My Raison d'Etre

Kew Gardens

A couple of weeks ago we went here



This is Kew, a lovely leafy village in outer London. In Kew is this unbelievable garden, really a massive green space with endless varieties of plant life, everything from a redwood tree grove to a bamboo forest to rare flowers in old victorian green houses. It's huge, and very nearly makes you forget you're in one of the world's most hectic cities (if it weren't for the Heathrow air traffic overhead). Kew Gardens doesn't make sightseeing agendas for most tourists, and this is a shame.

Sweet Boy

Peace.

Quiet.

Comfort.

All things I crave right now. We are a week into our new flat, far from normalcy. Still bunking on air mattresses, we slowly make progress to creating our new life here. Yesterday we had a break through. The internet arrived! Unfortunately it met the demise of our not yet three-month old desk-top computer. Getting life settled here is very much a dance, one step forward two steps back. Hopefully we'll get there soon enough, but right now it feels very much like being trapped in a slow-motion dream.

A Date With Ben

Thank You For Smoking, Prepositions, Jumbo, Diet By Budget--A Few Random Thoughts

If you haven't been to Europe in the last five years, you'd notice a big change. Europe, though woefully behind the US, is making strides to clear the air. They have a long way to go (just go to Greece, you'll see what I mean), but no more do you have to suffer in a smoke-filled train compartment in Italy, or a smokey cafe in Paris, and likewise here in the UK all indoor public spaces now carry a ban on smoking, including the pubs! Good news? Sort of. There is a major downside. Try walking down a street in central London for instance. It's a veritable gauntlet of smokers. And I have yet to encounter a courteous chimney, not even in the presence of children! Smokers are everywhere on the streets now. Either huddling outside a pub, strolling past storefronts, waiting for buses, dining al fresco at a cafe--everywhere! In the five-minute stroll to our nearest tube station I worry how much second-hand smoke I'm exposing the children to. So I wonder if this new anti-smoking legislation is really doing non-smokers any favors. Aren't we all better off if all the cancer sticks are corralled in a smokey pub?



Something happened to the use of prepositions when the British colonized the US. They got all mixed up! I'm trying to adapt, but it's like learning how to drive on the other side of the road (I won't even go there yet, literally). So if you've got something planned on Saturday or Sunday, you say "at" the weekend. If you have a gathering planned at 7pm, you say "from" 7pm. And it's not "leave it to me," but rather "leave it with me." It's driving me nuts. Just so long as under still means under and over still means over I might be okay.



Jumbo is probably a word that people here just shouldn't use. Show me the jumbo! Seriously, everything here is tiny! My "jumbo" roll of paper towels, for instance, is more like a roll of toilet paper. Most things at least don't come with such a laughable claim, but US elevators, milk jugs, refrigerators, washer/dryers, ovens, closets, just to name a few, would give their UK counterparts a serious inferiority complex. And that's not even counting Texas!



Though we aren't newcomers to the eye-popping price tags here in the UK, it still manages to give us a good bit of sticker shock. In fact if you're an American who's hoping to drop a few pounds, you might want to head to the UK. After several days of attempting to live on a college-budget diet to keep costs down, we decided we needed a little splurge. We stopped for a little ice-cream treat on the way home from a museum. The bill for three child-size single cones and one small shake came to a whopping $30! That's enough to keep you from indulging! On the other hand the monthly fee for a gym membership would cost us $182.54.

At the end of the day we may be dealing with some smokey streets, odd preposition usage, tiny lifts, high prices and whole list of other interesting things, but we are living in London. And really, how cool is that?