The Southwesterners have landed in London!

Early this morning at 7:50 a.m. ( about 2 a.m. back in Texas, so very early in the morning!) my 9 hour-long flight landed at Heathrow Airport in the beautiful city of London, England. I’ve been dying to update, but it’s taken me all day to finally get some internet access and settle down to write.

Mom and Dad saw me off at the Austin-Bergstrom Airport.

My lovely best friend Amanda came to the airport to say “good bye” to me, too!

After we finished settling into our rooms a bit, we were taken on a walking tour of our neighborhood in West Kensington, on which we were shown the tiny Tesco’s grocery store near our flat, the post office, some nearby pubs, and the nearest Tube station. It was about noon when our little tour finished, so we decided to pop into a pub called The Cumberland Arms for lunch. Located on North End Road, this pub is bright and quaint, and it was overall a very nice place to dine for our first meal in the UK!

Most of our group at the pub… we were still waiting on a couple of them to arrive!

My lovely roommate, Lauryn Deering, and I decided to share the Antipasti platter, which came with “prosciutto, speck, salami Milano & finnocchiona, crostini fegato, Mozzarella, roast tomatoes & grilled courgettes.” No, we did not fully grasp what that all meant exactly, but we decided to give it a try anyway.

And this is what we received! An assortment of meats (salami and pork) with thinly sliced roasted zucchini, roasted tomatoes, fresh mozzarella cheese in the center, and some hard sliced bread and flat bread (at least this is the way I interpreted it!).

There was one UFO (unidentified food object) on our platter though which looked like a brown paste spread over bread. When we asked what it was, a lady kindly informed us that it was “chicken liver purée,” at which point all the noses at the table crinkled a little with distaste.

From there things went a little like this: I cried, “Ah, chicken liver purée!” (as if that was the obvious answer), picked up a slice of the pasty substance, declared it smelled very much like the wet dog food that my little dog, Dawn, so loves to gobble down, took a sizable bite of the smelly stuff, and decided that it really was almost exactly what wet dog food must taste like.

Pre-chicken liver puree consumption…

I’m going for it!

“This smells like wet dog food.”

Unfortunately for Lauryn, I told her that it wasn’t so bad (“it’s not that bad… it’s not good, but it’s not that bad“), and she decided to be adventurous, too. This is the aftermath of that regrettable decision:

“Eww!”

The rest of the table was willing enough to take our word on the matter and turned down my offer to sample the mashed chicken liver. This was one of the more memorable moments of our time at the Cumberland Arms, however the rest of the food was delicious; on the whole, our experience was very enjoyable and a great way to begin our time here in London.

Quite happy for some refreshment after a long journey!

Right now, we are sitting at a Starbucks coffee shop we found on Kensington High Street some time after lunch (we couldn’t resist the free wifi!), which is about a 15 minute walk from our flat in West Kensington. We’ve had quite a few culture shocks today (Argos is a big-name store when it comes to household items, almost like Bed, Bath & Beyond, except that we walked in not expecting it to be a tiny catalog store. You search through catalogs or touch-screen computers, record the call numbers of the items you want, and take it to the cashier to pay and have your items brought to you. Very weird.), but we’ve made it so far! This is me right now:

I’m drinking a Caffe Latte mainly because they didn’t have the White Chocolate Mocha, one of my favorite Starbucks drinks, on their menu… We shall find out shortly if this is a trend throughout the UK. For now, I’ll just be satisfied knowing that caffe lattes are probably healthier than mochas.

I am feeling so completely jet-lagged right now that I am next to useless, but I’m not going to sleep until it’s a proper bedtime. I would also like to shout out to my wonderful family and my beautiful friends back home: I miss you all and I love you! I hope you enjoy reading about my first day here!