Outside the Cavalry Museum by St. James Park














Texas Embassy Cantina

View from Trafalgar Square down White Hall Road







View from walkway over the Thames

Street performers by Jubilee Gardens (sure you can tell who he's supposed to be...)

Good advice from the bus

Outside the main entrance to the Penrhyn Road campus

John Galsworthy Building - where Travis' classes are located

Kingston upon Thames- outside our first Travelodge hotel.. we are now around the corner

Here are some pictures from our arrival finally! There are so many more but only 5 can be added at a time. We'll share more later.

Renee: So today the Time 2 Move people have told us the references still aren't completed. Hopefully they will be done tomorrow so we can move out of the hotel. I'm looking for jobs and have received a call and email from a couple of job locaters for social work. The problem is you have to be registered and to do that being from the US you need a degree in Social Work. One agency still sounded like they would be able to find a job with Social Work support. Some of the other jobs I'm interested in you need to have an address for the application so I have to wait. We also have to wait for an address to open up a bank account here.

Yesterday in Central London was really great! We road the SW trains into Waterloo Station. Walked over and saw the London Eye ferris wheel (largest in the world) and ate lunch in the Jubilee Gardens. We watched some street performers then went across the Thames. We then walked to the Trafalgar Square where there was a concert happening. The statues of lions were kind of blocked by fencing but it was still an impressive square. Travis remembers going there with lots of pigeons. The National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery are in the square and free so we will see that later. From the square you can see Big Ben. We walked up Cockspur and before going up Haymarket we found the Texas Embassy Cantina!! :) Next stop was the Piccadilly Circus. This is a square that marks the start of the entertainment district to the south (we walked through and saw several theatres). They also have the big Times Square like signs on a few buildings. We then made our way to The Mall (road to Buckingham Palace) and walked through St. James Park. My mom would love all the flower beds in the park! The picture of Travis on a barrier block is at the other end of St. James park from Buckingham Palace. The lake in St. James Park has over 40 breeds of waterfowl and it was fun to watch all of them get fed and swim. There were also lots of squirels being hand fed. The walkway through the park is called The Diana, Princess of Wales, Memorial Walk. We made it to Buckingham Palace next! It was really amazing with great statues and black and gold fencing. Apparently there aren't always the guards with funny hats out there... they have changing of the guard ceremonies either everyday or every other day depending on the season. Travis said he had seen this before and it was very long and drawn out. I still want to see the funny hats! We then went down Birdcage Walk towards Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, and Westminister Abby. All appeared to be in the middle of restoration on the outsides but were still great! It was getting dark so went and ate at the Texas Embassy and then back home to the hotel!! Oh and we road on a double decker bus and it was crazy!

our first boring video

the BBC is all a buzz over here about Obama supposedly snubbing England's new prime minister. But meanwhile we're over here figuring out the web cam...

okay...

Renee: So we finally made it yesterday (9/22) after leaving five hours late...
Travis: Apparently the air conditioning for the plane went out and then the pilot "went through the book" to fix it. Then after that was fruitless we docked the plane again and hung out in the lobby until we got another plane.
Renee: We originally took the bus to get to Kingston however I messed up our stop a bit short. There was about 20 more minutes to ride to get to Kingston... apparently there is more than one Cromwell Road. We then called a taxi and made it to the hotel at 8 pm UK time. Travis is now completely enrolled at school. We are going to be calling places to find our new home today and hopefully find something tomorrow!
Travis: Yeah, I enrolled and still don't know my classes yet. I can't just get on a computer and look it up yet because my ID hasn't cleared and I can't log onto the computers. Right now we're using the one in the hotel lobby. We're taking a breather and then heading out to go look at a bank and see about getting a cellphone. We found out earlier that at the very least we will need one to call a cab. We ate a really good meal earlier in a Little Italy cafe that sat outside. We watched schoolchildren in suits and skirts go by while we ate ravioli stuffed with crab meat and shrimp. We paid 10 something pounds a piece for the meal. The night before we found a subway that included corn in the vegetables. We paid about nineteen pounds for that. All in all things don't seem all that more expensive...not couting the exchange rate I mean.
Renee: Oh and British English lesson.... Lift is an elevator and Queue means standing in line like "Get in the queue to wait"
Miss you all already!
Travis: We won't be putting pictures up just yet as we have not found a proper adapter for our lap top yet. There is a store next door to our hotel but they only have adaptors for other european countries. We took some time to scout out a place to live through a local renter's website and tomorrow we're going to take a train into the area we're interested in, Tooting, about halfway between here and Central. We hope that Renee might end up working in the big city before to long and we'd like to ease the pain of a commute. Okay that's pretty much it for our first one...be back soon to tell more.