Settling In?

It has been six weeks since we first landed in London, and most of that time has been spent in a mad rush to get one thing or another accomplished: basic furniture, telephone, internet access, transportation, electrical appliances, banking, finding our way around, etc.
This past weekend saw us get the remainder of our furniture delivered [...]

By Jon

It has been six weeks since we first landed in London, and most of that time has been spent in a mad rush to get one thing or another accomplished: basic furniture, telephone, internet access, transportation, electrical appliances, banking, finding our way around, etc.

This past weekend saw us get the remainder of our furniture delivered and set up, finishing up our moving in checklist. Having finished that on Sunday, I celebrated by doing absolutely nothing yesterday. While laying around doing nothing, it finally hit me how insane we must seem to everyone who knows us.

In less than three months (July-September) we managed to completely change our lives, in almost every way possible, and I think we acted as if it were the most natural thing in the world to just pull up stakes on a whim and move across an ocean, to a city and country you have never been to before. Yes, they must all think we are a bit nuts.

But the funny thing is; it was the most natural thing in the world. We decided to give it a shot and a week later Jenn had a better job than she did in the states. We put our house on the market and accepted an offer on it 96 hours later. Our pets all went to fabulous homes, almost by themselves. It required so little effort on our part. While dropping the dogs off, we also managed to sell our car to the people who were taking the dogs! We found cheap plane tickets almost as soon as we looked for them, and every trip we had to take to settle our affairs seemed to flow effortlessly into the next bit that needed doing or was on the way to somewhere else we needed to go.

We seem to have taken to our new circumstances just as easily. None of the things that we were worried about not understanding (like the Tube) have been a big deal at all. As a matter of fact, I find the Tube far easier to navigate than New York City’s subways. No automobile, no problem. We have turned down the offer of a Volkswagen Polo at a price that would prove that we were crazy if I told you, and now have bicycles instead. A large backpack and a bike does an excellent job of getting the shopping home if we go somewhere that doesn’t have a train next to it.

Sure, there have been some unexpected things (both good and bad, but mostly good) about life here, such as the enormous difference in quality food that I can easily get here (and I don’t just mean in London - the quality of Tesco produce is far higher than most anything I could get in the States: organic, sustainable, low food-miles and cheaper too!). But hey, what would be the point of leaving where we were if things weren’t different where we were going?

The point is that it was easy - too easy. Easy enough that it makes me wonder why I haven’t done this before, why people don’t do this sort of thing all the time. It really just isn’t that big a deal…and that’s just weird.

Tags: , ,

RSS feed

Comments »

No comments yet.

Name (required)
E-mail (required - never shown publicly)
URI
Your Comment (smaller size | larger size)
You may use <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong> in your comment.

Trackback responses to this post

My Others...

Friends

Subscribe

JONTILLMAN.COM Posts RSS feed

Tag Cloud