london: week one

The first week of our London experiment flew by. Despite the fact that my husband lost his wallet the day before we left, we had no delays getting here and seamlessly settled into our apartment. We are loving our accommodations which, unlike the last two short term, furnished apartments we rented in New York, are nicely furnished, well stocked and the management is incredibly attentive. There were no issues figuring out storage for clothes, luggage and golf clubs and we were provided plenty of hangars, lovely linens, a stocked fridge and a good night’s sleep.

We have been getting our bearings and navigating the neighborhood around where we are staying – which is the equivalent of Times Square in New York. We are situated in between the theater district, Chinatown, SoHo and a solid amount of adult stores. There are three pubs less than a minute from our building that are overflowing with people everyday from about 3 pm on. We were on a pub-a-day pace for the first five days and I believe that we will end up seeing about 30 to 40 pubs during our seven-week stay.

The weather was ridiculously good our first week – all of the temperatures were in the 70’s and there was no rain. We ventured out in short sleeves, with no rain jackets or sweatshirts, even at night. Our first week included:

* Week one of our 6-week padel clinic (which we almost slept through). Padel (pronounced “paddle”) is described here. Not widely available in the states, it is a racquet sport that is a hybrid of tennis and racquetball played on astroturf that requires a step up in effort and athleticism from pickle ball.

* A tour of Buckingham Palace’s State Rooms, the Royal Mews and The King’s Gallery, which includes 100 years of royal portraits and exceeded our expectations. The palace is, in fact, palatial.

* Dinners with friends from California on our first two nights here.

* Evensong at Westminster Abbey.

* Struggles with jet lag and getting on the correct time zone. We were shocked and disappointed to find out that sleep remedies – including pot gummies, Tylenol or Advil PM and even Melatonin are not available at all or only with a prescription. This likely explains why London does not have a pervasive smell of weed like New York does.

* A long walk from Notting Hill through Kensington to Chelsea where my first purchase of the trip was made on King’s Road.  While we finished the day with drinks at The Botanist, we met a couple who is visiting London for a month from Oakland, CA – basically an older version of ourselves who were also experimenting with living abroad. 

* A class at Barry’s Bootcamp SoHo where they stand on the right of the bench instead of the left, the Red Room is darker, the weights are in kilograms and, lucky for us, all of the treadmills are in miles and not kilometers.

* A day in Richmond, outside of London along the Thames, where we had a gorgeous lunch at Petersham Nurseries and a drink of the now famous Ted Lasso pub, The Prince’s Head.

* Light shopping along Carnaby Street in SoHo and around Covent Garden. Serious shopping is expected to commence once friends arrive to accompany me.

* A visit to the British Museum where we followed the audio guide to the ten most highlighted exhibits. This museum will require a return trip but having seen this episode of John Oliver, we are a bit conflicted.

* Dinner at Novikov, a very swanky Mayfair restaurant that has three venues at one location: an Asian fusion restaurant that is dark and loud, an Italian restaurant which is lively and well lit, and a lounge that I did not get to see but suspect is very vibey.

At the end of the first week, we had a dumpster fire of a day. We started the day with a lovely breakfast in our hotel and then ventured out to the West Ham United vs Chelsea football match at London Stadium. In my husband’s ranking of the best things in the world, there is golf, Premier League soccer and then everything else. This should have been a banner day for him. However, I was not feeling well and ended up getting violently ill at the stadium. With continuing abdominal pain, we decided to depart at half time and I felt terrible making my husband leave in the middle of the match. Things got progressively worse and we ended up going to the emergency room. On our way to the hospital, I received a text from my step mom letting me know that my dad has passed. 

This is heavier material than I normally convey in the blog, but it would be tough to omit both of these events from this post.  For those who don’t know me personally, my dad’s passing was not unexpected as he has been suffering from dementia/Alzheimers for several years and rapidly declining in a memory care facility. Last week, he contracted Covid and was not strong enough to fight it off. As anyone who has lost a parent knows, even when expected, it is still a shock to the system. Experiencing that shock while also in an emergency room in a foreign country and contemplating having surgery was just entirely disorienting and too much to process. 

Thankfully, the NHS was a mostly pleasant experience and I was released after being evaluated, monitored and given pain medication. For those who are interested, I can provide more detail on my brush with socialized medicine – which was obviously not a part of our planned experiment here in London. I do feel qualified to comment that the cast of characters in the ER in London was very much the same as I might see in the Bay Area. My husband did an amazing job of communicating with family and friends about both unfortunate incidents via text and email. I was able to start processing the loss of my dad in the morning after sleeping off the hospital administered morphine and will obviously be working through this loss for a while. 

Meanwhile, my husband and I keep repeating the phrase that is constantly broadcast in the tube and that we like as the theme to our experience so far: “See it. Say it. Sorted.”