Without Adult Supervision

So here we are in London, all grown up and living on our own, having to look after ourselves, cooking, cleaning and adjusting to life in a new city.

Our first few weeks mainly involved trying to get used to the sudden increase in domesticity in our lives, getting used to being married (and for me, fighting the urge to look around in search of Chris's mum when I heard the words "Mrs Hing"), hunting for a place to live and exploring London and for Chris, also getting settled in to work. Needless to say, the first few weeks went by in a bit of a blur, but here's a glimpse of what we got up to:

Our first visit to the British Museum. Amount of time spent in the museum before Chris's eyes glazed over and we had to make a quick exit: approx 30 mins, which gave us just enough time to see one section of the Egypt display and check out the Rosetta Stone.

At our temporary apartment, we had a skylight with blinds that could only be open/closed by using a large pole - as demonstrated by Chris below:

...and here is Chris in ninja mode, using the pole as some kind of fighting device (as you do...):

Our temporary apartment was really conveniently located only 10 mins' walk from Chris's work, so a couple of days before Easter, when I returned to the apartment after a day out exploring the city, I was surprised with post-it note instructions for an Easter egg hunt....turns out Chris had snuck back to the apartment during his lunch break and set it up for me!

Here's one of the Easter eggs that was camouflaged in our fruit bowl:

Here's my stash of eggs by the end of the hunt - Chris did good:


At times, it's been difficult having to live with just the bare minimum of possessions and every now and then, we'd really wish that we'd shipped over some of the things that we have sitting at home that we didn't think we need.

For example, we know that we have a brand new salad spinner waiting for us at home and it would've really come in handy over here. Chris managed to find a temporary solution by becoming a salad spinner - he even seems to be having fun:


Our salad ended up being nice and dry, but the problem was that Chris ended up making himself feel rather sick after all that spinning, not to mention that the apartment enjoyed a light shower, which may be fine when we had floor heating and floor boards at the temporary apartment, but probably would not be as great in our current carpeted apartment...

Grocery shopping in London has also been quite an experience, and seeing that we don't have a car, it's an experience that I usually go through every day as I can only carry so much home with me every time.

One of the positives about grocery shopping here is that there are loads of decent pre-prepared food in the supermarkets and a lot of the vegies come pre-washed, pre-cut/trimmed and packaged in handy little serving-sized packs.

The downside to it all is that you definitely pay for the privilege of being able to cook without actually having to cook much, and the fresh produce here just doesn't quite taste as good or as fresh as at home.

It might have something to do with the fact that walking down the vegie aisle of the supermarket is a lot like walking in on the vegetable version of a UN meeting - the vegies seem to have flown in from all over the world.

This is an example of one of my typical vegie purchases:

You probably can't read the label, but it tells me that out of my vegie trio, only the carrots are from the UK, whilst Mr Cauliflower is from France, and Mr Brocolli is a representative of Spain.

As for the mixed peppers (as an aside, over here, they're not capsicums but peppers - this I find a lot easier to get my head around than the fact that snowpeas here aren't called snowpeas, but are "mangetouts", which from what I can vaguely remember from high school French, would be translated to "eat all" and that just makes no sense to me), the label helpfully informs me that the yellow and green peppers came from Holland, but the red pepper came from Israel. This makes me wonder what happened to the Dutch red pepper - was it kidnapped en route to the supermarket or are the Dutch hoarding all of the red peppers for themselves?

We also did a lot of the typical touristy things during our first few weeks in London, but I imagine that our photos probably look the same as any other tourist's photos of London, so here are just 2 of our personal favourites:

* Our visit to Greenwich and the obligatory photo of me standing next to the Greenwich Meridian:

* I'd promised Chris that I would include a shot of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square - for some reason, Chris is fascinated with Admiral Nelson. He hasn't quite explained to me why he is so fascinated, but maybe he can cast some light on this in a later post: