We Made It!

-Katie
It's Friday afternoon and I am sitting in a park in London not far from the London Eye while John is doing some training through his recruiter for his new job.  Today is sunny (gasp) and in the 70's, not a bad start.  It's hard to believe we were preparing to leave Minneapolis less than 48 hours ago!  A person can do a lot of living in that amount of time. 

So far, things have gone smoothly.  John's parents and brother were there to send us off on Wednesday afternoon.  Our check-in at the airport was a non-issue, they even let us check our 5th pack for free....saved us $120!  The flights were all on-time and easy.  We found our amazing hotel in London without a problem and made it to the US Embassy to register as well as stop at the Embassy's IRS office and ask tax questions (ahhhh!  Something I'm not looking forward to....anyone know someone who does international taxes?!?!).  By this point yesterday, we were beyond exhausted seeing as we each got a total of 1-2 hours of sleep on the plane the night before.  But we knew we had to stay up for awhile longer.  So we took a walk through Hyde Park and ate at a cafe by our hotel.  By 7pm (London time), we couldn't keep our eyes open any longer and fell asleep.  We both woke up around midnight and couldn't fall back asleep for a couple of hours (dang time difference).  We finally caught a couple more hours of shut eye before we were up and going at 9.

We began the morning with a full English breakfast at our hotel and stopped at John's recruitment agency office this morning.  We have started looking into temporary phone plans to hold us over until we get permanent phone plans.  We found out we can't get permanent plans until we have both a UK bank account as well as a permanent UK address.  So here we come temp phones!  John has training all afternoon, which brings me back to here....a lovely park where I can write my thoughts and do some people-watching.  Not bad for a Friday afternoon.  And who knows what the rest of the day will bring....