It's Not Crazy...It's "Challenging"

Back home, Stegen was always a little too "chill" for me. He was the anti-planner, the "eh, whatever", and the embodiment of an island man..."Everyting irie, mon!" While I've wanted to strangle him and his "chillness" a few times back home, I realized I wouldn't have survived today without it.

We slept for 18 hours last night and when I woke up and saw that it was 13:27, I had to undo the 24 hour clock on my phone to make sure it really meant 1:27pm!! We were supposed to pick up our rental car at 11am! Needless to say, panic ensued, but somehow, we managed to get the kids dressed, sorta fed, and out of the door in 30 minutes. It was a freezing cold and drizzly day, but there were people walking around with short-sleeves and no umbrella! I realized we'd either need to learn to love it, or go shopping for a new wardrobe. Here we are waiting outside of our flat for our taxi to arrive:

We picked up our rental car, gawked at how tiny it was (VW Golf), and Stegen attempted to not crash as we navigated our way back to Maidenhead on the opposite side of the road, driving on the opposite side of the car. I've never needed an "OS" bar more than I did today!! The roads are extremely narrow, cars are parked on these narrow roads making them even more narrow, the signs are still difficult to understand, and it was raining! It was really strange sitting in the "passenger" seat, which back home is the driver seat--I kept moving my feet around, unconsciously, like I was accelerating and braking. I'm not going to lie, there was a lot of yelping, cursing, and all-over freaking out during our 5 minute drive back to town. It's a good thing Stegen is so relaxed...had I been driving, we wouldn't have made it back home! (FYI, I decided not to add my name to the rental car...it's probably best for our family and the rest of the drivers in England.)

We stopped by Sainsbury's, which is right next door to Stegen's Adobe office and has a similar feel to Safeway back home. After going through the most confusing parking garage ever, we made it to a parking space and began our adventure grocery shopping. I told myself I wouldn't continue to compare things to how they are back home, but I have to comment on how difficult this experience was. Back home, I know all the brands and can associate them with their known level of quality. Here, there wasn't a brand I recognized! Also, everything was sold in small quantities (or maybe they're just normal quantities and we're used to giant ones). What they label as "family-sized" is our normal size. Bacon was sold in slices of 8...yeah, I'll take 4 packs. I'll need to figure things out soon because our bill for a few days of food was out of this world! Maybe our Costco trip tomorrow will solve a few of these problems. Side note, anything turkey related is hard to find and super expensive, but they do have cool devices called the "Fast Track", which you can rent to scan your groceries as you go through the store and save time at the register! You win some, you lose some.

Once we left the store, we spent about 5 minutes trying to figure out how to load the groceries into the trunk...according to Stegen, it was "stuck." There were no buttons in the car to help us pop the trunk, either. Finally, we realized we had to tilt the VW sign in to get it open. Where's a car manual when you need one?

"It's stuck!"

"Ahh, got it."

"Yeeee!"

We made it home safely with our expensive groceries (all while Stegen continued to remind me to chill out) and ate a dinner consisting of rotisserie chicken, instant rice (it took us a good 5 minutes to figure out how to turn on the "cooker"), and canned green beans. I'll figure out the cooking thing eventually. We had the TV on for the kids on the BBC owned kids' channel CBeeBies (get it?) and at 19:00 (aka 7:00pm) on the dot, this happened:

The kids' station goes to "sleep" for the rest of the night!!

Well, we're headed to open up a bank account tomorrow (hopefully) and make a trip to Costco. Stegen suggested that I pick up a few bottles of wine for myself while we're there...I wonder why he would say that? Ha! Anyway, here's a bit of good news, Stegen got his new company phone today--iPhone 5s with Vodafone, which used to be part of the same parent company as Verizon Wireless. We're even more official now!