Stress

Moving to a foreign country isn't good on the stress level.  Lately, I feel like I am going to have a nervous breakdown at least once per day.  The two main stresses I have had are the move out of our Denver house and the apartment search in London.  I will write a little about each here (this may be a boring read for most of you, but it feels good to vent).

Move out of Denver

After one stressful week of trying to keep our house clean with a toddler running around making a mess at all times, we sold our house in Denver in early June.  Even though we didn't come out of the sale in the positive financially, I feel very fortunate that our house sold so fast and that we didn't have to bring any money to the table as so many do.  Unfortunately, that seemed to be the last of the good luck streak on the move out of Denver.  The movers Deloitte hired couldn't come until two weeks after we left.  We had to organize our entire house into three areas 1) move to London, 2) move to Green Bay, and 3) stay with the house.  We put painter's tape up all over the house marking various items and (being the organized person I am) had an item by item inventory of where everything should end up.  With that, we headed off to London hoping for the best.

Our move date was last Thursday and Friday.  We had it all coordinated that our realtor would let the movers in to our house.  Of course, the movers showed up and called me in London saying no one was home.  I had to direct them to call the realtor and gave them her number for about the fifth time.  When I was on the subway, I got another call saying we exceeded our 1,000 pound weight limit of the stuff we could move to London.  When I had cell phone reception again, I had to try to remember what was packed for London and direct the movers to pull certain things out.  It was a disaster, and I know I made some really bad decisions.  The rest of our stuff was getting shipped to Green Bay.  We had a weight limit of 7,000 pounds on those items.  We greatly exceeded this limit but since we were in London, we had no way to pull things out to bring them to Goodwill or sell them.  So, we just had to send them off to Green Bay.  I am scared to see what our bill is going to be for the excess on top of the amount we already know we have to pay.

Our Green Bay shipment should be arriving this week.  My parents will let the movers into our stoarge garage there.  We haven't heard anything about the London shipment.  I am scared to see what will arrive.  From talking to the movers, I am highly doubting they were reviewing my inventory as they packed.  Oh well, I guess it is an excuse to do some shopping.

London Apartment Search

Another stressful situation is our apartment search here in London.  We have paid corporate housing for two weeks which is up this Thursday so are in a time crunch for finding a more permanent place to live. The market for apartments is completely different here than the U.S.  Most apartments are owned by individuals, and they contract with a letting agency to try to rent out their apartment.  The letting agents work on a contingency basis so the market is not friendly at all for those looking to lease.  You have to schedule appointments with each of these letting agencies individually.  To see a number of places, this would involve setting up many, many appointments.  However, we found a company that specializes in relocations of Americans to London and sets up all these appointments for you.  You then go out with your search agent and see 20-25 apartments in one day.  We hired a nanny for Colin and off we went last Wednesday (on a side note - I need to become a nanny here - her fee was $250 for one day of babysitting).  The search was rather disappointing.  The majority of places we saw had four or five floors and the same number of bedrooms.  Not the lay-out you want when you have one kid who loves to play on stairs.  Other places were extremely small and/or required climbing multiple flights of stairs just to enter your apartment.  I came home that night extremely frustrated.

The next day, I did a search on my own and found a place that I thought would be a good fit and emailed it to our search agent who set up an appointment.  We saw it later that afternoon, and we are in the process of negotiating a lease on it.  It doesn't exactly make me happy that we are paying this relocation company a crazy fee for a place I found on my own, but at least we found a place (hopefully) and could use their assistance for negotiating lease terms. 

The apartment is relatively small (about 1,000 square feet) but nice.  It has a ground floor entry which is key with a toddler.  We toured so many places with numerous flights of stairs before you even got into your apartment which doesn't work with a stroller (I can't use the English term "pushchair" - it just sounds too weird).  The ground floor has a garage (unusual in London - we don't have a car but will use it for our stroller fleet and luggage), guest bedroom/office, and guest bathroom.  The first floor (what we would term second floor is first floor here) has the kitchen, dining room, and living room.  The second floor has a master bedroom with attached bathroom and third bedroom and bathroom.  Colin will have the second upstairs bedroom, and we will have a whole floor including bedroom and bathroom for guests.  So please come visit us!!

I am praying we actually end up with this place was we are having problems getting the funds transferred that are required to sign the lease.  We need to pay our first month's rent, one month's rent to the relocation agent, and a six week's rent security deposit in one lump sum before moving in.  This equates to a insane sum of money which is almost more than we spent on an entire year of our mortgage in the U.S.  It is amazing how people can survive living here year after year.  I am glad we have this adventure but am pretty sure we will be broke by the time we go home.  Most of our money is located in our U.S. account through Wells Fargo.  However, after spending pretty much my entire day on the phone with various people in the banking industry, we determined we won't be able to pay the amount we have due since we aren't in the U.S. to transfer the funds (makes no sense as why would we need these funds in London if we were in the U.S.).  We are having family do the international transfer now but are not sure if it will go fast enough to get the money to our landlord by Wednesday as was stated in the original lease.  We also don't know if we will be able to stay in our current corporate housing any longer than Thursday.  We could be out on the streets (well, probably in a hotel) for a few nights.

We close on our house back in Denver on Thursday so I am hoping that goes smoothly as well.  Let's hope that in a week, I feel much better about the move and in a few months all this stress is a distant memory.  For now, I am trying to take it one day at a time.

Hello London!

After a few fun days in Wisconsin spending time with my family, we were on our way to London.  The flight did not start out looking too promising.  Our flight from Green Bay was delayed over an hour so by the time we got on the (tiny) plane from Green Bay to Chicago, Colin was already a mess.  After nearly knocking out half of our fellow passengers trying to get to our seats in the last row with our three carry-on bags and car seat, we wrestled to get the car seat buckled in and settled in for 30 minutes of Colin crying en-route to Chicago.  We landed in Chicago right as our flight to London was supposed to be departing.  We sprinted to our gate and by some miracle made our flight.  It was delayed for a number of passengers coming it late due to earlier thunderstorms. 

After a repeat occurrence of struggling to get to our seats and get the car seat secure (and some yelling by the flight attendant who was not aware of the rules regarding backward facing seats on airplanes), we had to wait another hour before the flight was even able to depart.  Colin was going downhill fast.  Fortunately, once we were up in the air, we launched some Sesame Street episodes on the iPad and all was well in his world again.  He watched his shows and then drifted off to sleep until the plane landed in London.  We couldn't have asked for a better flight with the little guy!

We landed and immediately proceeded to the baby changing room.  A must after no diaper changes during any of the flights (yes, we are bad parents but had to rush to catch our plane in Chicago and weren't about to wake him up mid-flight on the way to London).  Upon leaving the baby changing room, we exited that part of the terminal through one way automatic doors.  As the doors shut, I turned around and looked at David.  He was not carrying our diaper bag which included our passports.  PANIC!  There was no way to get back through the doors.  We thought we were the last ones off our flight but by another miracle someone came through pushing a wheelchair, and we were able to dash back through and grab the diaper bag.  At this point, we figured our luck must be turning around but at custom's my fingerprints were not registering as a match with my visa.  We were then detained for awhile.  I am not sure what happened in the background, but we were eventually allowed to go through customs.  I think they felt sorry for us!  Hopefully, this isn't a problem every time I take a flight from the U.S.

Things started going much better after that.  All of our luggage was in a nice pile for us when we came out of customs (all other passengers from our flight were long gone at this point), and our driver was waiting for us even though we were over two hours late.  We checked in to our home for the next two weeks - a two bedroom corporate housing apartment located in Islington.

Over the weekend, we took the tube all over West and South London looking at various areas that have been recommended to us including Notting Hill, Holland Park, Maida Vale, Chiswick, Fulham, Clapham, and Richmond.  Every area seems to have pros and cons so I am not sure where we will end up, but it was at least good to get a sense of the neighborhoods before our massive apartment search with our relocation agent on Wednesday.

Today is David's first day at work and my first day as a stay at home mom.  David has a two day orientation and then will be off on Wednesday for our apartment search.  Colin and I will stay close to home this week as I am not brave enough yet to deal with the tube alone.  Most stops are not handicap accessible so require carrying a toddler and stroller up numerous flights of stairs.  I need to work up to that.  For now, we are going to the parks in our temporary neighborhood and doing a lot of shopping.  Grocery shopping will be a daily task until I figure out how to order things online.  Juggling a stroller and grocery basket means I can only buy a few things each trip.

We haven't done any traditional tourist activities yet, but here are a few pictures of Colin enjoying the parks this weekend.

London has great playgrounds

Colin is fascinated by all of the pigeons here

Of course, Colin has already introduced golf to our corporate housing

Goodbye Denver!

We said goodbye to Denver on Monday, July 2nd and started off on the first leg of our journey to London.  It was sad saying goodbye to our first house and the city where we started married life and had Colin.  I managed to keep my tears to a minimum.  Unfortunately, we had to leave behind all of our belongings as we STILL don't have movers scheduled.  Of course, this makes me extremely nervous.  I feel like we are constantly 10 steps behind on all the things we should have accomplished at this point of our move.  David has the attitude that it isn't worth worrying about things that we can't control.  Meanwhile, I am in a constant state of worry and panic!  On a positive note, we did get our UK visas so were allowed to book plane tickets and have a place to stay for the first 14 nights we are in London.  We are enjoying some time with family in Wisconsin now and are off to London on Thursday, July 5th.

Here is a picture of David and Colin with all of our luggage.  We somehow managed to get four suitcases, three carry-on bags, a pack n play, car seat, stroller, and toddler from the rental car to the ticket counter.  A miracle!

More from London!