The Easter weekend was a whirl of seeing family, sorting and packing.
My family visited bringing our lunch with them and David, with the help of my brother, Paul, took one of our last house plants to its new home. This was an enormous (8' tall), extremely prickly and very heavy - top heavy in fact - succulent that was moving across the road to one of our neighbours. The process looked like something out of a sitcom with the plant surrounded by a large box to prevent either David or Paul impaling themselves on it. Harder still was fitting it through the doors. I hope it doesn't grow too much whilst we're away.On Tuesday, our airfreight departed and the rest of our furniture etc went into storage. Help with children and cups of tea for the removal men was given by our very kind neighbours and by this stage we could fully appreciate just how much luggage we had to take with us - way over the allowance. Lots more unpacking and repacking and somehow, by squashing masses into the hand-luggage (totalling over 40kg), we got down to just about 8kg over and departed for a hotel by the airport. We'd picked a lovely small place, more like a B&B and incredibly friendly - if anyone needs a recommendation.......
We got our luggage on without additional charges and finally boarded the A380. It's enormous.
On the ground, the wings are so long they have an obvious sag, whilst in the air they just seem to go on forever. We were downstairs and as that deck is across the middle of the plane, the extra width makes it feel very spacious, plus the seats are slightly wider and TV screens bigger and even the area at the back by the galley and loos is larger too. We took a little trip upstairs and the cabin crew gave the kids extra snacks. All in all, an excellent flight - any complaints? Well, some of the air was a bit bumpy in places.We took a taxi to our temporary apartment. I say a taxi, because we thought we'd need at least two for all the luggage, but the driver thought otherwise. We drove here with the boot half open and the kids and I sharing the back seat with several cases stacked up to the roof and about 3 of the smaller bags on our laps. Healtth and safety? Let's not go there. At least with the boot half open he had to drive slowly!
Couldn't resist a quick picture of us on arrival with our 11 bags. Now, we're shattered. It's hot here - no surprises there then and the afternoons have been thundery but fortunately, no real rain - yet. I'll post another entry very soon about the apartment, school visit today etc but it's getting late and we need to get out tomorrow by 11am (2am GMT) and as we're not over the jetlag yet, that feels quite challenging right now!Good night.
3 comments:
Yay! You're there! And on-line! Well done, you poor exhausted people! A & R look remarkably chipper - did Adam enjoy the plane?
And what is the local driving like? (I still wake up in a MUCK SWEAT, attacked by memories of our Istanbouli taxi driver. Gah.) Are you going to get a car?
And what's the time difference? Can we get a Webcam conversation together, so we can see your new home?
And lots of pictures please! WE MISS YOU!
Yep, here and exhausted but getting stuff done.
Will get a webcam, but other stuff to do first and time difference is 7 hours ahead at present (it's now BST, I think).
I will get a photo site going soon too with lots of pics. We're on line, but not fully functioning, as the new laptop doesn't have my outlook address book anywhere useful yet. When it does, I'll send emails too!
Oh forgot - no plans for a car, too expensive here and would need to do a theory driving test too, so using taxis. Driving doesn't seem too bad when in a taxi, but everyone who drives here will tell you it's terrible. At some stage, I'll blog about it including some good quotes from the expat forum.
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