In the three days we had after the wedding banquet, life went bonkers, and it’s stayed mad for quite some time.

First, of course, there was the packing to be done. I was already mostly packed before the wedding (perks of having moved back from vancouver just a few weeks before) so all we had to do was get this:

Into something that looked like this:

And pretty soon, we were onboard and life was up, up and away!

Amidst all the kerfuffle that was our lives at that time, you can be sure we were glad for the tea that British Airways serves with every meal (and in between as well).

The flight (9 hours and 5 minutes) was uneventful. I slept most of the time and Jack tried to watch Spiderman 2, except he’d fall asleep and catch pieces of it, only to fall asleep again. When we woke we were nearing touchdown. The taxi that picked us up (courtesy of the agency we work with) was waiting for us and swept us off to the subsidized teacher housing that we would stay at for the first few weeks.

The flight screen as we neared the UK.

A breakfast for soon-to-be teachers!

The first double decker we spotted (and that I could take a picture of) in the taxi.

Once we were there we put down our stuff, chatted a bit with our temporary landlords (aka The Warden and his Wife) and set off to the nearest Asda, which is Wal-Mart’s UK alias. All we had to sustain us were Sarah’s cookies, which had somehow remained uncrushed in my jacket pocket all this time. During this time we realized just how important WiFi was, because we didn’t have it at our place, so we set off to find a phone card that would give us some data, and a mattress cover that would cover the two twin mattresses in our room.

Tip of the day: with a little a lot of stretching, a king sized cover will wrap around two twin mattresses.

Thinking that we would be moving soon, Jack and I decided against buying a duvet, since it’d just mean more to move once we found a new place (and our bags were bulky enough already).

Boy, did we make a mistake.

Summer days in London are apparently warm and humid, but the night was so cold both Jack and I got up, put on two layers, a hoodie apiece and socks. Then we went back to sleep on the taut mattress cover, shivering away the night before our orientation session.

Brrr.