The London Launch

It is exactly a month since I landed at Heathrow and started telling people, "By the way, I live in London now." Finally, I am beginning the promised blog so everyone can know about my adventures abroad. So here is a brief overview of the highlights from the last month....

Where to begin? I'm writing this post in the dining/living room of my apartment that I share with two fabulous flat mates. Matt and David, who are both gay, have a lot of energy, and believe strongly in the superiorness of Macs over PCs. Matt enjoys interpretive dancing to Whitney Huston's "I Will Always Love You," and one of David's top priorities when he moved to London was joining a gym. He gave them Matt's and my contact info so he could get the free "Fitness First," backpack. I adore them both. For my 22nd b-day they threw a "Maggie's B-day/Flat Warming Party," which we entitled "Low Key, Wine and Chee(se)." (Wine and cheese because that seemed so sophisticated and flat-warming like, low key because we had no real dishes yet and ate off paper party plates and drank wine out of plastic cups. It had the desired effect nevertheless.)

The first time I went out with Matt and David I bought a pair of shoes after we polished off a glass of red wine with a pizza dinner. Then, I went back to their hostile and borrowed one of Matt's shirts to wear as a dress. These are the two lovely people I will be sharing my life with for the next five months! :) Many more good times to come!!!

I've also found "gainful employment," as my dad would say. I am working at a company called ASG (don't ask me what the ASG stands for....I haven't the foggiest) Immigration Limited. The easy explanation about what they do is to call them a law firm and say that they specialize in visa and immigration work. I'm the new Administrative Assistant and can tell you all about how to arrange a FedEx International Priority Shipment and how much it costs to post something Royal Mail depending on it's weight. Putting stamps on envelopes is dull but the people I work with are great fun. I've learned how to make a good cup of British tea and tried a few varieties of pork pate from the gift baskets our clients send as thank-yous. (As long as I don't think about the fat content I could eat pate everyday!)

Speaking of food....British cuisine generally gets a bad rep. While so called "pub grub" is pretty much what is being consumed in every frat house in America and I am trying to avoid it, the English do breakfast surprisingly well. Waffles and French toast may be knocked off the top of my list as favorite breakfast foods now that I know about the plethora of other options out there: bagels and lox, crepes, scrambled eggs on toast with grilled tomatoes, Welsh Rabbit, a dish that features an egg and cheese mixture grilled on toast so that it puffs up in to an eggy, cheesy, crispy-bottomed mound of deliciousness, and several varieties of sausage (including venison!) are some of the delicacies I've tried since I've been here. Mom and Dad - you will be happy to know that I will now eat eggs in a way besides scrambled...I like them poached too!

One bad quality about Britain I can't defend....the weather really does suck. Never have I been in a place more unpredictable. Sunglasses and an umbrella are an absolute must every time you leave the house. The seasons could change during the duration of your tube ride. There was a fancy dress musical festival off the coast this weekend and the theme was "Under the Sea." Apparently from the amount of rain they got, it was aptly chosen. One guy I know from work and his friends went as the crew of a submarine; hopefully their periscopes allowed them to see the stage through the deluge!

Tourist wise, I've been to several places that the English major and Art History student in me could not resist. I visited the British Museum and the British Library in my very first weekend here. The Museum is amazing; you can spend over an hour in any room and not learn everything there is to know. Upon wandering in and feeling slightly homesick for the National Gallery in DC I stumbled upon an American print exhibit which featured art from the Harlem Renaissance. From there I found my way to an exhibition on jade jewelry making and glimpsed in the Ancient Egyptian rooms. The library was even better than the museum. I flipped through digital copies of "Alice's Adventures Underground," and William Blake's notebook. I saw Jane Austen's personal writing desk, which, even though it was quite early on will probably remain one of the ten coolest moments of my stay here.


So that's it...a very abbrevated recap of my first month in London. I hope to post more often from now on now that the stress of job hunting and flat finding are both over with. Please e-mail/comment about what you see here; send praise and criticism! This is supposed to be an exercise in real-life writing as well as a way to keep everyone updated about what I am doing!

Thanks for reading!

Cheers! (A British expression that means so much more than the celebratory clinking of glasses...it is a good substitute for thank you and good bye!)