Top of a Flower Shop

After almost three weeks of searching, we found our place!  It's in St. Ives, a town located about 15 minutes north of Cambridge.  We had hoped to find a place right in Cambridge, but everything was tiny for what we could afford.  But St. Ives is a really cute town and the location we're in is phenomenal.  It's a large apartment right in the town center above a flower shop.  The front of it overlooks the street and it backs up to a river, we actually have a mooring if we wanted to get a boat (I can't see us actually getting a boat, but we can go fishing!).  Here is a picture of the river.  Our place is about 100 feet upstream, located here.
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The apartment itself has a lot of character, the leasing agent said the building could be anywhere from 100 to 200 years old, that's a pretty wide range, but nevertheless, it's old!  We need to do some work to it--painting, cleaning, etc., but we really like it overall, and it's big enough to fit all of our junk, err.... belongings. :)  It's three bedrooms (yes, we will have a guest room!), and two and a half baths.  When you walk in from the front door there's a big curvy staircase that goes up to all the rooms.

And here is the view from our deck-- yes, those are sheep!!

So we're moving in next Friday.  We're excited to get out of the hotel and in a permanent place!

Some Cambridge Fun

After a week of looking at houses and apartments (or flats as they call them), trying to set up a bank account, and get cell phones, we finally had a day to relax last Sunday.  It helped that most things here are closed on Sundays so we had no option but to have a day of enjoyment.  The University of Cambridge includes 31 separate colleges throughout the city.  They are all very beautiful, the olderst was founded in 1284!  You can imagine all of the 18-22 year olds running around because of this....  Here are two pictures of King's College which is one of the most stunning.  After a long walk around the city we needed a break, so we went to have tea of course, at a sidewalk cafe.  A classic afternoon tea includes small sandwiches, scones with butter and jam, and a pot of tea with milk.  Side note:  Coffee and tea is served with milk, we ask for cream though which everyone thinks is odd, their cream is real cream so its extremely thick, similar to melted ice cream, if its mixed with milk it makes half and half though. 

On the housing front, we've looked at around a dozen places, some have been very nice and others not so nice!  The houses tend to be a lot smaller than in the US, so we're worried about fitting all of our furniture, even though we got rid of a lot of things before we moved.  All of our belongings and car are being shipped here on a steamship and are scheduled to arrive in early November so we need to settle on a place in the new few weeks.  We have a couple more places to look at this weekend and then hopefully we can make a decision. 

Getting the Feel For It

Well we have been in Cambridge for about three days now, and have accomplished very little in getting our new lives set up here.  In order to rent a place, we need a UK bank account, and in order to get a UK bank account, we need a permanent address.  In order to get cell phones here, we need both!  So we've been banging our heads against the wall trying to figure it all out.  Tomorrow we're heading to the base where Craig will be working and hope to get some help from some other Americans who have been through this before.  So far everyone has been very nice to us here and we've had fabulous food (don't believe what you hear about it!).  The oddest things we've tried are squirrel (it was good!), and black pudding which is a typical breakfast dish made with pig's blood.  I will be dedicating a future post just to pudding, as people are obsessed with it here.  Here are a few pictures we've taken around Cambridge, they really don't do it justice though.  It's very beautiful, a mix of old and new architecture, mostly old though, the newer buildings look a little out of place.