Moving in

We're making great progress moving in to the house. We had a 40 foot crate arrive about a week ago. We estimate 180 boxes were in there. The movers were able to get them all in the house on the first day. They sorted approximately 50 boxes on the second day, unpacking and placing things in good spots.

We've been doing about 10 boxes per day. So it'll take us about 2 weeks to finish unpacking. The shipping company comes in two weeks to pickup rubbish and boxes.

We can walk through most of the house, down to about 3-5 boxes per room now. Much better than the 20-30 that it was when we started.

Did you know that light bulbs are different here? Wish us luck to finish before they come to pickup rubbish!

Maps with friends, and great service

A colleague and I were glancing at Google maps to plan a work trip. It turned into a great conversation where she was able to point to general areas and give me a "feeling" for them. I think I've tried to ask questions about general areas before, but pointing at a map seems to really help people say things like "that's a great area, and oh, I'd visit xyz if you go there". I'll be pulling out Google maps a lot more to get ideas from locals... I think it also proves one of the knowledge management axioms of "you don't know what you know, until you need to know it".

I felt welcome as a local on Friday. A colleague from last summer came back in the office for the first time in 4 or 5 months. She's out on maternity leave (they usually take between 6 and 12 months maternity leave here). She's not coming back to the office yet, she was bringing her baby in to the office to meet everyone. Nice feeling to be a part of that long term continuity!

My wife asked for a Swatch watch for Valentines Day. I went online to try and order it. The website didn't work for me, I had the classic experience of clicking on "buy" and nothing happened. Too nervous to click it again and start a collection of Swatch watches, I decided to call them. I was quickly connected to their call centre in Switzerland. The woman on the other end of the line was extremely kind and helpful. After a few kind words, she was able to quickly process the order. I mentioned that I was a bit nervous the online order may have gone through too. She immediately checked the system and not only said its clean, she said she'd call back in 30 minutes to confirm its only been charged once. Sure enough, she called back exactly 30 minutes later and confirmed that the order happened only once. What a great experience, it was the feeling of a small company "care", even though I realise Swatch is quite large!

Money and Weather

Did you know that you can deposit checks by taking photos and submitting them through mobile banking apps? Absolute life saver for us because we were in a fun predicament where we had physical checks in the US and no easy way of depositing them. We learned the hard way that you have to physically go into a bank to setup wire transfers (for the initial transfer), that's hard to do from 1000s of miles away.

I have a proper UK credit card now! Full with a PIN number and "contactless". The PIN number is required for all transactions and it keeps the card quite secure. Contactless is amazing because you literally just waive the card and money disappears :) I was able to easily add my wife to the account, so she should receive a card soon too - hopefully all on the same account.

The states have had quite a bit of snow lately. I was talking to a professor friend at Harvard and he seemed genuinely surprised that I knew about their upcoming weather. I get it, I'm sure he has very little idea of what the weather will be in London tomorrow, but there is some global awareness and interest, or maybe just a lot of communications going on. It was such an interesting feeling to be on the other side of the surprise. 

 

"Even" lots of house ownership learning

I've heard the word "even" a lot lately. It's used in a funny and interesting way. It almost means "my bad". For example, if you're giving directions and you say "left turn", then realise later you meant right turn, you'd say "right turn, even". You don't say anything about how it was a mistake, "even" covers that for you. 

Our older dog is mildly sick. She's never had a cold in her life, that I can recall, but she has a runny nose right now. Actually, it's already getting better thanks to the local vet. We were nervous to try any vet, so we quickly looked around and asked around. Recommendations came quickly and we tried one, with warnings of "its expensive". They were great and not too expensive at all, in fact cheaper than DC. Turns out our dog has a cold, and seems to be stressed, can't overlook that pets feel the pain of transitions too. We're thinking about pet insurance, but just like the states, it may or may not be worth it...

Our older daughter is loving her cooking class. It's an hour drive each way, which causes the locals to call us "mad". Mad means crazy, mental means mind blowing. The whole family comes, so it makes for great conversation time in the car. This time I took my youngest daughter to the closest Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty near the class. Actually, I hate to say, it was quite a disappointing AONB. I've been spoiled by mental ones, but this one was "just a nice big hill". We drove back to town and saw a man with a Washington Redskins coat, nice!

We've booked flights for a few trips to the "continent". That's what we call the rest of Europe here. Looking forward to those, it seems most people travel at "half term", which is the long break halfway through school terms. 

There don't seem to be many basements here, but there are attics. The attic is known as the loft. They're full of about 12-24 inches of insulation. You can buy "loft stilts", which create a little table above the insulation for storage. You're not supposed to just put stuff on top of the insulation because it might hurt the stuff, or decrease the effectiveness of the insulation.

Overall, I'm noticing that I learned words and language for a long time, then I learned about places, now we're learning day to day activities. I'm trying to think what kind of learning I was doing before this whole experience, I think it was mostly data, information and process type learning. And every day, everywhere, it's all about learning yourself, others and group behaviour- trying to help others and contribute, enjoying the journey,  right?

Borough Market

A place called the Borough Market was recommended today, so I walked over there not sure what to expect. Once I got there it reminded me of the Chelsea Market in New York City. There were hundreds of stalls selling raw meat, fresh fruits and vegetables and other knick knacks.

The burgers were recommended to me, so I looked for those stands. I found a stall that sold quite exotic meats - kangaroo, ostrich, zebra, crocodile, wagyu, etc. The special was kangaroo fillet, so I tried it! It reminded me of venison, little punch of flavour and a bit chewy. It was more stringy than other meats.

There were people mumbling that these meats are illegal, and they did seem strange to me. I fully admit I was nervous to try them, but I made the big assumption that all was well, and the chat with the stall owner was certainly interesting. :)

121 is one on one

At work, there are often small meetings between two people. It's funny that they have different names for that meeting all over the world. Commonly in the UK, at least at the company I'm working for, they call them 121. That's shorthand for "one to one". 

After one of my 121s today, we stopped for a quick tea. I ordered a hot chocolate because it was cold outside. They brought out a cup filled with thick warm chocolate. The group I was sitting with were so excited to see "proper" Italian hot chocolate. I had never heard of it before but wow was it delicious!

On a side note, a new phrase for me today was "give them a bell", which means "give them a ring". 

Moving in and Chris Collison

The transition period to the UK is almost officially over. Our "crate" from the US arrived at our house in the UK yesterday!

We've been sitting on the floor, eating dinner in our laps for two weeks. We've learned to appreciate the value of a table and a chair :) I may have already mentioned that were borrowing mattresses from a colleague, so nice!!

The movers arrived with 3 people. We were a bit surprised because it took 8 people to pack the crate. Sure enough, we confirmed a 3 person crew is correct. 

They were the nicest guys. They took great care if our stuff, and they never even asked for food or a break? They did ask to use the toilet. We gave them tea and cakes for lunch, and we had pizza delivered for dinner. They ate, but barely, since they kept on working.

We ran into two fairly major challenges. One was that the Queen bed box spring didn't fit up the narrow stairs. They tried and tried, even measured, but it just wasn't possible. That's when we learned that day 1 is just getting stuff in the house, day 2 is building and organising, nice! So today, on day 2, a handyman is here on call to disassemble and reassemble anything that doesn't fit. He's sawing the box spring as I write this, hope it gets back together, I'm sure it will :)

During this rather hectic day, my new buddy Chris Collison was able to come over. I have to write that again for fun, Chris Collison came over to my house. I've been a fan of his world leading work in knowledge management for years, and here we are hanging out at my house, on a big move day. I forgot to offer him tea, so I apologized for that later, but we still had a great conversation, on "brand new" chairs in our house! We had a good laugh about the activity in the house.

Cookies for neighbours

Over the past week, we've baked cookies and delivered them to one neighbour per night. We've met most of our neighbours now, and had some nice conversations. Several retired couples and several young families, so it's quite a mix. 

The best moment was when we rang one doorbell and no one answered, but as we walked away, we saw someone stick their head out an upstairs window. They said "sorry, we're bathing the children". We yelled up "no problem, we just brought warm cookies to say hello as new neighbours". She yelled back "oh, I'll be right down". Very young unclothed children and all, we shared cookies and laughs :) 

Mail delivery

Mail is delivered by the Royal Mail. Mailmen walk door to door in red attire with a red bag thrown over their shoulder. In our neighbourhood, doors have slots in them for mail to be dropped straight in to the floor. The mailmen are quite social and willing to stop and chat if you want. I have almost no doubt we'll learn the name of our mail delivery folks, and probably even share a few great chats!

Bought a car

We bought a car. It's a used car. I think we all know the reputation of used car salesmen in the states, so I found myself thinking about my own unconscious bias toward that reputation. The dealer here seemed completely different from that mentality. For example, he let me test drive, by myself, without taking a license or any of my contact info. He was very detailed when speaking about the pros and cons of each car we looked at. It seemed quite decent and balanced. I felt comfortable. The negotiation was easy, I gave a price lower than the sticker and he said sure. Guess I should have gone even lower! 

He helped me understand taxes and insurance. He was even careful to not overly recommend any specific insurance provider, when it would have been very easy to go into gossip and rumuor about providers. 

Taxes were easy, go online, type in car info, pay your taxes, done. Insurance, on the other hand, was not easy. They have "compare" websites as they call them here. It looks like you can compare anything from vacuum cleaners (known generically as hoovers) to car insurance to everything in between. This is the recommended approach for finding things. So I searched. I had not heard of any of the company names that came back as good options, so I started googling "top 10 car insurance" and similar searches. Sure enough, these companies weren't even listed in "top 50" lists that I found. So I tried different compare sites and eventually found one that came back with more reputable names. Even still, the site said that most of these places wouldn't insure us. Uhoh.

One company looked reputable and willing to insure international drivers, so I went to their website. I went through an online form and at the end it said nope sorry, can't insure you. So I tried another company and it worked! But I wasn't comfortable because their drop downs didn't exactly ask for international info, so I wasn't confident. I called them Monday morning and heard the bad news that they also were not willing to cover us. The payment would be refunded and the policy immediately cancelled. 

Well now it's starting to get frustrating, so I called our internal company experts, and started really asking around for help. I called the number one rated company  and asked for their guidance as well. Matching their reputation, they were great. They were willing to cover us, but at quite a cost. Later, by asking colleagues, I learned they're charging us "teenager rates". I called back and was able to negotiate slightly better rates, and now we're inspired to get UK driving licences because our rates will noticeably go down.

We're driving and insured and taxed! Sure we always were in our rental (hire) car, but now it's really us. Look out open roads and areas of outstanding natural beauty - and everywhere else - we're on our way!

11 Day Hiatus, Sorry!

Wow, it's 11 days since my last post, time flies! 

Our level of comfort continues to increase here in the UK. It's becoming more natural to know what words to use. It's slightly easier to quickly realize how other people are thinking and feeling. Over the past few weeks, I've mostly learned that a heavy percentage of our decisions are based in the short term. Even in a culture here that is quite long term conscious, based in historical bedrock, there is still a tendency to react in the moment. Ill probably keep looking up research to learn more about cultures, personality types and decision making.

I was fortunate to travel back to Henley University last week. Such a great group of people. I was meeting with their project management professors, as opposed to their Organisational Development and Knowledge Management folks. I was impressed how connected they were to each other, how aware and intelligent they were of not only the progress in their own college, but in many others as well. 

From a family perspective, we had a good conversation about which groups and activities that we'd like to join. My oldest daughter requested cooking lessons, and acting lessons. As a family we researched both, found some great ones, and got her right in. We learned that most cooking lessons last one hour. We were hoping for more of a curriculum, a series of lessons that build upon themselves. We found one! Sure, it's an hour drive, which is similar to a 4-6 hour drive from a cultural comparison to the states, but it's great. Very popular class, our daughter loves it and immediately says she wants to stick with it. We also found a great acting class, which culminates with an accredited certification. She likes that class too, it's walking distance from the house. 

We don't have a tv, so we've been somewhat keeping up through Netflix and Hulu. I clicked on the first episode of a TV show called Breaking Bad and found myself immediately hooked. Now I'm feeling guilty as I watch hours and hours to "catch up". 

In the middle of winter, daylight is at a premium. It's light from about 8am to 4pm, with dawn and dusk just before and after. The temperature doesn't shift much day to day, so I find myself much more aware of small fluctuations in the temperature. That's a strange feeling for me, I think I literally used to just "absorb" large temperature changes and not even think about it.

As a closing thought, the grocery story is an 8 minute peaceful walk away. A lively playground is just two more minutes further. And yet, we find ourselves choosing to drive there. There's something overly rushed about that, I'm starting to notice. It's pretty probably a mentality that's similar to the one that's driving "high performance" and "productivity", always looking for the quickest, fastest, cheapest way. Whilst that's probably quite valuable in a work environment, I'm just now realising that maybe we can dial it up and down for different situations. Maybe choosing an 8 minute walk, with some good chit chat along the way, as opposed to a 2 minute drive, might help us appreciate things. I'll give it a chance :)

Pavement and Bin Lorries

The new words keep coming. I learned all about Boxing Day. Hint - it's not about punching each other, it's about putting gifts in boxes :)

Sidewalk is pavement, garbage truck is bin lorry. Actually, when you start using the word lorry to mean truck, there's a whole raft of new words - fire truck, tow truck, etc. 

My wife said the mailman rang the doorbell yesterday just to say hi. The service is called Royal Mail and they do walk the streets with a bag over their shoulder carrying the mail. She was happy to see how happy he was!

Winchester and Guildford

As a family we ventured over to a town called Winchester this past weekend. Some say it was the Roman capital here before London, others say a capital roved around. Either way, it's another great town with a vibrant shopping area. Especially around Christmas, it's market is fantastic.

We noticed jewellery, chocolate, food and toys. There was a butcher at a market stand right in the centre of town, he seemed very popular. One of the hanging meats seemed really hard to look at, we had no idea what it was. 

We ate Italian food for lunch, then stopped for tea and coffee. Our youngest daughter enjoyed jumping in puddles and the "castle". I think there is a castle, but she was referring to Guild Hall which does look like a castle, with a nice clock at the front. There's a nice rushing river or creek that runs through town, reminded us of a lazy river. 

On Sunday we drove over to our old friendly town of Guildford. Still such a great place. Our fav restaurant is closed from 1 Jan to 14 Jan, which is interesting because we can't imagine any US restaurant closing for two weeks? Guildford always seems to have great musicians in town, which brings a jubilant feel to the cobblestone shopping area.

We ate at another fav of ours called Giraffe. The service at this particulate restaurant is quite good. Overall, we've been here less than a week and it's beginning to feel like home all over again. 

My first panto!

I went to my first panto today! Going in, I only knew that they were traditional British events. I heard they were interactive, live plays, with semi-famous actors and actresses. I wasn't sure what to expect and yet I loved it, it was entertaining and funny. 

Our pantomime was Snow White. You're exoected to already know the traditional story and they poke some fun around it. I didn't quite recognise our famous actors and actresses, but the crowd sure cheered for them. They were very skilled. They incorporate numerous hit songs from the year, plus some big events and TV shows. They made fun of Great British Bakeoff and lots of local Guildford jokes. They sang Lady Gaga and even Frozens' Let it Go. 

The whole approach reminded me a little bit of Saturday Night Live, with the humour of Monty Python and the British version of The Office. 

Unfortunately we had to leave at intermission. It was a tough decision, but we had to go pick up the dogs from the airport. I was willing to get the dogs so that the girls could stay and enjoy the show, but we decided to stick together. I had help arranging it so that my daughters were going to be pulled up onto stage in the second half, so maybe we'll try that again next year.

We're beginning to settle in, and it's quite a feeling. I have some strange blend of proud, excited, intimidated, embarrassed and sad, they each seem to fleet in and out as moments pass. Checking out at the grocery store today I was told I have a "thick accent", that tends to bring out a range of emotions pretty quickly. I'm thinking it will all balance out over time, but it might be interesting to see if that comes true...and how long it takes... We're in deep learning mode!

Hyde Park Winter Wonderland

We ventured over to Hyde Park today. Throughout the Christmas season they have an event called "winter wonderland". I had bought tickets a few months back, but I wasn't sure what to expect.

We had a great time! It's a mix of a carnival, a Christmas market, special activities and a London park. The carnival was bigger than I expected, with at least half a dozen rides and even more games. The market was closer to what I expected, around 50-60 stalls. It's free to walk in, and you pay for special activities. I mistakenly thought that I had paid to get in - and cover all rides. In reality, I had only paid for "magical ice castle". We had a great time in the castle, it reminded us of the Gaylord Hotel ice experience, if you've been to one of those. It's a freezing cold room full of impressive ice sculptures and an ice slide. 

They play up the Germanic tie to Christmas markets in this Hyde Park Winter Wonderland. We noticed a lot of Geeman food, beer, etc. Several signs were even printed in German. We walked through a "crazy house" that had jumping floors, spinning walls and lots of other tricks - fun!

I don't know if it was by design, but the whole experience really tapped into all 5 senses. I think that kind of experience makes it a lot of fun and quite memorable. 

On the train ride home, we sat next to a grandmother and grandfather. The grandfather was very funny, like a true comedian. He had the whole car laughing at one point. He played the crowd, teasing himself and those around him. He obviously had instant material with our American accents. He asked us where we were headed, and we didn't even need to answer before he yelled out "well, I'm going to Basingstoke and clearly any place you're going is smarter than that". It was funny.