It's summer! ...and it's 60?

Okay, so you know all those jokes I made after the trips in March and April that were so gorgeous? When I said that London was pulling a great sales job on me and as soon as I got there it would be over? I was right. The weather has stunk in glorious fashion since the day I arrived. Sigh. I've been a bit gloomier myself this week, but I think I'm starting to pick back up slowly. The weekend was so miserable I hardly did anything after a wild outing Friday night to the pub where my flatmate works. I did the standard pint after work outing, except I forgot to eat, and found myself a bit queezy when 11pm rolled around! Lesson 1 for survival in Britain: find food when finding beer.

I bought a keyboard Saturday!! It's a Korg N1, not quite as nice a piano sound as my Kurzweil, but still 88 fully weighted keys, MIDI capable and all that jazz. And only £150, which is exactly what I was hoping I would pay. I still need to buy speakers for it, for now I'm stuck using headphones, which I never can really get used to - part of what i love about playing the piano/keyboard/whatever is filling the room and completely surrounding myself with the sound. Sigh...oh for the day when I live somewhere with my own piano again!

Continuing with my personal development, I started Spanish classes last night! And Lulu is reimbursing the tuition, which is awesome. Having a class of people to practice with will help, and then I need to find some more Spanish speakers around here.

Tonight my office is going out to dinner - one of the few Mexican places in London, apparently, so that should be fun. Especially with the coupons for two free bottles of wine :)

Can you tell I had some free time tonight?

Bam! There's my photos on flickr on my blogger. And I changed the template to an equally ugly setting, but I'm thinking I will get really adventurous and do more creative stuff. I work for a technology company, I should be able to write some decent html, right?

I went out and had ''a pint" after work last night, so I think I'm officially a London resident! Although this happened on the same day that I took the wrong bus in the morning and turned a 20 minute commute into an hour and 20 minutes. So maybe I have a little ways to go...

To get to work, I first have to get to the tube station. I can either be lazy and take a bus, or walk about 15 minutes. It's a nice stroll down Ladbroke Grove, which cuts through the heart of Notting Hill - the famous bit and scenes from the movie are on the other side of Portabello Road and the tube station from me. So I'm really close to really posh, getting access to the really cool without the really expensive housing cost. Gotta love overusing a word like really. :D Anyway, the Underground line i take is the Hammersmith and City line, which, crazy enough, takes me right to Hammersmith where I step off the train and walk about 2 minutes to my office. Hammersmith is not a bad place to work, there are coffee shops, restaurants, and a Primark, Primark being the awesomely cheap store where I found heaps of clothes on Saturday. So yes, London is the 2nd most expensive place to live in the world, BUT you can still find a cute tunic dress for 8 GBP, so somehow I should survive. I have settled into a good routine with food, too, I fixed my lunch today, cooked dinner tonight...that's where I have to be the most disciplined. With coffee, drinks, snacks, and lunch, it's easy to spend over 10 GBP a day just eating. We'll leave transportation costs for another time...yikes...

First week in review...

Alright - where to start?

I arrived Monday and didn't really stop to chill out until yesterday - went into work on Monday, worked a loonng day on Tuesday, slept really late on Wednesday but still worked a full day, and then on Thursday I got to go to Falmouth, which is a quiet beach town in the very southwest edge of England. I am trying to figure out the best place to put my photos, maybe flickr or picasa, so that when I go on little trips like this people can see them.
It was a really long train ride, which is kind of aggravating for how quick a trip it was, but on the way there I was with a co-worker, so it passed painlessly. We were giving a presentation on Lulu that night to a writer's center class, so it was a cool experience, but 5 hours on the train both ways was definitely not the highlight. I got to see a nice survey of the English countryside as a bonus :)

I got back Friday night and just hung out in the flat, my flatmate had food poisoning so a friend of hers came over and it was a low-key evening. Saturday we went shopping, I got more stuff for my room and the flat and lots of cute clothes, which was very fun. Then I met two friends of my flatmate - one Swedish and one Thai - and we had dinner and drinks outside at a pub in Notting Hill. I love how international London is!

I'm settling into life pretty well, I like my flatmates, like the flat, job is going well so far - it's almost been a boring week it's gone so smoothly. Hopefully I'll get some pictures up and some more exciting stories.

I have arrived :)

Wow, I'm really here. I'm in my new bed, listening to the London traffic through my window, in my flat. I have a bank account, all three of my bags, the extra stuff I left here last time, groceries, towels, sheets...it's been a busy day! I even put in a couple hours at the office, just to show off and go out for a pint with some co-workers. :) Seriously, I went to go see everyone and make sure I wouldn't be swamped tomorrow.

So the noise will take getting used to after the nice quiet yard I had in North Carolina, and my feet and back have returned to the brutality of adjusting to walking on concrete. I don't think I'm actually registering the fact that this isn't just another business trip. Or maybe I am, and I've just become un-disrupable. haHAhahhahah. um, yeah.

I will make it my goal to have my room clean by the weekend so I can take some pictures. Right now I have to get sleep. And lots of it!

the time is now...

I just got home from my going away party (the second of two) and that familiar feeling of "wow I will miss these people...why am I leaving just as I'm starting to get to know them and really have a good time?" was washing over me in the last 30 minutes. I do this too much. The constant moving can be draining, and I always have a night like this where I think maybe I should try the stable life. Find somewhere, be happy, stay there. But then I am soon reminded that the only reason I have been so happy the last few months is because I knew I was leaving. I don't start opening up until I see the 'light at the end of the tunnel". So I think back to how really bored and unhappy I was in Raleigh for the majority of 2006, and then look again at 2007, where I first knew I might move to London in January, and the five really cool months I have had are put back in perspective. Yes, ideally I would meet these friends and make these connections even if I wasn't leaving, but that's not the way I work. I'm just not there yet, who knows if I ever will be.

I leave for the airport in just over 12 hours - gotta get to bed! Way too much to do before leaving - all the last minute stuff I couldn't do until now, like wash the last of the laundry, pack up shampoo and makeup, fold up sheets and completely empty my room....That's the aggravating part of moving/flying - you can get 95% done, but that last 5% will kill you, and can't be done in advance!

I did sell my bed already, so I've spent one night on the couch and one on a makeshift bed in my room. I'm in the nostalgic, I'm going to miss people mood already, so I will end this post to make way for the excited OH MY GOSH I'M IN LONDON posts to follow :)

Could the day be any better?

I'm on cloud nine. Today starts with the arrival of my passport with visa stamped, approved, and valid for me to work in the UK for five years. Woot! Then, I have productive morning at work, a great lunch with my mom, plan my going away party this weekend, ship my golf clubs and music books through our UPS account, and get home before 5. At 5:30, the two guys who were interested in renting my house came by, and both were happy, and they're all set to move in July 1st! Oh, and did I mention my brother had pizza waiting for me when I walked in the door?

From there I go to kickball (yet another reason Lulu is the best place to work ever - we have an intramural kickball team), and we have an awesome showing for the first game in the playoffs and win a close game. I come home, and in cleaning out the closet, my brother finds the CD of the awesome Congolese music I fell in love with when I was in South Africa - I had given up on finding it.

Okay, I've probably ruined whatever crazy good luck I had going today by talking about it, so I better get to bed on this high :) I fly to the UK in FIVE DAYS!!!

the insanity begins...

Okay, I have SEVEN DAYS before I leave - time to start the whirlwind of activity to get everything done before leaving at 5pm on Sunday, June 10. I can't believe this is finally happening after so many delays and so much time looking forward to it!

I got my work permit on Wednesday, which left just barely enough time for me to overnight it to New York for a courier service to take my passport and the permit and my life on paperwork in an envelope over to the embassy, get it stamped and mailed back to me by Tuesday or Wednesday of this coming week. Whew! I then purchased my plane flight, picking a return date of the Saturday before Thanksgiving, since I will probably want to come home around that time. So I was feeling great with those two major details finally take care of.

Then the bad news arrived - my brother has decided to go back to Wake Forest to work there and go to school part-time and finish his degree. The real bad news was that he lost his job here in RTP, where he was really happy. So it's actually good news for him to have a plan he is excited about, just makes my life extremely complicated for the next few days. I have to find a home for my cat, another roommate for the guy moving into the house, and get alllllllll of my stuff out, rather than just some of it, since Matt won't be there to let me use my house as storage! Help...
Fortunately, some things are already falling into place, but I can tell I won't have much free time over the next few days! I did some major packing and planning today, which was encouraging. I had not realized how ridiculously expensive shipping boxes would be, so I had to re-think my use of moving expense money and find other ways to get my stuff over the pond. I'm going with a strategy of checking one excess bag, leaving one bag for my mom to bring when she visits, shipping 3 boxes with UPS, and giving lots of clothes I don't wear much anymore to goodwill. :) It's amazing how much less you care about stuff when it's a huge hassle to keep it!