Arrival

Welcome to our new blog! Our hope is that this serves as a spot for friends and family to stay updated on our adventures and also a travel journal for us.

(Quick aside: The blog title is a reference to our minor adventure discovering the Brits' unabashed love for mayonnaise. It's inescapable. It's gross. It's pretty much the worst.)

I've been informed that I need to write the first entry, since I was the first to arrive some fifteen days ago. We're still without internet at home, so these first few posts may be a bit erratic, but we'll try to be better about updating the site once we're able to work from home.

I arrived early one Sunday morning and was picked up at the airport by Joyce, my new HR manager, and an absolute godsend these past few weeks. I'm afraid I didn't make much conversation, but arrived at the apartment and collapsed for several hours in bed. I woke up in the early afternoon and tried to venture out in the neighborhood, but everything in walking distance appeared to be shut down and the one open store wouldn't take my credit card (the British seem really fearful of "fraud" and all their cards are microchipped, which has made using our American cards a bit hit or miss, particularly in smaller local shops). I wandered back to the apartment as night fell (ahem, at 4 o'clock in the afternoon) and made some tea before unpacking a bit and falling asleep. There was no TV/internet at home, so I read a 1000 page book that Sunday, too, and then knitted myself to sleep the rest of the week (until pilfering a laptop and some DVDs from work).

My first week at work was pretty uneventful, except for the fun of convincing the local HSBC branch that I only wanted to open a checking account (and not launder money)... what else... Oh, yeah, in the first hour of having access to a car here, I knocked the passenger side view mirror off. In front of my boss. Awesome. Definite confidence-booster.

You'd think the problem would be staying on the left-hand side of the road, but the issue is really drifting left (since you're used to centering yourself in the lane from the left-hand side of the car). The "accident," if you would even call it that, was really so minor, but it definitely startled me a bit. The following night, my satellite navigation crashed mid-route home, but I was proudly able to get myself home.

And that's pretty it, for my first week or so in Liverpool, until Mark arrived! I was missing him so much, and we had some fun activities planned for that first day...