We're Moving!

We found a place that we are quite happy with, so our new lease starts on Feb. 1. It shouldn't take us too long to move out since we only came here with 80 lbs. of luggage each. There is only so much accumulating things we can do in three weeks with no income!
I know that posts without pictures are boring, so we promise another post this weekend with pictures of our new place. And Ryan got a cycle, so pictures of that too. We were planning to go to London this weekend, but now it looks like we'll be moving instead. C'est La Vie.
To entertain you in lieu of pictures, we thought we would list some of the things that are the same and different about life here compared to what we've been used to.
Different:
1. Everything is smaller. This applies to almost anything we've found. Houses, refrigerators, cars, servings (both in the grocery store and at restaurants), and-probably closely related to the previous-people (we have only seen 1 or 2 significantly overweight people since we arrived here), etc. Nearly everything is just a bit smaller.
2. We've had to learn a new language. Many many words that are used here are different than the word that we are used to using for something. For example, the bathroom is the loo or toilet, pants are trousers, bikes are cycles, cell phones are mobiles, a yard is a garden, lines are queues...you get the idea.
3. Holiday. Kelly gets 30 days holiday plus bank holidays (an extra five). That's a heck of a lot of vacation!
4. Already mentioned but so hard to get used to that it deserves mentioning again--They don't use dryers here! The place we are moving into has an electric dryer that the landlady says doesn't work very well but she is the wrong person to ask because she hates dryers. Strange.
5. The age of things here is quite impressive. Cambridge U was founded nearly 800 years ago and some of the buildings date back to that time.
6. Taxes. We have to pay a TV tax of 160 pounds/year to be able to watch basic TV. And they roam the streets with TV-sensing equipment to catch people that don't pay. Also, all of our purchases include a 17.5% sales tax. And we pay council tax monthly to live in Cambridge. That's another 100 pounds/month. And our paychecks will be taxed heavily to cover things like national healthcare. They love their taxes here.

Same:
1. Everyone here is apologizing for the weather here, thinking we came from "sunny CA" but the weather here is pretty much exactly the same as SF so far. Though it is supposed to snow here a bit this weekend...
2. The food here is very good and priced very low. The organic food here is not much more pricey than the non-organic food and is plentiful and fresh. We had visions of eating fish and chips all the time, but we have not had to do that at all. And there is excellent food from all over Europe and India here.
3. Unfortunately, some of the big chains from the US have made it to Cambridge. For example, McDonalds of course is here. And Subway, KFC, Dominos pizza, Pizza Hut, Starbucks, Chili's, etc. We have yet to go to any of these places, so I don't know if the food is the same here or different.

That's just a taste of getting used to life out here. More pictures later. For now, here's our set of house keys. :-)

Every day is a school day...

We feel like we are learning something new every day here. So many parts of life you just take for granted because that is how you've always done something. We find ourselves questioning even the smallest things that we always thought were just normal.
We're really enjoying our time here. Kelly went to work last Tuesday and has been getting used to having a full time job again. She really likes the lab and is excited about the project so it's been good for her.
Last Wednesday night we drove down to London with Kelly's lab for cheap curry. It didn't make that much sense to us to drive 45 minutes with gas being $8.00 a gallon (yeah, it's over 1 pound per litre!--that would make people come up with alternate transportation in the states) to get curry cheaper, but it was a fun outing and nice to get outside of Cambridge. We only saw the outskirts of London though, so soon we'll take a weekend and do London properly.
Friday night we went to the pub with Kelly's lab and then Kelly got to go dancing with a couple girls from the lab. Cambridge is very much a University town, so there is quite a bit of night life here.
We did decide to tell our landlady that we are going to move out of the house that we are in now. She of course was fine with this and said we could move whenever we found something and didn't have to pay any rent at all, so that was really nice of her. Ryan has been spending a lot of his days looking at places, so we're hopeful that we find something we like. We're looking at the one we really want on Sunday, so if that works out we'll move soon. Moving would still be quite an easy process since we only own a couple suitcases each worth of stuff out here.
Here's some pics from the last week:

Black swan along the river Cam

Kelly's new bike! (or cycle, as they're called here)

Ryan has been keeping very busy with finishing the cleaning of our house, looking for cycles, looking at potential houses, doing grocery shopping and all errands on foot, and doing the laundry and hanging it to dry. Dryers are apparently a luxury item here. Most people have a washer and then hang to dry. Everyone has a laundry line outside which we can't quite figure out since it has rained about 60 percent of the time that we have been here. Ryan went to a job fair downtown today and has applied for a couple jobs, so hopefully something will turn up soon.

So far in Cambridge

So though we have been working full time cleaning, we have managed to get out and explore Cambridge quite a bit. We don't yet have bicycles, so our exploring has been on foot, which has left us quite physically tired and hungry a lot of days. Today we walked for nearly 3 hours! Pictures of the house will come later, but we almost have the downstairs cleaned, which is very exciting. We're doing what we can to make it nice and it's coming along. The picture below is of Kelly cleaning a wall today. Note the color difference between the clean and unclean parts. That is how all of the walls here were.

Two-tone wall -- Gross!

Here is a picture of the front of our place. A lot of the houses here are connected, similar to San Francisco. Ours is the blueish door on the right. The green door next to it is a little passageway that we can park our bikes in when we get them.

Home for now

Looking toward town. Our house is directly across the street to the right

Most of our wandering times we forgot to take the camera with or forgot to take many pictures, but today we wandered into Trinity college and happened to have the camera with. It was really breathtakingly beautiful. There is a choral service on Wed. night in the chapel there that we might go hear.

Ryan in front of Trinity college

Kelly on the Trinity college green

Most of what we have been up to is cleaning and wandering. And some shopping for necessities. Almost all of the people at the grocery stores here use re-usable bags for their groceries. And all of the groceries come in sizes that are just a bit smaller than what we were used to in the states. Which we are thankful for since we are carrying all of our groceries on foot!
Kelly starts work tomorrow, so her months-long vacation is over. She went into work today to sign a bunch of paperwork. Ryan is planning to continue cleaning part time and look for a job. And he will have to take care of some details of life out here that we haven't gotten to. For example, we are not allowed to get mobile phones out here without a debit card from a UK bank. We started a bank account, but we do not yet have our debit cards and so we have been only using Kelly's US mobile at 99 cents/min. There are just so many details involved in picking up life and moving to another country!

The unveiling...

Of course you don't get to see the house yet. Are you crazy? It'll take us a week to finish cleaning up! But what you do get to see is our pile of trash that we are throwing out of here. This doesn't include several bags in progress. We are definitely working full time and more on getting this house clean enough to live in. On the bright side, this morning the landlady dropped by to apologize again on her way out of town and she said that we can leave whenever we want with one month notice. So we have low rent and a month to month agreement. Not bad in the end.

Here we are in Cambridge

So, we made it to Cambridge. Kelly's second suitcase just made it here this afternoon, but that was really the only snag in our travel plans. Flights went well and we caught a bus up to Cambridge and then a taxi to our house.
No pictures yet of the house, and here's why. It was a total messy dump when we got here! Apparently the string of college students that lived here before us didn't ever clean or take their stuff with them when they left. And they liked to party. So we are spending the majority of our time working our butts off throwing out crap and cleaning the place up. The nice part is that our landlady didn't know the situation before the day that we got here, so she is letting us pay very little for our first months rent. And we can keep whatever we find which so far has included a dvd player, a small tv, lots of canned food left in the cupboard, a water filter, etc. So we are deciding to call this a blessing deep in disguise and make the best of it. It's a good thing Kelly doesn't start work until the 15th!
Today we went and walked around Cambridge and made an appointment to open a bank account here so we can actually buy things and get local phones and pay the landlady and such. To our friends in SF, the english money has been SO very helpful for our first few days here!!
We will keep you updated and post pictures when the cleaning is completed.

AAAAAHHHHH We Leave Today!!!!

Frantically trying to pack without going over the weight limit and trying to tie up loose ends here but we just wanted to post asking for your prayers as we travel. We are flying through Dublin and get into Heathrow tomorrow at 10 in the morning there. Then we are taking a bus trip up to Cambridge. Next post should be from our house there with some pictures...

More X-Country in MI

We are once again back in MI. The last time before we leave for England. We spent the last few days in Chicago trying to take care of more detail work for getting to England. On New Year's Eve we went to our college friend Scott's house for a party.

Our classy cop friend Scott

Tuesday we drove North of Chicago to visit our good college friends Erin and Steve. It was really good to see them again for a bit. We picked up Keri and CJ from the airport on Wednesday AM and drove up to MI to Kelly's parents' house. There was a lot of fresh snow on the ground (and on the road on the drive up unfortunately) so we had good cross country skiing conditions for today. We all spend a couple hours this afternoon out on the trails.

CJ and Ryan showing off their mad skills

Kelly got a macbook computer for a graduation/christmas present from a lot of people, so she is having fun playing with that new toy. Less than a week until we head off!