We're alive!

Hello friends and family! Many of you have asked for updates of our UK travels/adventure so far. We’ve been here for about 6 weeks, and certainly a lot has happened. We’ve both been very busy with work-related activites, but wanted to reserve space in this blog to account for our more fun, personal activities. So let’s see, where to begin…

We began our adventure at the end of July, travelling on Silverjet (an all-business class airline – VERY highly recommended, especially for you folks over 5’10” out there). We stayed at a hotel in Mayfair for a couple of days before moving to a extended stay hotel. Our room in this hotel is very nice – more of an apartment than a traditional hotel. It’s especially nice, because it has a fully outfitted kitchen, allowing us to cook many of our meals at home. This is one of the biggest ways we’ve been able to save money over here. As you may know, the exchange rate is about $2 to £1, making everything feel very expensive. However, since we’ve been here, we’ve discovered numerous ways to save money, including “self-catering” (that’s “cooking” for the Yanks), and booking travel online.

Contrary to popular belief, we’ve found the food here to be pretty good – certainly there is a fair amount of nasty stuff available, but overall, we’ve been quite pleased with the quality of the produce and other grocery items. One of our favorite places to shop is Borough Market, a farmer’s market that’s been operating in London for several hundred years. You can buy things like green beans and aubergines (that would be an eggplant), but also more exotic items are available, as well as a wide variety of prepared jams, pasta, hummus, etc. The prices are very reasonable, and we frequently return home with a backpack full of goodies. My favorite stop in the market is Utobeer, a beer vendor who sells all sorts of beers I've never heard of... but more on beer later... :)

Well, that's probably long enough for now. We'll post more soon!