London arrival

After a crazy month we are starting to settle in to life in London. We left Seattle on April 12th, spent about five days in London, then went on vacation in Spain for 11 days. Now we're back in London and ready to get down to business. We really enjoyed having this blog during our trip to India, so we'll try it again in this big adventure. Since so much has happened in the last couple of weeks, I expect there will be several different updates to the blog over the next couple of days to bring you up to speed. Here's the start.

Arrival in London
We planned our arrival in London for April 12th which would give us five days to look for an apartment before heading to Spain for a much needed vacation. What we didn't know was that was Easter weekend and most of London was shut down on Good Friday and Easter Monday (and of course the two days in between). Our five day house hunting trip turned into a five hour tour on Tuesday. After investigating different areas of London, we wanted to live near the Paddington train station because that's where we will need to get the train to Reading for Microsoft. We had a relocation person help us out and she picked us up at 9:30am with a plan to find a flat and drop us off for the train trip to the airport at 3. No problem.

We saw about 15 different apartments, all charming in their own way. Some had 20 foot ceilings and were 400 years old, others had five flights of stairs. We settled on a converted horse stable in a small alley about a block off of Hyde Park (the Lancaster Gate Tube station) and three to four blocks from Paddington Station. It has two floors, recently remodeled and a big sky light that makes the upstairs very bright during the day. At night it appears to have a bunch of halogen type lights that will make it very sophisticated and "euro". They call it a two bedroom, but the second bedroom is perfectly sized for someone no bigger than my mom. (but Ma, there's a guest room for you). It also has stable doors that open up onto the alley which will be great in the summer. I'll post pictures after we move in tomorrow.

Next we went to Spain. I'll save the summary of spain for another post.

Ted