Greetings from England!
June 14th, 2006 @ 1.49 pm
What? Jeremy’s in England now? Yes, that’s right. Last month I went down to Puerto Rico, and now I’m in Birmingham, England until tomorrow. It’s been a neat experience being over on this side of the pond. The flight over wasn’t too bad, though it was 7 hours long and I basically lost a night’s sleep due to it (overnight flight and a 5 hour time change… it’s 6:45pm here now, 1:45pm in B-more). We flew into Heathrow and had a chauffer company pick us up and take us up to Birmingham a good hour North of London.
Over here I’ve noticed the roads are much narrower, they drive on the “wrong” side, and things seem rather expensive. When we’ve gone to eat, the food prices seem about the same as they do in the US, except they are in pounds and not dollars, and with a dollar equalling about .54 pounds, it works out to roughly twice as expensive as in the US. Also, the drinks are very expensive- A soda here costs about 1.20 - 2.95 pounds each, they’re about 8-10oz sized, and no free refills! Oh well, I’m glad the company’s paying for it.
For cars around here they’re generally much smaller than in the US. There are a lot of Ford Focus’, and some other cars that we have back home, but also a lot of French, German, and British cars running around. So far we’ve been transported in Mercedes’ and VW Passat’s, and one Peugeot (or Vauxhall, I’m not sure) so only one that we don’t have in the US unfortunately. I would have expected a decent number of Japanese cars, but rather am finding very few. Most of the non-European cars are Fords, and I’ve seen a couple of Honda’s and Toyota’s, and one Chevy.
The reason I’ve been over here is so a coworker and I can crawl over some machinery that they’re finishing up making over here, see it work and get to know it before it ships to Chicago. Once in Chicago, we in Columbia will be their first go to point if they have trouble and need assistance. Therefore, we will know what we are talking about and may be able to help them or service the equipment without needing to involve the European companies and deal with the distance and time change problems.