Punting down the River Cam

One of the must-do activities in England, and particularly for any visitor to Cambridge, is to go punting.  Which is really a funny word that means “using a long pole to push a flat boat slowly through the water”.  What you don’t realize until you actually get in the river is that it is CROWDED with punters.  There are two options for punting:  you can do it yourself with a smaller boat or you can join a group and leave the punting to the professionals (or at least someone who looks less foolish doing then you would).  Thankfully, we chose the latter and let someone else do all the work.  Trust me, it looks easy, but after seeing so many first-time punters out there twirling in circles, I was happy just to sit back and enjoy the ride.

Oh, and here’s just one more reason to leave the punting to someone else, especially if you wait until the afternoon.  The traffic is terrible, and although there are supposed to be rules (stay to the right, etc) the first-timers don’t know them (or can’t follow them because they don’t know how to steer).  And just in case you are wondering, there are no brakes on a punt.  No oars, no rudder either.  The long pole does everything (except stop the boat).  So basically we would just plow right through the mess, bouncing off other punts.  Trust me, this is way better than bumper boats.

There are several different routes along the river depending on where you launch.  We “chose” the College Tour, where the river winds itself through the many colleges that make Cambridge University.  I say “chose” because we just put in a random punting company in the GPS and drove there.  Lucky too.  It turned out to be fantastic. 

Now I’ll do my best to identify the some of the sites along the way. 

Here’s St. John’s College.   Ivy league for sure.

Here’s the Bridge of Sighs, where the condemned would walk from the dungeons to the gallows (hence the name).  Now it links the dormatories to the testing center (hence the name still).

Of course, Katya, our almost-teenager, enjoying the view.

There’s Kings College Chapel on the left and maybe that’s Kings College on the right. 

I can’t figure out which college to which this building belongs.  I just liked it because of the history.  This building is hundreds of years old and the tiny window on the right has an interesting story.  There used to be taxes on just about everything in Britain, and once there was a “light tax” levied on everyone based on the size of their windows or the amount of light they allowed into their homes.  So people started bricking up their windows like this one here so they wouldn’t have to pay as much. 

Here is Mathematical Bridge.  When built, held up by physics alone.  Now there are a few modern bolts and such to help it out.

This is New Court St. Johns.

Here we have An Old Red Brick Building.  (don’t know the real name of it so I made it up).

Punting down the River Cam lasted about 45 minutes.  Just long enough for one’s tush to go completely numb, but not so long that it gets boring.  Next time, I might just try to do the punting myself.  Who wants to join me?  (mostly so I’m not the only one making a fool of myself out there.)

After the punting, we went for a stroll in the area.  Turns out it’s a very popular shopping area. 

Here we have three little monkeys enjoying ice cream from the street vendor.  What can I say?  Ice cream is a grand tradition for road trips.  

We turned down an alley and found ‘The Haunted Bookshop’.  We didn’t stick around long enough to find out if it really was, but judging by the 900 year old cemetery across from it, I’d say there’s a good chance it is.

And finally, here we are at last, happy to be in Cambridge.  Well, at least Lyana’s happy.  Can’t say the same for the sad trio surrounding her.

Cheers

Rob

Our Bury Village

I mentioned before that we live out in the country, specifically in a village called Bury.  After saying “Bury” with a thick American accent for a couple of days, we learned that British actually pronounce it “Berry”.

Bury is a village that is connected with Ramsey, a town. Ramsey is very-very old.  The town of Ramsey was built up around the gate of Ramsey Abbey during the 9th century!

From what I am seeing, each village governs itself quite a bit. Of course, all towns and villages belong to a specific shire, so we are also in Cambridgeshire, sort of like a county in the states.

Bury village has a church, a small convenience store, called Bury Store, a pie and cake place, called Bury Cakes, a restaurant called White Lion, a school, a village hall and that's about it. If it weren’t for Ramsey that is so nearby, we wouldn’t have many places to go to. 

Here is the White Lion place. To the right of it is the street that leads directly to where Robert works at the moment.

Ramsey has pretty much everything you need for every day life—more than a dozen places to eat, lots of small shops and second-hand shops, banks, Tesco (which is sort of like Target/Walmart), library, Leisure Centre (remember to pronounce it as “Lesure” and not “Leesure”), clinic, post office and a couple of primary schools and even Abbey College, which I think is a secondary school.

The village is beautiful. In fact, every time I drive through any villages around here I keep thinking to myself that is it is truly unbelievable I am here and that all those pictures you see on TV and in books about what English villages look like are a reality to me.

Driving around, looking for houses, we also noticed that many villages have the same street names.  There seem to be a Church Street and School Lane in every village. You can find a High Street everywhere too—that’s the main road that goes through a village.  Pathfinder Way and Owl’s End seem to be popular street names too.  We live on a close. A close is a street that ends with a dead end—as the sign always shows. Many street names are “Something close”.

This is a picture I took turning into our street.

Almost there…

And here we are—Greenwood House (some houses actually have names here).

Speed limits on most rural and main roads are 60 miles per hour—that seems like flying on some of those back roads. When we drove on a rural street for the first time, I thought that we were going to die because British drive so fast even on narrow roads with sharp turns.  A few times I had to close my eyes and just have faith that both cars are small enough to pass each other. I am getting used to that as well as I am getting better at fitting my car on those roads. The speed limit drops to 30 mph when you enter a village or a town.  Sometimes they have so called Calming Traffic Devices in place—either bumps or an actual island in the middle of your lane to make sure you slow down and let oncoming traffic pass.  I have not seen a policeman giving out tickets yet—hidden cameras are installed on most main roads though so you don’t even ever know if you are being caught for speeding or not.  You will get a ticket in the mail if your car went too fast between two cameras.

This is a picture I took on the way back from a berry farm nearby. These clouds are gorgeous!  It’s also quite windy in our area.

This is what a mini-round-about looks like. There are many of those in towns, serving a purpose of US stop signs. This one is in Ramsey.

British apparently love their double-decker buses. They use them for public transportation and even as school buses in many areas!

Last Sunday we went for a walk after dinner to the church down the street.  It seems to be ancient (and it probably is) but people still meet inside the church on Sundays.

Alex said this was a goblin.

Beautiful colors of the evening sky.

Behind the church, lies a small cemetery.  The kids were amazed at how old some of the grave stones were.  You couldn’t read any writing on those tomb stones, but they were clearly at least a couple centuries old.

Part of the cemetery was dedicated to military people who died near Bury.  Since RAF Upwood (used to be a big air force base)  is technically located in Bury, many pilots from WWII are buried here.  

Most were British military officers and some were from Canada and New Zealand.

On the way back from the church, we took one of those public footpaths that seem to connect villages all over.  Our footpath is not a paved trail, it’s just a path through the woods and fields that goes behind village houses and passes our backyard. The village organizes public walks for people who want to stay active and walk together.  I think people around here cherish every moment that is not rainy and go walking all the time.

All right, what else would you like to know?  Anything specific that you would like to hear about?

Good night for now,

Lyana

Alex’s First Birthday Party

Alex was invited to his first birthday party in England by one of the boys from his class:
Please come to my lads at home wii, footy n pizza bash to celebrate my 8th birthday that day with my mates.
On Thursday, after school till 5:30.
Please let Mum or Dad know.
love Freddie xxx
I wasn’t sure what footy was.  It was actually football (the real thing). And I have noticed that most people sign “hugs and kisses” xxx after their name.  It was also interesting to see that the party was right after school, on a weekday so that kids could just walk to Freddie’s house together.
Just wanted to share
Lyana

Spiders, Hedgehogs, Garbage Disposals and Dryers.

Wow!! What a month we’ve had! Tomorrow (as I am writing this) will mark one month since our arrival to England. It feels like we’ve been here for at least half a year—it’s been a long month!
First and foremost, I have to tell you that England is just beautiful! We have been so blessed with wonderful sunny weather for the the past two weeks—windy and a bit chilly but sunny. People are very wonderful and helpful.  Most are very polite and so well-spoken.  When I speak to them, I immediately want to imitate their accent but I sound somewhat of a mix of Ukrainian, American and (dare I say?) Japanese-haha. One guy to whom I was talking, asked me if I were from Ireland. That’s a new one.

All right, so on September 10th, we signed our lease for the house, just a day after finding out that the windows in our house are single-glazed, meaning they only have one layer of glass in them which is not so good compared to double-glazed. Double-glazed windows are what keep your house better insulated and thus warmer during the winter.  We were warned by many Americans to make sure our house has double-glazing or we’d be paying a lot more for gas during cold months. Well, on the website where our house was advertised (through the military), the description stated it was double-glazed, so we never bothered to check with the landlord until the day before we signed the lease.  I was very-very sad and felt a bit cheated in a way.  I had already so much invested in the house—kids were going to the school in the village—and there was no other house that we liked enough to move to instead.  Therefore, we went ahead and took the house anyway, a bit concerned that we’ll be paying out of pocket every month for heat (we’ll already be using a part of our utilities allowance to cover the excess of our rent payment). Sorry for boring you with all these details…if we are moving again in a year to another house, you’ll know why.

On September 12th (yes, on my birthday) we got a HUGE present—our household goods and quick shipment arrived! All containers are always shipped to RAF Mildenhall, a big base an hour away, and then the movers drive it to our area. Only two guys came (compare that to a brigade of Japanese movers who came to unload our stuff). It took them almost till 4 pm to get everything done.

Our living room at the moment.

Yes, we are hopeful it will snow at least once this winter—the sleds made its way to England too.

Two of our containers are still in transit, but will arrive here by next week hopefully. I think they were held up because we had some snacks in our 72-hour kits.  At the moment, we are missing a few furniture pieces, namely our dining table and chairs. It’s a good thing we have a low Japanese table—we’ve been dining Japanese style (I have  no idea how they manage to sit on the floor for prolong periods of time without being sore).

Both Katya and Mark are staring at something to the side.

I must say that Japanese were excellent at packing our household goods!  Nothing is broken so far (except one penguin cookie jar that we didn’t use anyway to Robert’s disappointment).  British guys were very impressed with the packing job—Japanese built custom boxes basically for every piece of furniture.  So we are very happy.

The first week in a house full of newly moved boxes is the hardest, and you forget how difficult it is to do it all once you are in the middle of it.  After three days or so, we were eighty percent unpacked. The hard part that because only one bedroom has a built-in closet, we had to figure out how the whole storage/wardrobe thing was going to work.  So now Katya and Alex have a wardrobe in their rooms, and we have two more wardrobes on the first level for coats and board games.  We had to put some random items in random spots, at least for now.

….I have written a novel and haven’t even gotten to the reasons for my title!

Spiders are everywhere in England. Everywhere. I have no idea how they get inside but they do. I am not afraid of spiders, actually, so they are all right.  Although seeing a huge spider in my bathtub does make me feel a bit uneasy.

Mice on the other hand is what I absolutely hate! As our neighbor put it, you don’t move out to the country if you don’t want to see any mice.  That is so comforting...I guess this neighbor, Kim, has a cat who brings dead mice and birds and drops them at his front porch all the time.  I have now found two dead dried out mice in the midst of gravel rocks on our driveway—gross!!!!!

Hedgehogs. I love hedgehogs!  I actually remember seeing hedgehogs all the time in Ukraine growing up.  In the states, no one seemed to know much about them.  But here—they are everywhere! And they live in our huge backyard, somewhere.  The reason we know they are there is because kids found two dead hedgehogs this week. Again--gross!! I am just so scared of all these dead animals….This morning I went jogging in our backyard (however funny that sounds) and I had to watch my step carefully being afraid to step on anything dead or alive-haha.

Oh, but we love our backyard!  We play tag there every night.  Kids are planning already where they are going to make a tree house next spring, well, it’s mostly Robert who is planning that.  Since the weather has been so nice, they have been able to play there every day.  Oh how we wish we had their friends here with them.

Garbage disposals.  If you were to ask me today what is one thing I miss that I had in the states and in Misawa it would be a garbage disposal! Who knew that it made my life so much easier!  Actually, it is not JUST the fact that we have to throw away our food scraps into a trash bin. It’s the fact that we have to separate all food and grass clippings into a special recycle bin.  Somehow people can stand the thought of just throwing your food leftovers into a large trash bin and have it sit there for two weeks with no bags or anything. I finally bought some small compostable plastic bags so I could maybe put my food in there and then into the big trash bin.  That’s another thing—rubbish is being picked up only one a fortnight…we’ll see how we manage that.  In Misawa, we were spoiled by Japanese coming to get our recycle and regular trash twice a week.

Finally, a word about dryers.  It’s something that most Americans take for granted—and I did until this month.  Growing up in Ukraine, I knew first hand how difficult life could be without a dryer.  No one every complained about it though there because really, there is not much you could do with a bad attitude anyway.

Military issues us a washer and a dryer.  Although our washer is significantly smaller than what  we are used to, it will do, I can adjust.  Our dryer, on the other hand, is a condensed dryer.  It takes a very long time to dry clothes but also it’s the kind in which you have to empty a plastic container on the bottom that fills up with water.  I haven’t figured out yet how to make it work properly because the dryer just seems to shut off on its own when clothes are still damp. I do have a cloth line outside that I might have to start using to be eco friendly.  Oh, and British love to be Green!  It is a great thing, but as I can see—the whole recycling my food thing does make my life not as comfortable (yeah, yeah….I am whining).  I cannot wait till I look back at my first few days here and just laugh at myself.  I know that day will come-haha.

It’s almost time to pick up Katya and Alex from school.  I promise to write more later.  There is still a lot more I want to tell you about life here. 
Cheers!

Starting School—the British Way.

After almost three months of our crazy summer vacation, all of us were ready for kids to begin school.  We were not sure how it all was going to work out.  After searching for a house for two weeks and not prospects, I was very close to sending kids to the school on base, since we were living at the hotel still.  Finally, after we found the house and knew which school kids would be going to, I was hoping they would start right away. Unfortunately, each class is allowed to have only 30 children (for one teacher, but usually there is an assistant who comes in).  Alex’s class-which is Year 3—had only 27 people, so Alex could begin school on the first day of school—September 5th.

This is Alex on his first day of school.

I liked how one of my friends recorded also the stats for each kid on the first day of school.  I will try to do the same.  Alex is 53 inches tall, 74 lbs, loves building cities and reading geography books.  His teacher’s name is Mrs. Summerell .

The name of the school that kids are going to is Bury Primary School.  As you can see, it’s a Church of England school, so kids school structure is a bit different than it was in American school.  Kids ages 4 through 11 go to this school.  Katya and Alex were 205th and 206th students, the only Americans.  Each day kids kids have three breaks, from what I understand, one hour for lunch and recess, and an assembly for all students where they pray, sing and do announcements for about 10 minutes.  Lunches cost $3 and kids are allowed to get seconds of everything except dessert.  They have vegetarian or regular options always and their desserts are fabulous but small portioned.  Parents are not allowed to send in any sweets (candy) to school for lunch because of school’s concern about teeth-that’s what their website says.

Mark was second to start school.  He is going to Bury Playgroup, which is a preschool from 9:05 till 12:05 each morning.  As of right now Mark goes four times a week (I chose to do that) and he will go to five days a week after Christmas.  He has to get used to going to school every day since British children start school when they are four—so Mark will go to Bury Primary School next year!!  It’s also amazing that this Bury Playgroup, as most other preschools in the country, offers up to 15 hours free per week.  Therefore, most moms do send their children to preschool when they turn three.

Here is Mark on his first day of school:

Mark is 40 lbs (hovering over that weight for a while now) and he is about 40 inches tall.  He loves riding his bike and wishes we didn’t have a gravel driveway.  He has four teachers and 18-22 kids in his school.

Mark was excited the whole morning, but when the time came to be left at school, he was not happy.

In fact, for the first four times Mark cried as I was leaving.  He is the only one, actually, out of all our kids that ever cried when he started preschool.  I think the whole transition this year and lack of preschool experience in Japan were the real reason.  Now, a week later, he is loving preschool and does not cry.  Seeing how happy he is when I come back to pick him up makes my day!  He is so talkative after school and tells me all the details of his morning.

Last but not least, Katya started school the day after we signed the lease (since Cambridgeshire council needed the proof of our residency).  Katya was 31st child in her class—the only reason she was accepted is because we live right in the village.  The school is considered a very good school and that makes it difficult to get a spot in it, unless you live right in Bury.

Here is our happy Katya in her cute royal blue uniform. 

Katya is 54 inches tall and weighs about 65 lbs.  She still loves Harry Potter and Percy Jackson books.  Katya hopes to get her piano lessons started soon.  Her teacher’s name is Mrs. Wilkinson.  Katya found friends very quickly and she is already mastering her British accent.

So far, all kids are enjoying school very much.  It’s a bit adjustment to have school from 9 am till 3:20 pm.  Seems like the whole day is school.  I have to walk (or drive) the kids every day—we miss the kids’ ability to walk to school like they did in Misawa…Basically I drop off big kids at the school at 8:55 and then we walk to the other side of the school yard where Mark’s school is and drop him off.  I go pick up Mark around noon. And then again go back to pick up Katya and Alex at 3:20.  School is only 5-7 minute walk from us, so that is fantastic.  It hasn’t rained yet when I had to pick them up though, so we’ll see how that works.

Speaking of picking up, I have fifteen minutes before kids are get out of school, so I must go now.

Cheers.

Three Weeks in England

Thanks, Robert, for setting me up….I really did not have a different version of what was happening for the first fortnight of our life in England. It is sort of a blur now.

We were lucky enough to get into a very nice TLF (temporary lodging) house.

 

It is a three bedroom house, so we never felt too squished.

The weather has been really great half of the time and really strange the other half. It gets to around 45 F sometimes at night, but then it warms up to 70s during the day. It is sometimes rainy for half a day, or sprinkles randomly during the afternoon. It is just strange, very unpredictable—apparently the weather guys here think the same so they can never predict the weather correctly more then two days in advance.

Kids have been doing crazy things inside the house.

 

Running around, making forts out of a dozen of hotel pillows and blankets, watching A LOT of TV and playing their only toys available—wooden blocks and cars.

After we THOUGHT we found a house, we drove to Kettering, a town about 30 minutes from the base to Wiksteed Park. The park has a free play area, so since we weren’t feeling too adventurous to spend money on rides, we just let the kids play on the playground (after paying $9 for parking!). That’s when we got the call about our house not being for rent any more….sad, sad day. It was Friday morning of Labor Day weekend. 

On Saturday, we still weren’t feeling like having fun since we did not have a house. We decided to go to Lakenheath—another military base 1 hour away—to find a car. We were tired of driving around in our super old rental car. Unfortunately, we did not find anything at the lemon lot there. We got to go to the “big” BX store where I will have to be buying my Clinique stuff from now on since our BX store at Alconbury doesn’t have a make up counter. I also ran into our friends, the Adamsons, who were with us in Misawa. It was so great to see a familiar face!

And we got to eat some Taco Bell-haha. I guess we were craving something different besides fish and chips, sausages, and pizza.

That’s one thing I was wrong about. I thought that I will be able to eat all the European food I want here—I really missed that food in Japan. Well, unless we are willing to drive to bigger towns about half and hour away, it is not so easy to find anything besides pubs with fish and chips or Indian curry. Possibly, we haven’t explored enough, but that’s what it seems for now.

Another thing I was wrong about is thinking that British people might not be very nice. Well, so far we have been very lucky and most everyone has been very welcoming and polite. People at the stores are nice, teachers at school are very pleasant, although no one tries to serve you as much as the Japanese did. That’s all right.

On Labor Day, we got to do only British things since most every American was somewhere travelling in Europe. We had to go school shopping since Alex was starting school in two days.  The great thing is that all school supplies are provided—we had to buy nothing but uniforms. We went to ASDA (owned by Walmart) in Peterborough, a big city of about 200,000 people. Peterborough is about 30 minutes away from our future house since we have to take mostly rural roads to get there. It’s about 20 minutes from Alconbury base.  ASDA was soooo crowded with people, mostly immigrants from Eastern Europe and Middle East, that we couldn’t wait to get out! After buying white polo shirts, dress pants, gray skirts, black shoes, tights and royal blue cardigans, we were done, spent about $120 on both kids with buying enough clothes to last probably three-four days without doing laundry.

On the way home, we stopped by at Nene Park—a beautiful park in Peterborough. Alex was already making conversation in his fake British accent, talking about Harry Potter.

The weather was gorgeous! We still hope everyone has been lying about the weather after all…(I know..wishful thinking).

I think that England has more rabbits than people. We have seen sooo many of them!

This is our new snack staple, apparently. Well, at least until life gets a bit more normal. We are still in survival mode at the moment.

Okay, so that was my update.

Tomorrow, we are hopefully signing the lease. Our household goods will be delivered on Wednesday (they have been here for three weeks now!) and we’ll be busy unpacking for the next two weeks. Katya starts school on Tuesday, as soon as I email the copy of our lease to the Cambridgeshire School Council. 

In the meantime, still thinking about starting a new blog for our British years. So changes will be coming soon.

Lyana