I meant it when we had no idea what would happen in that first week. In that time as school started, Jack discovered that Coke came in 3L bottles. Three. Litres. What.

A Canadian mum who had traveled to London with her daughter also cooked us dinner before flying back home. There’s something nice about eating dinner with fellow Canadian teachers. The British accents we hear are spiffy and all, but voices of home at dinner should never be taken for granted.

Right after school finished on Friday, Jack and I dropped our stuff off in our dorms and hopped onto the bus to a different Ikea. By the time we arrived though, we were quite hungry and decided that shopping on an empty stomach was not a good idea. In fact, empty stomachs are never a good idea. Off we went to the bistro to find delicious cheap foods. Hot tip: If you’re ever in an Ikea in the UK, register for an Ikea Family membership so you can get delicious deals. I kid you not. For £7.65 we had a minted roast lamb shank (with peas and chips), a dish of butternut squash gnocchi, apple soda and free tea. Tea is free to all Ikea Family members. Golly gee free tea.

I get weird when I reminisce about good food.

After all that jazz we were ready to shop. We had our mini pencil, a listful of Swedish names and ideas of how to decorate the space. The night culminated into a mad dash to the finish line (aka the shipping counter) because the store was closing and Jack and I had to find all the right pieces to load onto the cart before they could be shipped. The kind lady at the shipping counter laughed at how out of breath we were, because there was no way that they would have turned away customers who needed to arrange shipping, but we really weren’t to know. We scheduled delivery for Sunday and, after picking our way through a few random mall alleys, found our way safely to that strange purple bed.

The next day Jack and I packed up and said farewell to the little dorm room.

We called for a taxi (which took a while to find our place), were picked up, were dropped off and finally, after receiving the keys from our friendly real estate agents, climbed the stairs into our new home.

‘Course, after we dropped off our stuff, we were hungry, so off we went to get more food. Moving takes a lot of food. Since we’ve become regular patrons of our local pub though, I’ll save the food talk for a proper review, because that place makes decent food for a decent price. We ate and spent the night in our new bed, aka the floor, because it was Saturday night and our bed and mattress wouldn’t arrive until the next day.

Sunday came around and Ikea called us halfway through church service. The furniture arrived, the moving men were knackered (exhausted, for you Canadian folk) and Jack and I set about being busy, busy bees. We headed out to buy a few groceries, returned and got down to work. The place we were in started out looking like this:

To something like this:

To something like this:

To finally something like this:

We were knackered (there’s that word again). The day was full of Jack building things, me taking care of other things around the house, and us taking breaks together with Master Vamp and Sunred (you really should check out Tentai Senshi Sunred), but finally we were done and ready for the next week of school. Or so we thought.

In any case, we were home.