The Goodenough Blog

I can’t even begin to describe all the awful things we have eaten in the last 3 weeks as we traveled around the countryside.  There was the fish and chips, the fried bread, chips, bacon sandwiches, chips, pasta, and more chips.  And that’s the short list.  I only got sick once though.  On the plus side there is seafood everywhere!  I have had so many mussels, clams, and other mysterious crustaceans here, lovely fish stews and soups and I love it.

But I can say that I am so so grateful to have a kitchen again.  Granted I only have one shelf in the refrigerator and I have to walk quite a ways to go to the market, but it is a kitchen none the less.  I made yummy lentil, bean and barley soup last night that totally hit the spot on a chilly English evening.  I am adapting to tea with milk and sugar, which I have to admit is pretty yummy.  Although probably not that good for me, as I am consuming 4-5 per day.  Oops.  But hey I did give up coffee and alcohol so I guess having tea as a vice is pretty tame.

But despite the bad rap that English food gets, I have to say I have been pleasantly surprised by most of the food here.  I’ve had very little food that didn’t taste good, never mind if it was nutritious.  We found a place today that serves pancakes with syrup!  Holy moly!  This is like finding a needle in a haystack, most cafe’s etc. here only serve what is known as a “full english” or a “fry up” breakfast.  This monstrosity of a meal includes, fried eggs, toast, fried tomato, grilled mushrooms, sausage, fatty bacon, hashbrowns and of all things baked beans!  Oh wait I almost forgot, the black pudding.  Blech!  Beans for breakfast is just wrong.  I am dying for potatoes and eggs or pancakes or waffles. . . . yumm.  But for now I am being a good girl and making eggs and toast, fresh fruit and gluten-free muesli.  But it is very tempting here because there are several fabulous restaurants just begging me to try them.

Bacon sandwich

Here are some more photos of Brighton and our house. Not much new to report except that my butt is very grateful for our new office chairs.

Light switches, separate hot/cold faucets, central heating, flat screen TV’s, low flush toilets and public trash bins. These are things that the Brits need to work on. So far those are my only gripes, well almost. The weather has been surprisingly mild. Yesterday I was hot, who whoulda thunk. We went on a mission to find a 2nd hand furniture store up the street yesterday afternoon. Walked for 20 min to find an empty store, bugger. But out of that journey we ended up in the “cool” part of town rather unexpectedly. No one told us this was even here. We found a organic healthy fluff store, the mother-load of clothing stores, and tons of cool local cafes. The area is huge too. I found my clothing store. I should have known that all the clothes I like are British and I should have come with the clothes on my back and bought everything here. In one store I found Ben Sherman, Fred Perry, Lindberg, G-Raw, Merc and Penguin. WTF… This place has been shear torture so far. Good clothes and old Land Rover Defender 110s everywhere. And the 110s aren’t $80k, they are cheap.

We went online shopping yesterday, which was a real task. We bought 2 desks, 2 chairs and a new bed frame from Ikea. £40 for delivery, ouch. But, I have no way of picking it all up so… £40 it is. But all that for £230. Not too shabby. We are working on a kitchen table with a bench seat at the moment. Not ideal, but there is internet and power so it will do for now.

Ikea Desk and Chair

new bed for us

We found a great little market called the Taj about 15min walk from here. They have good produce and all kinds of cool ethnic food. We tried to buy fish from the fishmonger yesterday, but we made a bad choice and got frozen swordfish. Was fishy. We have to get used to the local fishies. Plaice, haddock and mackerel.

It’s 4pm. The work day begins.

Here are a few pics of our house in Brighton.  I think it is fab.  We do need a cleaning lady to come since neither of our new housemates are very tidy.  But here you can get an idea of our new pad.  The only slightly difficult part is that this great house is on top of a rather LONG hill.  My calf muscles have not quite adjusted.  But between the hill and the 3 flights of stairs, I should be in great shape by the end of the summer.

Oh the holy terror that is the giggle loop.  I’ll let Jeffrey explain. . .

So this evening we went to a choir performance by one of our new housemates.  Jessie was singing the Passion according to the gospel of Mark at her church, St. Luke’s Anglican church.  I have not been in a traditional church in sometime and it was both terrifying and exciting at the same time.  The choir was good but very solemn.  And then “Jesus” got up to sing. . . and did he ever.  He trilled his “R’s” and shook when he sang.  Then the other guy got up for his solo and did the same, very committed to the part.  And then came the giggles.  I squeezed Eric’s hand when “Jesus”  tried to jump an octave and didn’t quite make it.  I started to snicker, then I felt Eric shaking with laughter.  I could barely control myself.  I was shaking and holding my hands over my face so that hopefully no one could tell I was crying from laughter.  I finally stopped only to start back up again as I could feel Eric still shaking from laughter.  He finally ignored me and started reading some random flyer that he found so that he could concentrate on something else.  It took everything in my body to keep from bursting out in laughter, oh man that sucked and was so much fun at the same time.  I love it!

We made it!  But just barely. . . .

We packed and brought with us 4 suitcases of 70lbs each because that’s what the airline said we could bring.  We brought our computer monitors, almost ever piece of clothing I own, and 10 pairs of shoes.  And of course my sizable MAC collection.  I thought it was great how much stuff I was able to bring, until I met up with the English train/subway system.  People in Europe don’t pack giant 30″ bags, they pack these minuscule little roller bags that I swear can’t hold more that a pair of socks and a toothbrush.  And so because of our enormous bags not only are we instantly labeled “Americans” but we are also forced to navigate the underground with no elevators.

So at the beginning of our trip we decided to put 2 of the 4 bags into a storage facility at the train station so that we only had to lug around 2 huge bags while we toured the countryside.  It was still miserable with our huge bags, every time the train approached I got a little pit in my stomach as I tried to figure out where the luggage rack was and how not to block all the travelers looking pissed and in a hurry.  Every hotel room we stayed in was on the second or third floor and none had elevators, so again we lugged our bags up the stairs.  So yesterday we went to get the other bags out of storage and £96 later we were headed to the Tube and back to our hotel.  The Tube is soooo anti-luggage and anti-handicap for that matter there are absolutely NO elevators.  So as we dragged them down the stairs at one station, we had to lug them up 4 flights of stairs at the next stop.  I am never-ever doing that again.  Never.  Next time we are going to shell out the £50 and get a taxi.

Ugh, but needless to say us and all 4 of our bags arrived in Brighton tonight to a mad house and more stairs.  The couple who are renting out their house to us were here packing up their house to leave in the morning and their 3 kids were running around plus the other 2 women we will be living with for the next several months.  Our rooms are on the 4th? floor and so we carried our bags up yet another 3 flights of stairs.  We have 2 attached rooms with 2 beds, the one room is huge and perfect for our workspace.  Can’t wait to get settled in.

So we are back in London today after a glorious 2 days in the countryside.  Ugh.  We have seriously got to get out of the city with our giant luggage.  Navigating the Tube with a huge bag is no fun.  And the last 2 days in London’s financial district has been quite chaotic.  The G20 summit summoned world leaders from many countries and demonstrations and riots for days.  People broke into the Royal Bank of Scotland and police had to try to corral 4000 people in the streets.  So as we are hearing about all this I realize that the hotel we booked is right in the heart of the chaos.  We are staying right where the riots happened.  Today though it is business as usual.  Thank God.  We have seen a few signs of the demonstrations but mostly people are back at work, la dee dah.

So last night I stayed awake sick in the bathroom so we were more than happy to check into the hotel today and sleep.  I have no pictures because we didn’t do anything but get on a train, another train and crash on our bed.  Maybe tomorrow.  Tomorrow we go to Brighton, our new home until August.  We are so excited to get there and get settled, we are weary of traveling and ready to get back to work.  And so I am off to sleep, hopefully I sleep through the night tonight.

When I met Eric in 1997/1998 I thought he was so mysterious, so smart and underneath that hard exterior he had the most tender heart of any boy I had ever met.  I was immediately in love and thought we would go on dating and being in love forever.  But then my wonderful Eric upped the stakes and asked me to spend the rest of my life with him and while I was so young and naive about marriage I gladly accepted.   I had this unexplainable knowledge that he was going to do amazing things and I wanted to be part of the journey.  Now, 9 years after we said “I Do” we find ourselves frozen on a canal in rural England having the time of our lives.  I think this is what I meant by being part of the journey, although I never quite pictured a life in the UK.

Now for the surprise!  Eric has had a long fascination with canals and locks since I can remember.  So for our 9 year anniversary I surprised him with a 4 hour tour of Bath by boat.  He was so excited and couldn’t believe that I had kept it a secret for nearly a month.  As we approached I soon realized that this was not the private tour I had imagined, this is a choose your own adventure, drive your own boat, holy crap what did I get us into, trip.  Surprise!

We had so much fun on the canal, it’s like being in an RV except you are on the water.  There are other boats parked along the water which people live on since there are kitchens and bathrooms and beds.  We decided that we might have to spend a weekend on one sometime, you can cruise into a city, park and have a pint at the local pub and then climb back on and drift off again.  We were on our own into the wilderness with only a ten minute tutorial on how to drive these things and the rules of the canal.  We were pioneers off to explore the new world together.

I have to say this is the most fun we have ever had on our anniversary.  We had an amazing time on the canal, we found this incredible tea room in a basement and I had the most delicious Chai.  We walked over to the Royal Crescent and enjoyed the sunshine and then went out for a less than amazing dinner.  I won’t go into specifics about the ending of my dinner, but lets just say I got no sleep.  Even still I am happy to say that the adventure continues and that we have had an incredible 9 years and I can’t wait to see what we do in another 9.  I love you Snarky, thanks for the time of my life.

Wow what a day.  We left Liverpool today early to get on not one, but 4 trains!  L-o-o-o-o-o-n-g day.  We finally arrived in Bath today and what an incredible city.  We are staying at the Tolley Cottage which is just 10 min walk from the city center.  The cottage is right on the Avon canal and from our room we have a view of the city and the canal and so we watched the sunset from our room while we rested from our long journey.

We decided to venture out and see the city and stopped into Sally Lunn’s Tea House.  This house is the oldest house in Bath, built in 1482 the house is famous for Sally Lunn who came to the house in the 1600’s and started baking buns that became famous and they still serve them today.  It is so fun, like tea in Jane Austen’s living room.  We had tea and buns and then wandered over to Bath Abbey.    For dinner we decided to go to Jamie Oliver’s Restaurant here in town.  It is rustic Italian and the food was excellent.  We had these green olives that were incredible and they were playing Il Postino, one of my favorite films, on the wall with English subtitles.  Actually it was so cool because Il Postino is about the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda during his political asylum in Italy, the reason this is cool is because Neruda is one of my favorite poets.  The other reason it was cool to see it today is that we had a Neruda poem on the head table at our wedding exactly 9 years ago today.

I can’t wait to surprise Eric with our Anniversary present tomorrow!

Ack so just as Eric lines up the camera for a breathtaking nighttime view of Albert Dock in Liverpool, with the lights on the water and the sky still slightly lit with purple and grey clouds. . . . the battery dies.  Blast!  We have pictures of our day in Liverpool but alas they will not be online until we are reunited with our luggage that we left in London.

In the meantime, I can tell you my impressions of Liverpool.  Well. . . not Liverpool exactly but Albert Dock.  The dock is a recently refurbished area of the city that has undergone a major transformation.  It is lined with a few shops, cafes and restaurants.  There is also a TATE art gallery where we saw an exhibit on Art in the 20th century.  I was very excited to see the Jackson Pollocks but everything else was. . . umm. . . .strange and unimpressive.  But maybe I don’t get art.  This area of Liverpool is great if you just have an afternoon to spend down here.  Which is exactly what we had.  We are leaving in the morning for Bath, but thank GOD for the Holiday Inn which is right on the docks.  After the last hotel this is a very welcome change, we have Wifi in our room, a decent bed and elevators.  Yes!  Elevators are good.