Getting Oriented in London

After a little less than a year of conversation, ideas, emailing, and one phone call, what was once just a possibility of coming to London to work with a church plant of Holy Trinity, Brompton, has become a reality.  We flew into London on July 4th (I guess that would be our 'Dependence Day') and have spent the last two days trying to familiarize ourselves with our surroundings.  It has been a whirlwind but we have loved our time so far.  In the past three days we have crossed a continent and an ocean, made our way through rush hour on the London Underground, gone grocery shopping (three times), seen ancient artifacts, gone clothes shopping, and walked the whole of Hyde Park.  And this is only the first portion of our nearly seven weeks here.

This was our plane from Los Angeles to London, a "quick flight of 9 hours and 34 minutes" according to the flight attendant.  It actually wasn't that bad.  They served us two meals, there were free movies on demand, and all of the flight attendants had great accents.  We were able to get some sleep on the flight, but still arrived a bit groggy.  We grabbed a latte in the airport before boarding the London Tube with all of our luggage.  What an experience. Luckily we started at the end of the line, so we were able to get a seat, but the closer into London we got, the more crowded the train car became.  It was quite a feat to get out of the car at the appropriate time, but we were helped by some friendly Brits.  We then walked just a few blocks from there to our new home in London.  We are staying with the vicar of St. George's Holborn and his family.  The house consists of John (the vicar), his wife Catherine, their two girls, and a member of the church who is in between flats at the moment named Zhen.  Zhen goes to the local university, and will be completing work experience in her field throughout the summer.  She is wonderful and friendly and we have enjoyed our conversations with her.

Our first evening we had dinner with Catherine and the girls and got to know one another.  The following morning we set about getting ourselves settled.  We went to the local grocery store (Tesco's Express) and got many of the essentials which we needed.  It was so much fun seeing all of the different brands of foods, and different names for things, like aubergines for eggplants and courgette for zucchini. Talk an=bout a tough time buying vegetables! We just avoided the unfamiliar, like good Americans.

Then we wandered over to the British Museum, which is a short walk from our flat.

It is an immense, impressive, and overwhelming experience.  There are many exhibits, and we only took time to look through three of them; the Assyrian, Egyptian, and a portion of the Greek sculptures.  After that, we were very tired and called an end to our museum-ing for the day.

Mandy with a statue of Pharaoh Amenope III (the name may be spelled differently and he may actually be the II).  He is one of the candidates for the pharaoh of the Exodus. Isn't he dreamy, dahling?

Brian with the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, who was an Assyrian king.  The second picture from the top of the obelisk shows King Jehu of Israel paying tribute to Shalmaneser around 841 BC.  It is the earliest surviving picture of an Israelite.

We also saw the Rosetta Stone.  Needless to say, Brian was really excited about all of this stuff...

After our museum visit we went to another grocery store, Sainsbury's, to pick up some things that we could not find at Tesco's.  We also stopped at a hardware store to get a converter for our plugs, as the British apparently do things in high voltage.  With that, we were pretty set for a while, set up to be very English, indeed.

Today we rode a bus down to the shops on Oxford Street to get Brian a raincoat (who needs one of those in London?!) and then wandered into Hyde Park, which is an enormous park on the west end of London.  

Hyde Park contains the Serpentine, a lake which is located in the middle of the park.  Also contained in the park are flowers, lots of trees, squirrels who are unabashedly friendly (seriously followed us around and came up into people's laps!), Peter Pan, and the world's best ice cream.  It may have been that we were hungry, but that ice cream was amazing, literally tasted like frozen whipped cream.  Really, it was very good. We recommend it to all.

There are also some monuments in Hyde Park.  To the right is the Albert Memorial.  We also saw Kensington Palace, a statue of Queen Victoria, and the Italian Fountains.  Each of them was very impressive.

The weather was fairly cooperative, except for a few minutes of rain.  We had a great time walking around, but it tired us out.

When we returned home, we finally met John, as he had been away since we arrived on Wednesday. It was a wonderful time to get to know one another over a cuppa tea. We laughed when everything he tried to tell us about the house Catherine had already gone over with us. We are really looking forward to working with him, the Valentine family, and all of the people at St. George's.

This weekend is full of our first taste of ministry here in the UK.  Please keep us in your prayers, and we'll update you all in a few days.