Merry Christmas, everyone!

The entire city of London is closed today (Christmas Day), so I have some time to sit down and write a little.  It’s nice to have a day to relax and just hang out with no agenda.

Our travel from Atlanta to London was as smooth as could be.

Due to a slight snafu on someone else’s part, we were driven to the airport in a white stretch limo.  We got to feel like high-rollers before we ever left our state and figured it was an auspicious beginning for our travels.  What a way to set the tone!  Lines at Atlanta’s new International terminal were short; our flight was on time.  Everything was going so well that when I reached my seat and realized the people directly behind us had a baby, I figured that was the big catch.  Crying baby for 8 hours!  But no … the little guy slept the entire flight.  The mother looked like one of the Kardashians and was seated in First Class.  For some reason Grandpa was stuck in coach with the baby.  Mama would saunter back every once in a while to check on things, then retreat back to the hot towels and reclining seats in the winner’s section.  How did she manage to pull that off?  The baby not only slept the entire flight, he slept through the whole landing, too.  Relieved Grandpa disembarked with a still-sleeping baby.

We had a whopping 5 suitcases plus 5 large carry-ons in total.  Our next hurdle was to get that huge mountain of luggage onto the Tube without losing a family member, and make it to our rented apartment in Marylebone.  I’d been stressing over this part of the journey for weeks.  I needn’t have worried.  The Underground has a stop right across from Heathrow’s baggage claim area; by far the best and easiest public transportation from an airport I’ve ever seen.  Grab your bag, hop on the train.  Voila!

Adam and I have both fallen in love with England.  We’ve been contemplating living here, at least part-time, once Josie graduates from high school in 9 years.  However, we learned a hard lesson about living in foreign countries when we moved to Mexico back in 2001; despite a great attitude and good intentions, it can nevertheless end up being a miserable nightmare.

We wanted to have more of a living experience (rather than a tourist experience) before considering a larger commitment; being the planners that we are, a 9-year advance scouting party isn’t too early.  We are not spontaneous people.  (Contrary to the old adage “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry,” we’ve found that the best laid plans — with a little wiggle room for adjustment and an excellent escape plan if things go bad — almost always pay huge dividends.  Forewarned is forearmed! )  So, this Christmas we decided to rent an apartment and just live for 21 days in London to see how it goes.  Cooking, grocery shopping, dealing with the garbage collection and weird laundry facilities don’t sound like important issues, but can end up being deal breakers when every day-to-day task is an exercise in frustration.

The apartment is pretty cool.  It’s tiny, but 4 stories high.  They call it a flat, but it’s more of a steep spiral staircase with wide landings and old, sloping floors.  There isn’t a flat surface to be seen.  There are 2 bedrooms and a potty on the 4th floor that could all fit into Isabella’s room at home.  The third floor is the master bedroom and the real bathroom.  Second floor is tiny living room (only one TV in the whole place, we’ll see how that works out) and a small but fully-stocked kitchen.  The first floor is just an entrance and small hall to hang coats on pegs.  The total square footage of the entire 4-floor flat is probably equivalent to just one floor of our house at home.  And yet, this place is worth more than US$1 million. Location is everything.

Despite our easy travel day, we arrived feeling half dead.  It was only 9:00 a.m. but the girls and I decided to take naps anyway.  Holden and Adam opted to push through until bedtime.  The two boys went out and explored the neighborhood, found a couple of grocery stores and bought some provisions for the apartment.

They made the right decision; come bedtime, the girls and I were unable to go to sleep while the two of them zonked right out.  I drank a couple glasses of wine to help relax, but my jet-lag caused the wine to start a headache.  I took an Advil to combat the headache, and the Advil almost immediately upset my stomach.  I found some tea in the kitchen to settle my tummy, but it had a higher caffeine content than I expected.  Oh, the horror … I’d entered into an Elvisian drug spiral, unable to reach equilibrium.  There was nothing left to do but drink a big glass of water in hopes of detoxing myself.  I went to bed, miserable, to wait it out.

Anyone who regularly suffers insomnia knows that every problem is orders of magnitude worse at 3 a.m.  There I was in bed in a strange country, staring at someone else’s ceiling, convinced I was one Midol tablet away from needing rehab and a new liver.  I was equally convinced I was worthy of neither.  Midnight is the witching hour; 3 a.m. is the hour of self-loathing.

I finally fell asleep, and the next thing I knew Adam was waking me up at 10:00 a.m.  What a glorious, exciting day we had in store!  A few hours of solid sleep and some daylight work miracles on one’s outlook about life.

We had all the foodstuffs for making a full English breakfast, but I quickly discovered some glaring equipment holes in the fully-stocked kitchen.  No cooking oil; no salt; no frying pan; no spatula.  I tried to fry eggs in the bottom of an old flaky wok with a wooden spoon.  We abandoned our itinerary for the day:  instead of visiting Selfridges and Harrods, we went looking for a kitchen supply store near our apartment.

I wanted a cast iron frying pan and a decent spatula.  We did find a kitchen supply shop (which was also a hardware store) but they didn’t carry cast-iron cookware (“I’m very sorry, Madame, but no”) and had a very limited number of other choices.  I ended up buying a ceramic-coated non-stick skillet.  I’d seen them before, but have never used one, and wasn’t particularly happy about it.  It wasn’t cheap, either (£30 = US$50) but I was desperate.

Best! Pan! Ever!  It can’t beat good old-fashioned cast iron in the frying of bacon, but it’s far and away the best egg pan I’ve ever used.  Clark Griswold’s non-caloric silicon-based kitchen lubricant has nothing on this pan.  Zing!

[Side Note:  The fridge and the oven are both made by a company called Smeg.  Never heard of it, but it was specifically mentioned in the brochure as a point of pride so it must be really awesome.

Neither of us can figure out how to work these appliances.  Lights come on for no reason and then mysteriously turn off when you want them most; the degrees are all in Celsius; the controls have strange icons that may or may not represent snowflakes, closed parenthesis, and radioactive “danger” insignias.  We’ve been fighting these things for three days now.  In frustration, Adam snapped at me, “I don’t know!  I don’t know how to work the Smeg!”  (Giggity!)  

Other things are strange, too.  The Christmas potatoes came with instructions to “decant potatoes into baking pan.”  I’ve never seen the word “decant” refer to anything other than wine.  (Post Side Note:  My New Year’s resolution is to take snobbery to unprecedented levels; I shall never eat an undecanted potato ever again. Neither should you.)]  

Two more trips to two different grocery stores and we finally had the makings of a decent Christmas dinner.  Everything will be closed on the 25th so we have to be ready.  I originally planned to roast a turkey, but I think the oven is too small to handle a bird that size.  We bought chicken instead.

Having to go to so many different shops to get basic supplies can be charming or irritating, depending on how much of a hurry you are in.  It takes us a long time to find things, both because we don’t know where to look for them, and because a lot of the more common products are in unrecognizable packaging.  We accidentally bought paper towels instead of toilet paper (the paper towel rolls are so small!)  Butter is butter, but instead of coming in a box with four 4 oz sticks, it comes disguised as a 250g bar of soap.  Eggs come in packages of 10 rather than 12, and brussels sprouts (which seem to be weirdly popular) come still attached to the giant stem they grow on.  One buys a baton of brussels sprouts.  We’ll get the hang of it eventually.

Aaaaaand, that was our whole day.  Future supply runs should be more efficient as we learn the ropes.

December 24, Christmas Eve

The day before Christmas, Adam wanted to go to Harrods and Selfridges to see the festivities.  Crowds are acceptable when they are part of “getting to know the local culture.”

Selfridges was crowded, as was to be expected on the day before Christmas, but all in all not too bad.  I’ve seen “Mr. Selfridge” (the show) and half expected to see ladies all dressed up in old-timey garb, but the clerks were just regular modern folks.  (Jeremy Piven wasn’t there either, which was a bummer.  I love that guy.)

Harrods is an entity unto itself.  Stepping through it’s doors is stepping into an alternate Christmas fantasy universe.  We headed up to the fourth floor where they have the children’s toy department adjacent to the Pet Spa. (“The Pet Spa provides a range of wonderful pet services, featuring behavioural counselling, full body massages and animal reiki, as well as nutritional advice, personal training sessions and, of course, impeccable grooming.”  Seriously, I’m not making this up.)

In Harrods extensive plush animal department, Josie found a robotic pig that she simply couldn’t live without and luckily it was 50% off.  She decided to spend some of her own hard-earned money.  Cash in hand, she approached the check-out counter.  “I love pigs!” she told the clerk.  “I’m so excited you guys have a nice pig here I can afford!”

The clerk amiably said, “Hello, Luv!  Do I detect an accent?  Whereabouts are you from?”

Josie looked uncertain and said, “What?”

“Whereabouts?” he repeated.

Josie glanced at me and whispered, “I don’t know what wear-abouts are.  Are they pants?”

After she paid for her pig and we’d turned to leave, the clerk immediately turned to the employee manning the next cash register.  With his index fingers made into guns, he said “Say ‘ello to my leeeetle frieeeend!  Bababababababababaaaaa!”  For this guy, an 8-year-old girl with an American accent immediately brought to mind a bloody murder scene from Scarface.

There also appears to be a fairly significant difference between Santa Claus (with whom we are all familiar), and Father Christmas.  Santa Claus is a roly-poly little old guy who sits on a chair and chuckles, “Ho ho ho!  And what would you like for Christmas, little boy?”  You sit on his lap, furnish him with a list of your demands, and happily depart with a candy cane.

Father Christmas is a 6ft5in hulk in an enormous red cape who strides through the store like a royal greeting his subjects.  He is trailed by two simpering little women dressed as elves.  Father Christmas towers over you in boots that could crush your skull and asks pointedly, “Were you good this year?”  You get the feeling that he’ll give you something of his choosing, if at all, and you’ll damn well like it.

Back at the apartment, we gave the kids their Christmas Eve gifts.  (We’d opened all our Christmas presents a week earlier, before we left home.  The “haul” was pretty light this year; our big expenditure is this trip.)  Holden was really excited about the Christmas Eve gifts and I kept telling him not to get his hopes up because they really weren’t that great.  When he finally got to rip open the paper and found new pajamas, he said, “Geez, you weren’t kidding about getting my hopes up.”

Christmas Day

Everything is closed, so we’ve been hanging out in the apartment. It’s nice to have a down-time day.

Regent’s Park is just a few blocks away, so our big outing was to bundle up in warm clothes and head over with a few slices of stale bread to feed the birds.  It turned out to be one of the most fun things we’ve ever done.  The birds are wild, but practically tame.

Geese, swans, coots, gulls, pigeons, herons and several types of duck all hang out together, and it’s fun to see their different styles of getting their share of free food.  The geese and coots march right up and beg (and steal if they see a chance).  The gulls are shy, but aerial masters and can snatch a crumb of bread out of the air before any other bird has even realized it’s not in your hand anymore.  The ducks stand a few feet away and look sad.  And the pigeons will perch on your body and happily eat out of your hands, and don’t think to leave once the food is gone.  They’ll be with you until you shake like a dog and shoo them off.

One of my biggest thrills was a squirrel.  He approached a couple in front of us and stood begging with his little paws clasped in front of him, like a furry Mr. Peanut holding an invisible cane.  The girl darted away from him squealing, “EW!” I still had bread left, so threw him a piece.  He stuffed it into his cheek and crept toward me.  I realized that with a little coaxing, he would eat right out of my hand.

I know this is not a good idea.  Last summer in one of the National Parks, I recall seeing a sign with a gnarly photo of someone’s mangled hand that read, “I thought the squirrel was cute so I fed him and yada yada yada, now I have 17 stitches.”  (I’m paraphrasing, and nobody remembers this sign but me, so I may have imagined it.)  The point is, I know squirrels are wild animals and can be unpredictable, they can be carriers of rabies, and they will bite if they feel threatened or trapped.  But I figure other people skydive, ski at breakneck speeds, and rock climb … all without having to endure lectures about how reckless and irresponsible they are being.  If I want to risk my life and health by feeding a park squirrel, then I’m going to go for it!  This is what me livin’ on the edge looks like.

Here are way too many photos of us with birds, and one photo of me taking my life in my hands with the squirrel.

Christmas dinner turned out well in spite of my not being able to find a baking dish for the chicken.  I ended up using a spring-form cake pan with a pot lid perched on top.  It worked surprisingly well.  I decanted the potatoes into a pie plate and that worked well, too.

Thus ends our second Christmas Day in England.  (First was 2011.)  Cheers!