Law, Partially

Bobby is a good time lad. He has fun at home and on the road. While Dad’s been at work, the boy spends his days crawling around in the grass at the nearby park and crawling around our apartment’s carpeted floors. Today we took him to a brasserie, Noble Rot, where he had some lamb and guinea fowl – and lots of water, also some Cheerios and pureed leeks to top off. We've witnessed a record sustained heat wave in London over the past week. Londoners keep telling us to savor this weather because the sun rarely shines for a full day, let alone several full days in a row. Because the sun doesn't have the habit of shining, buildings often don't have air conditioning, including our apartment. Luckily the heat broke for the weekend. Bobby had a nice nap in his carrier while we perused the shop windows of Lamb's Conduit – yes, that's the street's name where you find Noble Rot – in the crisp afternoon air before heading in for dinner. Dinner at Noble Rot The staff

In their travels to places away from home, tourists stay where the place’s narrative is easiest to follow. In cities, it’s usually the center of town where you find the critical mass of historical sites and cultural institutions. These are the sites we see in pictures, and here is supposed to contain the essence of a place. Stay nearby to capture as much of that essence as possible before packing up and leaving on Monday morning. If staying in London’s West End, you could wake up and see Buckingham Palace, Palace of Westminster, and maybe even walk across Trafalgar Square and take a quick tour of the National Gallery before seeing an evening show in Theatreland. You could argue that city centers are catered for tourists or maybe just the rich, and “real life” happens outside. Many of these exterior neighborhoods, however, won’t have the clean hotels of the city center, however, and probably fewer English speakers (when outside of an English-speaking country, of course). Airbnb dares

The lessons of life abroad are found in the routine interstices of daily life. We’ve encountered challenges in setting up our life here but not because this place is so radically different; it’s because this place is so deceptively similar. There are a few things a middle-class family must do to get up and running in a new place: find a home, fill the apartment with the things needed for life, set up a checking account, get a local cell phone number, subscribe to a broadband Internet service provider. Luckily, we don’t require daycare or schooling for Bobby at the moment. We managed to find an apartment with the help of a real estate agent hired by my employer. Most of the apartments we saw were awkward in some way. In the end, we found one that’s acceptable, but we are surprised at how many fees and taxes accompany a rental property in the U.K. My wallet hurts. Ouch. Very annoying has been the extreme background checks we've had to go through, and the extreme disorganization

When looking for a place in London, we were trying to determine which neighborhoods were near the Tube. If you look at the London Tube map, you actually may get no idea at all about where the Tube actually goes. The Tube map looks as if the entirety of London is crisscrossed by these underground trains. In fact, most of the lines may be found only north of the Thames, and the lines are much denser on the west side. Maps of London Underground These animations neatly show the differences between transit maps and their overlays to the real map. Find other cities here: http://mymodernmet.com/animated-subway-maps/

It was the best of times. It was the blurst of times. Ten years ago, Christine and I met at a Mumbai train station but were nearly thwarted that same day by a pack of aggressive monkeys. Now we have a little monkey of our own.  I documented our initial encounter on this blog  without a thought of what lay ahead. The comments to that blog entry are pretty funny : you should read them; my mom was worried I'd catch Bubonic Plaque from the monkeys that were hounding me that day. What Christine most remembers from that day is that I planned to jump from a train speeding into a station but was ultimately thwarted by my own ill-conceived plan. (For more info, click  here .) Nonetheless, we celebrated this fateful milestone in London yesterday with Indian food for lunch and wine and cheese for dinner. At a restaurant with white table cloths near our temporary apartment, Bobby tried dal and chicken tikka masala -- he seemed to like them! This kid won't be eating fish sticks of

We have one week in London to find an apartment before I start work again on 5 June (this is where I'd put a frowny face if that was a thing I did). My firm arranged for us temporary accommodations and a real estate agent to find a more permanent abode. Outside of the two days we spent with our real estate agent, we made some tepid explorations of London. We've been to Chinatown twice to scout restaurants. There is a Singaporean restaurant there, but sadly it is closed presently for some remodeling. Chinatown is lodged in the West End amidst many theaters and between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square, so it is very well-touristed, overrun in fact with people walking at a slow clip. It is actually a very "expensive" part of town, nearby a number of high end residential and retail districts, but it is so crowded, who would want to live there? As Bobby is now quite an accomplished crawler, we took him to the Tate Modern, which has a huge open floor in its atrium