Gray Matter

**It was taking me too long to write and upload pictures so I figured I should post the first half of our trip. This is part 1. Tomorrow I'll do the rest.**

Here are the best ones:

An American in Paris
Uma Reunião de Gray e Pires -or- 8 Years Too Long
I See London, I See France...
Lost in Translation
Parlez Vous, Disney?
How to Learn Portuguese in 3 Days
Could We BE Anymore International?
A Little Slice of Heaven
What Language Barrier? -or- I Don't Have to Speak Your Language to Know What You're Saying
I Louvre You
We'll Always Have Paris
Introducing J. Reubes

Over the Easter weekend we went to Paris! One of Brent's favorite mission companions and his wife live there now so we went to see them and happened to fit a little bit of Paris sightseeing in there, too. Brent and Fernando haven't seen each other since Brent's last zone conference on his mission, eight years ago. We have kept in touch with he and his wife, Cris, via email and phone calls every few months but it was about time we all met each other in person.

We've all been very excited about this reunion for a few months now but I started to get a little nervous because I don't speak Portuguese and Cris only speaks Portuguese and French. I have Brent to translate for me and Fernando speaks English as his 3rd language so we could communicate most of the time. I was still nervous, though.

We took the Eurostar train through the Chunnel on Thursday night and met the Pires' at the Gare du Nord station in Paris. They live outside of the city so by the time we got home and got dinner ready, it was midnight. Oh well! We still ended up staying up talking until 2am.

Brent exchanged our travel money for Euros before we left the UK. It's so funny looking! We think GBP looks like play money but it's nothing compared to Euros. And they are really small. Or maybe it's US money that's the funny stuff...

On Friday, Fernando had to work so Cris, Brent and I did some sightseeing on our own. Poor Brent was stuck all day with 2 very chatty women, who happen to not speak the same language, so he was just a walking mouthpiece all day. It was pretty funny, especially at lunch. He sat in between us and just translated the whole time. Sometimes, we'd all get so into it, he would be talking to Cris and then say something to me completely forgetting he was still speaking Portuguese and stare at me waiting for a response.

We took the train into the city and saw the bibliothèque du Centre Pompidou. It is a very large "library" dedicated to George Pompidou, a past president of France. It was a huge building with a museum, restaurant and cinema inside. There were metal detectors at the entrance. The area around the outside was full of people just sitting around eating and talking watching the various street performers. I guess that is French Culture.

We also saw the Hotel deVille. Not sure of the history of it, but it was big and old and pretty and there were lots of demonstrators, for one cause or another.

We walked a lot, and saw a lot of typical French/European scenes. The river was beautiful with all kind of pretty bridges and walkways.

One stop along our way was the Notre Dame Cathedral. It's massive! Because of the holiday, the line for tours wrapped all the way around to the back so we decided to skip it this time (which became our theme for the weekend). We decided rather, to walk around and take some pictures of the outside. At University (there's some more British speak for you), my very favorite class was Art History, and my favorite section of the class was Cathedrals. It was simply amazing to actually see the building in person. I took a couple hundred pictures so narrowing it down to these was really hard. Beautiful. You could see some places where restoration had taken place but there are several places, and gargoyles that are hundreds of years old, which is why some of the scary guys look more like ferrets than monsters.

Of course we had to stop at the Eiffel Tower! Again, really long lines and it was starting to rain so we skipped the chance to go up, we'll do that next time. Brent and Cris were both really surprised at how big it is! They thought it would be smaller. Another thing we found funny/interesting were all the illegal street vendors. There were tons of them! And a few of the brave ones stood literally right outside of the gift shop trying to sell to the people coming out. Really!? They are like pigeons, if one is selling, they all flock over and try to sell more to the person who already bought something. And they scatter like birds as soon as a cop shows up. It was funny.

We met up with Fernando at Bastille, a neighborhood known for the big war memorial in the center. There are lots of shopping and food places here, and one of the Paris Opera houses.

We ate at a french restaurant called Paradis du Fruit. It was an organic, mostly vegetarian place. It was pretty good. We had to ask for a special English menu because Fernando was having a hard time translating all the food names for us.

**See you tomorrow for the rest!**

**We won't have the internet until Thursday, so I wrote and scheduled this post on Friday, the 3rd.**

We've moved! Again! And as always, it was quite the process. I'll attempt to keep it as short as I can. Funny, huh? Just scroll down till you see pictures if you don't want the whole scoop.

Before we left Los Angeles:
-Brent was assigned a relocation specialist from the Zurich office of Zurich, Beat Kopp (pronounced Bay-ot, not beet, much to my dismay).
-Beat hires, Claire, from Team Relocations to take over.
-Claire has us fill out a survey of what we want in an apartment, how much we want to pay and what areas we would like to live in. What?! How the heck are we supposed to know?
-We fill out the survey to the best of our ability and with our best guess on money figures making sure not to stray more than a few hundred pounds above what Zurich is providing for housing allowance. Where to live, was a different matter seeing as how we've never set foot in the country. We asked for some suggestions and guessed, again.
-Rick, from Dynamic Property Search (hired by Claire), emails Brent to schedule when we'd like to go looking. Beat is paying Claire to pay Rick for 2 days of property search during which he'll show us 10+ properties each time and then aid in getting us settled.

14 March, Day 1 of property search:
-We meet Rick at the tube station in Richmond for our search in Richmond and Kew Gardens.
-He drives us to the first appointment and spends a few minutes explaining the process to us. It goes something like this, landlords and/or owners hire a letting agent (basically a real estate agent) to find a renter for them. Renters (or in our case, Rick) find property listings on the internet and schedule viewings with the agent (in our case, 2-4 agents per day each showing us 2-5 properties each). Renters then decide what they want and tell the agent. Easy enough, right? Wrong! From this point on it becomes much like buying a house. The renters then put in an offer. The listing prices are basic guidelines and NO ONE offers asking price unless they are desperate for the place. The letting agents then puts it to the owner/landlord who then either accepts or counters. So you go back and forth with the agent until you all agree on something. I'm really glad we had Rick because being new to the process and being Americans we probably would have gotten duped BIG TIME if we did this all on our own. Letting agents, and then in turn landlords, are much more willing to bend for relocation agents because they know what they are doing.
-We meet with the agents and see the 13 properties he had scheduled. Some houses, some flats in large converted Victorian mansions and some flats in big fancy developments. We decided we like the quaint houses and conversion flats. We aren't big, fancy development type people. Plus if we're going to be in England, do it right, you know?
-He drops us at the tube stop and we go home and think about what we liked and didn't like and pick our top 3 favorites.

A few pictures of some of the places we saw. Good and bad, I'll let you decide for yourselves...

That week:
-We settle on what we actually want as far as look/feel/price of property
-Email back and forth with Rick about next weekend's search.
-Pick a different area to look in

21 March, Day 2 of property search:
-Rick picks us up at the Chiswick Park tube stop for our property search in Chiswick and Fulham.
-We have a much harder time seeing places due to the traffic (Chiswick & Fulham are closer to the City therefore, there is more going on) and a few agents being late and a few places we were going to pick up the keys for couldn't find the keys.
-We decide Fulham is not really for us and skip 1 or 2 of the places we had on the list.
-Lots of frustration and traffic
-All of the properties Rick shows us are higher than the top end of our budget because he claims he can negotiate lower.
-The one place that was well under our budget was so far away from anything that we would have needed a car.
-We go home and are not in a good mood.
-Brent makes a really comprehensive chart detailing our 3 top properties from each week to compare all the specs of each, including travel times to work and church and pro's and con's of each.
-We decide on 2 properties from week one and email Rick.

More pictures...

23 March, the universe hates us:
-Rick emails and calls to say that our top pick is already under offer and we decide we can't offer any higher but that the second choice will accept our offer.
-Not being able to have our first choice makes us realize we don't want the second choice pick anymore.
-Rick emails to tell us the owner for choice 2 is willing to go £35/month lower because he wants us (we were told we are good applicants because we are young and have a good solid job and were landlords ourselves and plan to stay for 2 years)
-We decide we just don't want choice 2 or anything else lower on the list because everything else doesn't feel right or is too expensive.
-We panic. A lot.
-We ask Claire if we can have one more day of search with Rick because the 2nd day was such a bust and we want to look in Richmond again since we know what we want this time.
-She has to wait for confirmation from Beat that Zurich will pay the £750.

The next few days:
-Still panicking but decide to look online for ourselves.
-We find a few places we like (as much as you can decide from seeing a few pics on the internet).
-We call the letting agent and find it's already under offer but he would be willing to hear other offers because there is an issue with furnished/unfurnished.
-We get word we get another day with Rick. Phew!
-We decide to take a quick trip on our own to Wimbledon to see if we like the area and can find anything that matches what we want. One of Brent's coworkers and his wife live there. They seem like really great people and could totally be friends so we wanted to see where they live.
-The area was nice but the agent wasn't very helpful. Without Rick to liaise for us, the agent just didn't care. He showed us the 5 closest things to the office not even paying attention to what we like.
-Decide Wimbledon is nice but trying to find something we like would be hard.
-Search and find 4 properties we would like Rick to show us on Friday and inform him that we are lowering our budget because with the council tax, we will reach our original estimates of what we want to spend.

27 March, One last try:
-Meet Rick at Richmond station.
-See the 11 properties he found for us (including 3 of the ones we sent him).
-Decide that we could happily live in most of the places we saw.
-Go home very happy and make a chart of our 6 favorites of the day.
-Spend 7 hours making the chart and then subsequently trying to decide what we want.
-Go to bed with a choice in mind.

Even more pictures...

28 March, This is it!:
-Wake up feeling rested and better able to make a confident decision.
-Decide to go with our choice from the night before. It was the only house of the dozens we saw that I got really excited about while viewing. According to Brent, I mentioned that "I love it!" several times as we were walking through it.
-Email Rick and give him the go ahead to call the agent and work his negotiating magic.
-Get word back that we have been chosen and that the owner will take our offer of £100 lower than the asking price.

This week:
-After several emails back and forth with Rick, Claire and Andrew (the letting agent) get the lease and sign and fax it back and schedule the check-in for Saturday.
-Schedule our shipment from LA to be delivered on Saturday!

3 April, The big day: (I'm guessing here seeing as how this hasn't happened yet at the time I'm writing this).
-Rick comes to our Corp. Housing and loads his car up with our quickly expanding amount of belongings.
-We take anything else that wouldn't fit in Rick's car on the train and meet up at the new house.
-Check in, receive our shipment, start unpacking.
-Everything goes wonderfully well and comes off without a hitch. (We hope.)

Our new place:
276 St. Margarets Road
Twickenham, TW1 1PR
UK

We love it and feel very comfortable here. We are a little further away than we had originally planned to be but Brent is willing to sacrifice time to commute. With the negotiation Rick made, we are also spending less than we figured and we kind of feel like we are supposed to be in the ward as well, which always makes a decision feel better.

These are some of the pictures from the online listing. I'm glad they had so many because now I don't have to worry about taking pictures of it until we are done unpacking.

Front and entryway