23 September 2006

Castle Photos




Week One

We’ve been here in the “Olde World” for about a week, and it has been an exhausting one. Arup has put us up at a posh corporate apartment close to their office, which means it is far from anything and everything else. We have become masters of public transit, though this also means we are covering huge distances between bus and train routes by foot. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that we have walked pretty much every neighborhood along the southern train line out of Birmingham. With all this walking, we have a good feel for each area and decided within the first 4 days or so that Acocks Green was the place for us.

The Arup office is in the extreme southern suburb of Birmingham, which is unfortunate because we are city-loving people and didn’t want to live too close to the office. Acocks Green is a great compromise: it’s right on the train line and it just 2 stops north of Solihull and two stops south of central Birmingham. There were about 3 flats/apartments in the area that we looked at, and we felt like the cheapest one was also the nicest, which doesn’t happen often. We reserved our modern 2 bedroom, 2nd floor flat on Tuesday, just under a week after arriving in England. Look for future apartment posts soon.

To celebrate finding our flat and finally take a break to enjoy things here some, we headed 30 minutes south on Wednesday to Warwick Castle, one of the best preserved medieval (or as they write here, mediaeval) castles in England. Other than raining almost all day (yeah England!) the day was great, as the pictures below clearly demonstrate. In addition to the basic castle tour, there were all these cool medieval demonstrations throughout the day. We saw a highly-scripted, WWF-style joust, as well as a “Birds of Prey” demonstration with hawks and buzzards and eagles. The eagle was by far the coolest bird, and it just reminded us of how fearsome and powerful the good ol’ USA is, or at least our national symbol. You don’t want to mess with an eagle. Anyway, the day culminated in the launching of England’s largest trebuchet, which is a siege weapon like a catapult, but better because it slings the projectile forward. It was a great day and it’s awesome to know that all of this is now just 30 minutes away from us (not-so-subtle plug for visitors)!

Visit here to check out all of our Warwick Castle pictures.

18 September 2006

The beginning


We've arrived, and we've finally got this darn blog up and running. It only took a month! We hope that it will be an entertaining and insightful look at life abroad, as well as a way to keep in touch with all of you. Let us know if it's working!