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. :-)
