Just Plane Crazy
Ever dream about what it would be like to pack a bag, hop on a plane, and move across the world to another country? The actual task of planning such a move and arriving at an Airbnb 9 hours later − no big deal. What comes next though will either have you peeing your pants with laugher or wide awake at 2am about to cry a river and drown yourself in it. Spoiler alert: my first 2 weeks in Liverpool included a bit of both.
My adventure started about 6 months ago when Jet Set Boy and I applied for UK work visas. I’ll leave the details of applying for residence permits and planning the trip for another post, but I can tell you this, it’s not nearly as hard as you think it is. Long story short, we decided to start our journey at an Airbnb in Liverpool.
After arriving in Manchester at 10:30am after a seven-hour flight, we jumped on a 45-minute train to the Liverpool City Centre, dragged our rolley bags and jammed packed backpacks through the streets to the lobby bar of the posh DoubleTree hotel. Before you get excited, we didn’t stay long. We only stopped to rest our feet, grab a pint, and decide which one of us was going to venture off into the unknown neighbourhood of Cheapside to fetch the Airbnb keys.
The Key Exchange
Originally, our Airbnb host asked us to go the to Bargain Booze to pick up the apartment keys. Our host gave us a 6 digit secret code that we were instructed to whisper to the Bargain Booze teller before he/she would hand over the keys. It all seemed very Ethan Hunt, Impossible Mission Force, to me. Twenty-four hours before we arrived though, we received a message from our Airbnb host that informed us that the Bargain Booze had flooded and that we would have to venture further into the unknown, a 10-minute walk from the DoubleTree now instead of 3 minutes, to an EasyDayz and provide the same secret code.
Your mission, Jet Set Boy, should you choose to except it, is to protect the secret code, locate the Easydayz, retrieve the keys, and deliver Jet Set Wells safely to her Airbnb where she will then be able to rest her fatigued sole. As always, should you or any of your IM Force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. This blog will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Jet Set Boy.
What is an Easydayz you ask? Great question – we didn’t know either. Google told us it was a convenience store though.
Soon after drinking his pint, Ethan Hunt left me at the DoubleTree to guard our bags from any bad guys whilst he embarked on his mission. I was instructed to call 911 if he didn’t return in 30 minutes. I of course also had to Google the UK equivalent of 911 though – it’s 999 by the way.
Airbnb Ghosts
When we arrived at our Airbnb, it was fortunately everything it proclaimed to be; it had a working fridge, stove, TV, and laundry machine. The next 24 hours was basically a tornado of adventure. Night 2 was probably the toughest. I went to bed around 7pm, pooped from all the virtual organizing and travelling, and woke up at midnight. There was a ghost in the apartment that Ethan Hunt could not protect me from. The light in the hallway near the bathroom was flickering and I heard strange sounds coming from the hallway. When I got up to check it out, it was even scarier than I had imagined and I ran back to bed. I had the strangest mixture of feelings. I felt anxious, scared, and a bit ridiculous for feeling that way. It was really weird to be in someone else’s apartment, in a far away country with a hallway and street outside instead of tucked away in a secure hotel room with a concierge desk to keep me safe. I’m not usually keen on waking Ethan Hunt up in the middle of the night, I like him to get his beauty rest, but this time I was eager to. When Ethan Hunt woke up, he helped me developed a covert plan for catching the ghosts and I immediately felt at ease.
The Laundry Shit Show
Over the next 2 weeks I learned a freaking lot about England! Let me start with laundry and combo washer/dryers. I know, doesn’t this sound like an exciting topic? First of all, the washer/dryers are combo machines. This means that you put your dirty cloths in the machine with the soap and then they come out 9 hours later clean and dry (and extra wrinkly and small!). Ethan Hunt is an expert at dangerous and highly sensitive laundry operations, so I let him decipher the top-secret code of symbols on the machine and show me how to use it.
The first time I used the combo machine, I was pretty impressed; the towels came out warm, clean, and the same size that they went in. It was great! The combo machine skipped the extra step we have in Canada of switching the clothes from one machine to the next for drying. The second time though, I decided to wash some of my own clothes. I washed everything together, as I always do. My lulu leggings came out fine, but my socks looked like they would now fit my 4-year-old niece. My tops were wrinkled up like an origami swan that you can’t figure out how to flatten back into a regular piece of paper again.
The third time would be a laundry charm; I had a good feeling about this cycle. This time, I thought I would program just a wash cycle, and then hang dry my cardigans and sweaters. For sure this would avoid the wrinkles and shrinking, right? Wrong! This time, my clothes were burnt. Who would of thought this was possible? Not me. My knits sweaters were steaming. You could literally see the steam coming off them. They looked like someone had left an iron on them for far too long. They were also dripping wet, not just damp, and stretched out (completely opposite to the shriveled up shirts in my prior attempt). I think Ethan Hunt had the most success, his dress shirts turned out all right. He hung them on hangers to dry and although they were crunchy like a board you could snap like a twig, at least they weren’t burnt and still fit his chiseled bod.
One of the strangest parts about this whole laundry shit show is that the combo machines are almost always in the kitchen and stealthily disguised as a cupboard. As a Canadian that is used to having a whole room in the house for a separate washing machine and dryer, this was super bizarre to me. I imagine it has something to do with the plumbing and it being easier to connect the machine to all the other kitchen plumbing than running separate pipes to a laundry room in the corner of the house. The Airbnb washer/dryer worked almost our entire stay until it locked our towels in the machine the morning before checkout. Suffice it to say, we didn’t shower that day.
I Like that Boulder
If you’re a science dork like me, you might find this next bit interesting, but if not, you’ll have to wait until my next post to hear all about the cocktail culture and bin chute room.
It didn’t take long for Ethan Hunt to open up an investigation into this crispy crunchy clothes conundrum that plagued his dress shirts. His investigation lead him to learn that UK water is porous and that we will therefore have to suffer with crispy crunchy clothes for the duration of our stay in the UK. Ethan Hunt wasn’t entirely wrong, he rarely ever is, but I did some additional digging and discovered that it’s not the water that is porous, but rather the sedimentary bedrock that is. The bedrock in the UK is commonly made up of sedimentary rocks like limestone, chalk, flint, and sandstone and as rain and ground water run over the holey sedimentary bedrock, the water gets into the tiny little spaces of the rock. When the water travels through the spaces in the rock, it picks up minerals that make their way into household drinking water and make it “hard” and full of calcium carbonate. This extra minerally water is what makes clothing come out of the washing machine crispy and scratchy and creates a whole bunch of plumbing issues too, such as limestone buildup. Of all the challenges I imagined I would encounter when to England, I never would have thought laundry would be one of the biggest.
You’re my Cup of Tea
In the above few paragraphs, I have shared some of the most interesting moments I’ve experienced since arriving in Liverpool. I think there are a lot of things I had been taking for granted in Canada and I bet that I’ve learned just as much about Canada as I have about the UK since being here. For example, knowing which side of the stairs to walk up, opening a window (there are no screens here), laundry, and counting coins at the store are all things that I’ve never really thought about on a day-to-day basis. Above all though, I think I am beginning to gain a new perspective on happiness and I am so fortunate to be able to share all of these emotions and experiences with the person I love to bits and pieces, senior field operations agent for the Impossible Mission Force, Jet Set Boy. Stay tuned to hear all about my failure at the bank, 2-for-1 cocktails, and flat hunting.
P.s. Mushy peas really taste like mushed up peas
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