First Day Pictures

Just to give you a sense of where we are, I thought I'd post a few pictures of our first day in Bristol.

First, the apartment:

The apartment itself, I must confess, isn’t quite as nice as it looks in the pictures. As a matter of fact, it seems like everything in the apartment is designed with the sole purpose of looking fabulous in pictures. The actual apartment, in reality, is pretty worn at the edges. Everything is a little dirty, a little run down. The walls have scuffmarks and greasy fingerprints on them, the countertops are cracked and burned in spots, and the dishes in the cabinet were all dirty with old food residue. It’s like anywhere you look, if you look too closely, you’ll find a flaw.

Don’t get me wrong… It’s not terrible. We each have our own rooms, and the kitchen really comes in handy. It just needs a better cleaning crew, and a little more day-to-day maintenance. If we were staying here for the entire six months, I’d probably lose my mind. For a week, though, it’ll be fine.

Onto the neighborhood…

Here’s St. Mary’s Church, right down the street from our apartment.

This is a neat little pedestrian bridge across a small river near the city center. (Can you see Frankie in the red coat?)

And the "Wallace and Grommit" animation studio is right down the street:

Our first big outing was a visit to the SS Great Britain, the first ocean liner made of metal. It might sound a little boring (it is, after all, just a big boat in the harbor), but it was actually pretty interesting. We walked all around the decks, looked at the engine room and propellers, and looked through the inside of the ship. Each room inside the ship was filled with little dioramas that re-create life on the ship in the 1800s. Weirdly, they also filled the rooms with scents that let us know what each of the places smelled like. The deck with the livestock smelled like manure, the barber’s room smelled like shaving lotion, the captain’s room smelled like pipe tobacco. It was kind of a neat sensory addition… Everything except the infirmary, which smelled like vomit. Soooo gross.

Frankie had a great time pretending to fire the cannons and steer the ship. As we walked around, she also gave us a mini audio tour, filling in (totally made up) historical details about the ship. “99 years ago, the captain used this closet to keep all the ice.” (False, but plausible.)

It was an uncharacterstically gorgeous day in England, and we did a lot of walking around the city. By the end of the day we were all pretty tired. We were desperately hungry, too, but ran into a weird British snafu: The Sunday dinner. Apparently, all of the restaurants in the UK serve a giant Sunday lunch (here, called "dinner"), and then completely shut down from 3 - 6. So, when we tried to grab a meal at 5:00, we couldn't find a single place to serve us. It was totally frustrating! Eventually we found a fast-food place that was open, and we ate as if we hadn't had a meal in days.

Starvation-induced anxiety aside, though, it was a great first day.