Christmas update

I hope you all had an enjoyable and relaxing Christmas. Having done the family thing early this year, we were expecting it to be just four of us on Christmas Day. However – thanks to John’s generosity - we received a nice extra prezzie here in the shape of my Mother-In-Law (I realise how that sounds, but I could not be more sincere :-)

The next couple of days were the usual whirlwind of food preparation and general headless chickenness. We decided to incorporate traditions of both countries into the menu, beginning with a prawn cocktail with marie rose sauce. I’m bothering to specify because here the ‘cocktail sauce’ is a dark red, spicy sauce, so this was all new to everyone except Karen. Thankfully, although the prices turn it into a bit of a luxury good, it has proven possible to find weird and wonderful stuff such as salad cream over here.

For the main course (known as the ‘entrée’ here for some reason!), we gave turkey a miss – after all, we had only just finished with Thanksgiving leftovers about five minutes ago – in favour of baked smoked ham, with sweet potatoes, stuffing, mash and parsnips.

The parsnips were an adventure all of their own. It is possible to get them here, even though people aren’t usually that familiar, but in the event the store was all out. Still, I couldn’t imagine a Christmas dinner without my parsnips, so while everyone else went home to start cooking and baking, I walked 45 minutes through ankle-deep snow to try another supermarket. Thankfully they had them there. I guess it’s a little sign of homesickness. Hopefully everyone doesn’t think I’m insane for my silly indulgences :-)

We had a bumper Christmas (thanks to both families and our friends for your generous gifts!) with lots of stuff for our new apartment. This was made even better because we had the chance to collect several wedding presents from people in the US which we chose not to have sent to the UK at the time. We also had a nice long video chat with all my family in Scunthorpe, and I even watched the Queen’s Speech on the BBC News website!

While many of you were enjoying a second day of festivities on Boxing Day, we were continuing our hunt for a new apartment to move to after Slovakia. Without boring you with too many details, we found an apartment we really like about another 7 miles south of Washington, still accessible to the Metro system, and have since put down a deposit to move in on 7th March. It’s a big relief to get it all sorted, and we’re looking forward to moving in and all the associated purchasing when we get back!

Finally, on Sunday we visited Eastern Market in ‘The District’ (D.C.), a flea/farmers market (not in the same place, thankfully :-) and then walked the couple of blocks to the Capitol Building. I was glad to finally see it up close – it’s visible from miles away, but that’s not quite the same as being there.


We’re now preparing to leave for Slovakia on Friday (via Canada, bizarrely enough, and Vienna!). I’ll be sure to report in from there.

Mark