Can't See Anything Apart From These Darn....

Boxes!!!!

Our shipment from England has now arrived! 53 boxes....yes....we know....don't ask.....53 boxes!!!!

Looks like we have a lot of unpacking to do.....we'll see you all later....much later!!!!

PS: Have a look for yourself below....can you find the box in this picture?

"Yes!"...We hear you cry!!! "I have found the box!!!! It's the white one!"

Sitting On A Rubber Ring, Sliding Down a Ski Slope.....

.....is called TUBING. Yes, that's right...TUBING!!!

Well, this all starts off with Brian being volunteered against his will (only joking??!) to look after some school kids at a tubing event at Chicopee.

The Chicopee Ski center (notice how we spell centre!!) is around the corner from where we currently live...we could walk there if we wanted to....

After arriving, Brian decides to 'whimp out' and just stand and watch.....however, a persistent little girl called Kira (the youngest child of our English friends here, Andy and Jacquie...) who was in attendance keeps going on and on about how she wants 'Uncle Brian' to go tubing with her...(she was the one who volunteered Brian in the first place!!)

Reluctantly, Brian goes up the slope....never to be seen again.....or is that the line from some cheesy film!!!

Anyway, the truth is that Brian loved it!!! So much so that he stayed up on the slope for over 1 1/2 hours, organizing the kids and pushing them down the slope, and he had a go himself....3 times in fact and lived to tell the tale!!!

Brian now is tubing mad, and can't wait to go again. So much for Brian being the shy and retiring type (yeah right)!!!

Elaine, however, stood back and watched as she had an important job to do....TAKE THE PICTURES!!!!....which are below (well...not all of them):

Elaine with Kira......

Brian with Kira......

Brian....with tube in hand (and yes...he did slide down the slope you see behind him!!!)

Our Car....

Not much to say here really, but here are some pictures of our new car...it is a Dodge Caravan SE. It has a DVD player built in, and you can plug in your iPod / MP3 player to it, and copy songs from it to the 20GB hard drive (yes...you read right...this car has a hard drive built into it as well!!) and a touch screen dash board as well....posh, eh????

It has a system built into it here which they call 'stow and go'...in other words all the seats behind the driver and front passenger fold into the car, so giving us plenty of room to store lots of stuff (food for Brian!!!)

Brian has not figured out how all the functions work yet...more worried about driving on the wrong side of the road, as neither of us had driven abroad before....it's easy....don't really know what we were worrying about!!! (Who are we kidding with all the snow and black ice!!!)

Apartment and stuff.....

Well,

For those of you that want to see pictures of the apartment...look no further...for those that don't, well...don't look now!!!!

The lounge.....

and of course..the entertainment system (boys will like this!!!)

The dining room (Brian trying to look clever in front of the laptop computer!!...Honest he is NOT doing anything with his nose!!)



Another shot of the dining room.....



The kitchen.....



The bedroom....



And the last picture (promise!!)...our view from the balcony.....

About Time!!!

Folks,

For those that know us.....HELLO!!!! For those that don't....WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE READING MY BLOG?!?!?

Anyway, enough of that...we are (as if you don't already know!!) Brian & Elaine, and we have at last emigrated to Canada!! It has been a hard long struggle, but the 3 1/2 years it has taken us to get to this moment has been worth it!!!

We have found an apartment to rent for a year, it has two bedrooms with living area, dining area, two bathrooms and a balcony. The block is only 7 floors high and in the basement it has its own laundry room and two social rooms one with a pool table. All for $960 (CA) (530 pounds). ....Oh and we have a parking space underground which is heated.

We are near hotels, a shopping mall and Chicopee ski club, so we are in quite a good location.

We have already furnished our apartment as we went to a furniture store and they delivered and set everything up free of charge and we still got a discount on the purchases too! It's so great you can really bargain over here! We have a reclining three seater sofa and chair, coffee tables, dining room set, massive t.v./entertainment unit, queen size bed with matching furniture with top of the range mattress, table lamps, floor lamp all for $7,000 (CAD) which is roughly 3,600 pounds. We have also bought a car which cost the equivalent of 17,000 pounds ($33,000 CAD)!!!

Not bad considering we have only been here for just over four weeks! We have also been to a farmers market in town which is held every Saturday where they sell all home grown produce from fruit, veg and meats and boy is it cheap not like when you buy organic stuff in the supermarkets in UK and you have to pay through the nose for them, they encourage you to buy the local stuff so they make it super cheap for you!

Brian is looking for work at the moment, he has sent his resume (posh word for CV here!!) to a lot of IT companies and agencies, but nothing definite yet. Elaine wants a completely different job here, like working in a clothes store, but again she has applied for a couple of things but nothing has come of them yet.....


Well....that's all for now......we will update you with more info once we settle in a bit more.....


TTFN


Brian & Elaine