Arrival

Well, I made it safely to the UK. Things moved swiftly from touchdown at LHR onwards: barely any line at passport control, picked up my bags right away from the conveyor belt, hopped right on The Airline bus service to Oxford, grabbed a taxi at the bus station and arrived at John's place at about 7:45 AM GMT, a full hour earlier than I expected.

John made coffee, bacon and eggs, which rejuvenated my flagging biological clock. I unpacked a few things, set up my laptop with the house wireless and took a shower. The bus to the Wellcome Centre from Cutteslowe is a pain in the ass because it goes into the city centre and then out again instead of around the edge of Oxford (John's house and the Wellcome are roughly radially equidistant from the centre of Oxford, at about 11 o'clock and 2 o'clock, respectively).

My day so far here has been pretty good: all the people are nice, my computer was set up and waiting for me and I got a chance to talk to Lon about potential projects for about half an hour. In a little while I'm going down to meet the HR people to get my access card, set up a deposit for my paycheck etc.

In fact, the only downside so far is this crazy UK keyboard that I'm typing on...actually, now that I think of it, since my laptop has a US keyboard I'm going to go nuts, since I can't even just get completely accustomed to the niceties of this layout. The differences aren't huge: some punctuation moved around and diffferently shaped shift and return keys, which occasionally results in a string of backslashes or tildes.