Month: December 2024

Christmas 2024 in London

A medical issue caused us to cancel our planned trip to the US for Christmas. So this year, we’re spending our Christmas and New Year holidays in London.

Regent Steet

Although we greatly miss spending time with the family, London is known as a great place to be during the Christmas holiday. There are some amazing light displays. And if you’re interested in shopping (we aren’t), Christmas markets abound, in addition to the plethora of shops that offer boundless opportunities for holiday buying.

Transportation for tourists
Oxford Street Christmas Lights

We do a lot of walking, and have seen many of the popular Christmas light displays. We also visited a Christmas market, complete with mulled wine.

Mulled wine on a chilly evening
Covent Garden

Christmas Day was a quiet one for us. A short walk in the neighborhood. Later in the day, some video calls with family (adjusting for the 5-hour time zone difference).

And, a traditional Christmas dinner. Well, maybe not traditional in the common sense. We’re having Christmas sukiyaki. Having lived in Japan for several years, we love the Japanese hotpot meals. That is our delicious Christmas dinner, rather than the fowl and dressing.

Merry Christmas to all…and best wishes for the New Year!

Our Christmas dinner sukiyaki

Winter Solstice 2024… in London

The year is winding down… and today, 21 December, is the Winter Solstice. The shortest day of the year. The beginning of astronomical winter.

The good news is…the days will start getting longer. It has been an incredibly grey, dismal, drippy, chilly, windy past 6 weeks. I can count the number of days of sunshine on one hand…and still have some fingers left over.

London is located at about the same latitude as Newfoundland…similar to Warsaw. Kiev, Winnipeg and Calgary. So in the winter, the sun kind of goes sideways across the sky. The sun never gets higher than 20 degrees above the horizon. Weird light, and always in your eyes as you walk down the street.

Today we went to a Winter Solstice celebration at the Greenwich Observatory – the first such event ever held. Greenwich is the Prime Meridian, and home of the 18th century astronomical observatory. Interesting place to go, and inside Greenwich Park, a large green space south of the Thames River.

This year, due to a medical issue, we will be spending Christmas in London for the first time. We will miss time in the US with our family. But we’ll make the best of it here in our London home.

And as the Solstice passes, we are looking forward to the days getting longer again. Having sunrise at 8 am and sunset before 4 pm is getting very old. We even have resorted to using a daylight lamp in the house to simulate daylight (particularly as we’ve seen so little of the sun during the past several weeks).

There are still some months of winter left, and probably a fair share of cloudy, misty, windy and cold days. That’s part of living in London. And yes, we are adapting to our adopted home.

December, 2024

A few months have gone by since our last blog post. It has been a tumultuous time. The days seem to merge into weeks and months. Some of the time has been good…some not as good. Let me try to catch up.

Overall, my job is going well. Much to do, not enough time for it all. Pretty much business as usual. We did our big meeting in Abu Dhabi in September and it went well. The months after have been busy but manageable.

The US election was disappointing and now we have a new administration ahead that we can’t see as anything but cataclysmic. It is hard to view from abroad. And we know that we will need to do something in a year or two. Where to go when my contract here expires? Of course the default is the US – that is our country of origin. But is that the best? Looking at other options but all are difficult. Where will we go as we enter retirement? Still no answer.