So, I’m here in England feeling guilty that I haven’t updated the site like I planned to. Well, I’m on vacation. I’m having a great time. I’m visiting good friends that I haven’t seen in months, and I think it’s more important to sit around the table chatting nonsense with my friends than to sit alone in front of the computer rehashing the day’s events. But at the moment I have the time to rehash a bit, so I shall.

Showing up here on Friday was crazy. We left Freiburg by train at 8 in the morning. We went from the train to the airport, the airport to the plane, the plane to another airport, from the airport to the tube station, then into the tube, out into another tube station, and we emerged on Trafalgar Square at 1 in the afternoon (England time).

The traveling was a blur, as it always is. Everything between entering the train station in Freiburg and exiting the tube station at Trafalgar Square blended together and took on an aura of unreality, like being in limbo. It was almost as if we had been teleported directly from Germany to England, as if we had entered a wormhole in Freiburg and were simply ejected at the other end into the heart of London. It was quite a shock.

My first impression of England after having been in Germany for a while: chaos. I’m sure there’s a method to the madness, but I haven’t quite figured it out yet. I get the feeling that there are certain unspoken customs and rules that are guiding day-to-day life here, and I’m not totally privy to them. Yet.

It’s funny to feel like such a foreigner in the country that is probably more like America than any other country on earth (okay, except for Canada). It’s like being in a parallel universe: everything is incredibly familiar, but at the same time it’s all just different enough to make me realize that I’m not really at home here. Yet.

I think I will be at home here, though. This was supposed to be a sort of research trip: we wanted to take a look at Brighton to see if we did indeed want to move here. The decision to move here was really already made before we came to check it out, but I feel better having seen the place and realized that it is pretty cool after all. I don’t know why someone would come here as a tourist, but I think it will make quite a good place to live.

I’m still scared about moving, and I’m still questioning my motives and second-guessing (third-guessing, fourth-guessing) myself. I know that I’m going to be tormenting myself with questions and doubts for the months to come. But I’ve also realized that, in a situation like this, there’s really no way you can know if you’re making the right decision until you’ve gone through with it and seen what happens.

So we’re going to go through with it and we’ll see what happens. Only time will tell if we’re doing the right thing or not.

In the mean time, I’m going to just sit back and enjoy my vacation. Oh, and I haven’t had to live on cheap fish and chips after all. So there. I don’t need no stinkin’ bank card.