the corner office

Jam doughnuts are made with raspberry jam here, not apricot jam like in ZA. This is a change that'll take some getting used to. Waitrose make mean Chocolate Berliners though, a treat I'd never had before. Chocolate-filled doughnuts - whodathunkit? I'm hooked.

On the subject of jam, there's no superfine apricot jam either. In fact, it seems that jam here isn't jam unless it's chock-full of fruit. I can understand that many people would regard this is a good thing, but I'm a fussy eater and personally, I like my jams to bear as little resemblance to the original fruit as possible. I've discovered that 'conserves' are closest to the ZA concept of jam.

I soon learned that you can get chips with almost anything. Chinese food, Indian food, you name it. That's pretty cool in a decadent sort of way. Burger King isn't bad, is definitely better than Macdonalds (which is, as expected, reassuringly the same), but I will miss Steers. I see franchise opportunities. Ronwen and I have tried a good few restaurants, but I've enjoyed traditional English pub food the most, by far. And of course, English ale is a wonderful thing. It is only through the utmost exertion of self-discipline that I haven't drunk a whole lot more of the stuff.

Needless to say, I got over here and needed a laptop pronto, so after spending ages back in ZA researching Dells and Thinkpads, I needed an off-the-shelf and decided to hold off on investing in a dream machine just yet. Instead I got myself an Acer Aspire 5630, which looked like a solid buy, and is so far turning out to be quite a nice machine. The integrated graphics card isn't ideal, and WXGA feels a little claustrophic, but I can't complain.

This baby came with XP Media Centre, which I'm sticking with for now, and running Linux inside a VMWare partition. I brought all my hard drives over with me as carry on luggage, but I soon realised that my current VMs weren't going to do me much good, since they were all 64 bit, and I'm back to 32 bit now. So a new Ubuntu server it is.

As for XP Media Center, I was rather chuffed to discover that it has a fishbowl screensaver. It reminded me of the old Macintosh After Dark screensaver from the 90's, but needless to say, fishbowl screensavers have come a looong way since then.

I'm going to be rambling about new versus old experiences a lot for a while. Newest adjustment: British keyboards. I keep getting my quotes and @s mixed up. It's kinda cool to have a £ symbol on a keyboard though. I like it. £££.

Well, we're here, and our first week is almost over. I didn't think it would take me this long to update my blog!

The break in Durban was great, but it went by far too quickly. In addition to lots of visiting of family all over KZN, we also spent some time in the Drakensberg.

Our Durban break was marred a bit, though. On the day before we left for the UK, we were woken up at 4h30 in the morning by the house alarm going off. Some thieves had broken into the garage, and made off with my mom-in-law's car. Netstar got it back pretty quickly, but the theme was, as usual, how lucky we were that nobody came into the house and that it didn't turn violent. It was a reminder that despite the fact that we've tried to focus on the positive reasons for moving overseas, the negative reasons for getting out of South Africa also played a big part.

Anyhow, there are enough positive things to focus on now. The weather's cold and miserable, but I'm loving it. This early sunset thing has thrown my body clock for a loop, but it's getting better - I'm no longer wanting to go to bed at 7 at night. As expected, there are a million things to get used to and learn and unlearn, but it's all fascinating and exciting, and we're getting there.

The most amazing part of our week here so far is just how beautiful this part of the world is. We're staying in Oxfordshire, so between Oxford and Reading and all the local villages, this is fairy tale country. Job and flat hunting are underway, and with some luck, we'll stay in this part of the world for a good while longer. Absolutely WOW.