We will update shortly! Love yall!

Sorry for the delay, the pictures had to thaw!

Greetings everyone, it has been such a busy week for the two of us that we haven't had a chance to post anything. We wanted to share some more pictures from last weekend.
Last week was very cold (sounds like what you are getting right now)! Last friday night, we decided that a trip to Stonehenge the plan for Saturday. We got going around 10 for two hour drive. The car's thermometer said -5.5 C when we left, and didn't pop over 0C all day. It was so cold that the windshield washer fluid was frozen most of the day. Here's a video from our drive to Stonehenge.

We had fun walking around and seeing Stonehenge, although it was about as you'd expect. We signed up for the English Heritage annual pass, which allows us to go to over 400 historical sites across England. Since we got this pass, we will have to go back to see the stones when they (and us) are not frozen.

After our short tour of Stonehenge, we decided to eat lunch at the nearby town of Salisbury. We found a delightful pub to dine, and had some of the best food so far. After lunch, we wanted to see what the town had to offer, so we walked over to the Salisbury Cathedral.

The cathedral was built 14th century and housed the oldest known working tower clock in the UK (possibly the world) and an original copy of the Magna Carta. The cathedral's history and architecture were quite impressive, and it was neat seeing the historical document.

Sunday we went to Ikea to pick out the furniture that we are going to have for the next year. The rest of the week has been mostly filled with work and purchasing housing goods for the flat. We currently have around 50 Ikea boxes of furniture waiting to be assembled. That's what we are up to this weekend. We got the keys to the flat, but now we have to put everything together and get it ready for us to move in.

On a side note, we found that the SkyTV Sports tele channel is showing the NFL playoff games late nite on Sunday. Last week we got to watch the Ravens! We'll see if we can stay up this weekend to watch them again.

Sorry we haven't gotten a chance to call anyone lately. Our cell is very low on minutes and we haven't had a minute to top up. Hopefully we will get a chance this weekend and will give everyone a call sometime soon.

Cheers!
- Chamee and Ken

Busy bees

Hey everyone! Sorry it has been awhile since we posted. We have been busy bees the last couple of days. As soon as we get a little down time we will post about our weekend. We were able to take a trip to Stonehenge and Salisbury. Details to be posted!

Winter Wonderland

Last night we were feeling adventurous on the food front and wanted something a little different. So we all decided on Indian food. We had all seen an Indian restaurant down the road from the hotel...off we went. I don't believe that any of us had ever been to an Indian restaurant before, so we were all new to the menu. There was a little bit of a language barrier too. Needless to say we were confused. I ordered the safest looking dish that had no curry, Manchurian chicken- thinly sliced chicken in a thick sweet and sour sauce. I am not a big curry fan at all. Ken dove right into one of the "one pepper" curry dishes (you know how asian restaurants will have a legend with mild to hot dishes represented by 1-3 peppers shown). For an appetizer they suggested this multi sauce platter with crispy chips called papadams. It came with 5 sauces that ranged from yoghurt and chive sauce, to a mango chutney. My favorite was the mango chutney. The chips tasted like Munchos-Frito lay- chips. I think they were all laughing at us for asking so many questions about the food. When it came out, mine was is in a medium red sauce and had stewed tomatoes and mint. It was really good with the rice. Ken's was great. I actually liked his better than mine. It didn't have too much curry in it to where you were knocked off your chair. It was very light and I really liked the flavor. I think his was called Bhuna chicken curry. It was quite a different taste than any other food I have eaten, but I would say that we would try it again. I am going to have to do some research on the different kinds of dishes so I will know what to order next time.

So we woke up this morning to find that all of the trees and other vegetation were FROZEN!! and it was -3celcius. I think because it is wetter here it seems colder than it would in the US if it was 25 F. Here is a picture of the road and the trees covered in ice. We also saw a truck that had frozen spiderwebs! They almost looked fake.

We also went to the apartments today and took some really good pictures of this awesome tree right outside our window. It almost looks like one of those spooky trees from a cartoon or something. It sure does make for a good picture. We are off to dinner! To the pub we go! We are actually walking in this crazy weather!

I drove for the first time!!

Hey there! Sorry yesterday's post was so short, but we were tired. But here are the details that I wanted to add to yesterdays post.

For lunch we went to a little place down the road called The Rose and Crown. It was fairly early to serve lunch for the English. I think we arrived around 11:45am. We went to a few places before we ended up here because they weren't serving lunch until 12:00 or 1:00. Us Americans like to eat lunch early I guess. But I think it has something to do with how we like to get to work early and leave early. We ordered at the bar. I had the chili jacket potato (baked potato) and Ken had the club sandwich. I wanted to sit by the fire, so I grabbed us a table in the back on the other side of the double sided fire place and awaited our food. I got the jacket potato because my mouth was still hurting from the dental work that I had done the day before and I wanted something warm. When the food came, it was beautiful! It was a fancy jacket potato with a salad on the side. Ken's club sandwich was a monster and it had Arby's style seasoned curly fries! They were really good. He also had a half pint of the draft Strongbow ( hard cider). Strongbow is definitely our favorite cider. It has more of the apple flavor than some of the others so you actually feel like you are drinking hard cider.

We made our first trip to TESCO after lunch just to get a few things and to see what all they had and guess what! We found a section with mexican stuff!!! It is all Old El Paso, but hey...they have it so now with the taco seasoning that Kim and Chris gave us for Christmas, we can make mexican at home!! We also found their version of Frosted Mini Wheats. So Bob, when you come over we will have some. We also wanted to take a picture of how they do not refrigerate their eggs. I guess they don't because they are so fresh? If anyone knows the answer, please comment. I am still kinda scared to buy them and it would make me feel better if I knew why.

Oh...and today after work I drove back to the hotel. Now mind you, there was only two turns. But I braved the road and did it! I will elaborate when I get more experience under my belt. We are off to dinner! Talk to you soon! Cheerio!

We're Here!

Hey everyone! We made it here safely. I think we are a little more tired this time around than last. We got in around 7am and got our luggage and headed straight to pick up the car. And what do you know, we are leaving the airport and...bam! the M23 is closed northbound. So again we are forced to use our trusty Garmin to save the day. We ended up just going up an exit southbound and turning around. Not as bad as we thought. Turns out it was only a frozen on ramp (slip road as they call it). Apparently it has been really cold for the past few days. There was about an inch or so of snow on the ground and we heard on the radio that it had gotten down to -12 celcius in some parts of southern England. IT IS COLD!! We tried a new pub today for lunch. I will post pictures later. Then we headed to TESCO, a grocery store, a bought a few little things...bananas, water and granola bars. We went back to the hotel and took a couple hour nap to snap out of the daze of being on a plane for that long. Got up around 5:30 and headed down to the restaurant in the hotel to eat dinner. And now...we go to sleep! We will post more details of today tomorrow! Hopefully we will get our keys to the apartments soon! Cheers for now!