Welcome to the online diary of the “London Ziegs,” as they journal their experiences relocating from the balmy climes of sunny Orlando, Florida to the more chaotically cosmopolitan environment of London, UK!
Last week, we took the Eurostar under the Chunnel to meet my folks for a few days in Paris. (I also took the opportunity to meet some remote co-workers at the Amazon.fr office.) We had a wonderful time, and finally managed to edit most of the footage down to the following four segments:
Bus Tour
One thing that's worth doing in any big city is hopping onto one of those open-top buses and getting a quick introduction to what all's available, where things are in relation to each other, and what looks interesting enough to merit a closer visit on foot. The following is set to the credits score from the Bourne trilogy, which featured many a high-speed chase through the streets of Paris:
Be Our Guest
This is kind of a parody of all the pictures (and slides...endless slides!) that my Dad used to bring home from my parents' trips to Europe, in which my Mom nearly always happened to be snacking on some local delicacy. Since Paris is synonymous with grossfine cuisine, it seemed appropiate to document some of the highlights as we chewed our way across the capital:
Eiffel Tower
Well, you can hardly come to town and not visit this emblematic icon. Although we walked by and under it enroute to other stops, we didn't go up the elevator until our final morning in the city, before dragging our luggage back to the Gare du Nord. Note that, while it is fairly straightforward going up the tower, there are two elevators coming back down; the one we took terminates about halfway down, leaving you to navigate the stairs for the rest!
Lourve
We allocated one full day to exploring the famous musée of Paris, dutifully stopping to verify all the plot twists in Dan Brown's factually-challenged bestseller:
Of course, there is so much more to be said about Paris, and France and Europe in general, but that'll have to wait for another time :-)
My parents arranged to meet a few of their college buddies from Capital over in Europe for a reunion tour, so got to spend a few days with us at the beginning and end of the trip. One thing we got to do was finally take a ride up into that big wheeley-thing that decorates the Thames pier:
Christopher has always been the more sports-minded of our kids, and adapted to England quickly enough by joining both his school's soccerfootball team, as well as their cricket club! These are a few short snaps from his first official game:
DailyMotion allows me to use my original audio track, but the video quality is rather poor, even with "HQ" enabled:
Conversely, YouTube forced me to change the audiotrack (still processing, as the current version is silent), but clearly provides the best video quality:
I suppose that if this is the worst I have to complain about, I should count myself pretty fortunate :-)
The kids got two weeks off from school for the Easter holidays, and we decided that we'd been "playing it safe" (keeping close to Maidenhead and it's immediate rail-accessible environs) long enough, so decided to strike out into the verdant verge for a 4day camping trip along England's "Jurassic Coast", down around Lyme Regis on the southern Atlantic coastline.
There are a lot of interesting points to visit between Berkshire and Dorset, but one that had long topped our hitlist was Stonehenge. A lot of the locals here shrug, "but it's just a bunch of rocks," typically to go on about how Avebury is both larger and less commercialized, if you go in for that sort of thing.
But that's not it at all. Stonehenge is more than a pile of rocks: it's a center of myth, legend, and folklore dating to before the time of wallpaper screensavers and forwarded emails with 3MB attachments showing precariously perched kittens and dancing babies. It's the primordial lodestone, a keynode of ley lines whose ferric poles pull at our cultural consciousness. Not to even get started about Seekers, Aspirants, Ovates, and your new-agey Hierophants!
"And their legacy remains...hewn, into the living rock of Stonehenge."
Saturday dawned bright and beautiful, so we thought it would be a good day to finally take the train up to Oxford. I take trains running "to" Oxford just about every day (I come home each evening on the Paddington-to-Oxford line), but typically get off after one or two stops.
We packed our usual rucksack of sandwiches and snacks, then headed up for the great explore:
A short clip of Mom & Dad walking down by the Thames as it flows past Maidenhead's eastern shore...and a special treat for any fans of EPCOT's fantastic Impressions de France :-) (By the way, that's pronounced "tems", don'cha'no!)
This morning I hopped a train to Reading, and would have switched for Southampton except the lines were all snarled due to some malf upstream. Anyway, they advised that folks feeling adventurous could try the line to Basingstoke and figure it out from there, so I did. Disembarking at the Basingstoke platform, an older gent asked if I knew the way to Southampton; I told him that's where I was going, and would be happy to have a buddy in my search. That worked out well for him, as he'd just got off a plane from Sydney (Australia), and had a bad back, and was towing about 50lb in luggage. Anyway, we found the right train, and were in Southampton by late morning.
There's a free bus that runs from Southampton Central to downtown and then the docks. I had no idea where I was going except "1mi past Dock 4 gate". I managed to find a sign pointing toward Dock 4, which proved to be a goodly walk, then the gate-guard assured me that my shipper's berth was indeed another mile down on the left. I found my way to the shipper's office, paid the miscellaneous customs & handling fees (£162.50 in cash, exact change is appreciated thank you very much). Finally, then went and found my van, which was apparently emplaced with a bunch of military vehicles as "it was one of those big American jobs".
They said they'd needed to jump-start the battery, but otherwise it seemed to be ship-shape, so to speak. And so...I was off!
But where to? Honestly, I have no idea where I went after that; fortunately, I didn't need to :-) For Christmas, I bought Laura a Garmin Nuvi, and boy did it work a treat. I'd thought to unpack it back at our house in Maidenhead, which it promptly registered as "home"; so when I stuck it to the windscreen in the van and plugged it into the cigarette lighter, it helpfully prompted "would you like to go home?" "Heck yeah," I replied, and off we went.
So what's it like for an American, driving their first time in England? Not nearly as awkward as I'd feared. Frankly, there are a lot of cars on the road; and that's a GOOD thing, as it means there's nearly always someone else right in front of you. Just do like they do, and you tend to be fine. (I had read The Official Highway Code back-to-back on the train down, just in case anyone takes me literally.)
Driving on the left really isn't that big a deal. Most of the roads I was on had two or even three lanes of traffic going in my direction; so it was easy to just stay in the left-most of those, which is where I spent most of my time in the US anyway (okay, I wasn't the most "fuel-efficient" driver when ripping up the Florida Turnpike in my Eclipse!). Staying in the left-lane, you tend to notice a lot of folks passing you on the right, which instinctively feels rude (not something genteel folk would do in America, if we had a gentry), but that's just them so you ignore it.
The one bit that will definitely take a bit of getting used to is the roundabouts. We have roundabouts in the US -- they've made quite an inroad in Central Florida just in the last 15 years -- but between the left-right switch, the multiple lanes, the 3-7 exits which seem to spurt off in seemingly random directions, and that bloody Nuvi hissing in your ear "No, fool, I said the fourth exit -- the fourth, are you deaf as well as blind?!?" (at least, that's how it came to sound after the third, patronizing "recalculating...")...anyway, where was I? And that's just how it feels to whirl around one of those bloody roundabouts.
I did stop for petrol before leaving Southampton (you have to ship your vehicle nigh-empty, so she was thirsty she was), and plunked in 80 litres of...what, I don't know...liquid gold, must've been at those prices. I winced and just handed over my debt card.
When Mark's dad Pete was in town last week, he walked Christopher to school at Ellington Primary one morning. We thought Christopher's classmates back in Narcoossee might like to see how Chris gets to school these days :-)
(Chris writing)
For one, don't do the actions to this song. This is me walking to school, yes walking! It's actually pretty relaxing to walk calmly and without worry along Cookham rd. and it beats being bored sitting in a hot van.
That has such better assonance than "Picture Monday", don't you think? And besides, it gives us a chance to play with the most-excellent new Flip camcorder my parents sent us for Christmas! The only editing software I had onhand was the iMovie freeware that came on my Macbook...okay for starters, but I can already see where I'll want to explore more powerful offerings later.
Because we found continuous-shot walkthroughs helpful ourselves when trying to remotely visualize distances and "ground truth" before our move, we started with this single-shot recording of a walk from High Street Methodist back to our house:
[UPDATE] YouTube apparently doesn't like 14min videos, so I'll just link this one directly for now :-)
A couple days later, we took my brother Scott on a 16,000-step hike (per our 2008 pickle present!) through London, including this tour through the Tower of London and across Tower Bridge:
Finally, I'm including the following video which we did not take, but which I found on YouTube, documenting Maidenhead's Christmas Light Switch-On from Jonathan's birthday; heck, we might even appear in some of the crowd shots :-)
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