Here’s our new “house.” This is student housing; however, it has four flats with a bedroom/living room, kitchen, and bathroom. One interesting thing is that we were told that our flat was on the second floor. However, at some point, prior to arrival, I remembered that in the UK the first floor of a building is called the “ground floor.” The second floor is called the “first floor” (first above ground), and the third floor is called the “second floor.” In other words, we’re on the third level rather than the second one. And, no, there isn’t a “lift” in the building. Hopefully, we’ll benefit from the extra exercise!

Jet lag is a real deal. That, and a sleepless night on the plane, left us very tired once the adrenalin began to wear off. By Wednesday afternoon we needed a nap! We slept like logs for two hours and only woke up when the alarm on my phone went off. We were then able to stay awake until around 10:30 local time. That’s 4:30 in the afternoon in Texas and according to our body clocks! However, that two hours of sleep didn’t come close to leaving us rested so we went to bed and slept hard for most of the night. We’ll see how day two works for us.

Our biggest chore of the day was going back to the grocery store. We actually went to the store soon after we arrived to get enough food to last us a day or two.  The one we went to was in more-or-less reasonable walking distance. What a disaster! We were very tired, walked farther than we expected, and when we got there everything that was refrigerated had been lost due to the terribly hot days preceding our arrival! The coolers just couldn’t keep up with the heat and all the food in them was lost. Today’s trip was to a bigger store (Tesco), and they were well stocked except for a couple of empty coolers which had signs on them apologizing that due to the hot weather their units had failed.  Happily, the temps are back to the normal summer 60s and 70s now.

Our journey to the store included our first Manchester bus rides. The busses are all double decker versions. The story is that that particular road hosts the busiest bus route in Europe. You’ll see a bus every few minutes, so no schedule is necessary. We got a day rider pass costing us about $6.35 (USD) each.  We only rode to the store and back, but two one-way tickets would have cost a bit more than one day rider pass.

Obviously, I’m not going to do a long post every day, but everything is fresh and interesting to us right now and I want to share while stuff like this is on my mind.