Yesterday was our three-year anniversary, yay us! I'm happy to say that after three years of marriage, two of which have been spent in a foreign country with pretty much no one else to hang out with, we still really like each other. And we arrived in the UK just a few days before our anniversary back in 2005, so we celebrated both milestones with a nice evening in the "Big City" for dinner (that'd be Oxford, not London).
David found a great parking spot on St. Giles Street, which left us with the perfect distance to walk to dinner - just enough to revisit some familiar Oxford sights but not nearly as long as we used to have to walk back to Wolfson College!
It was great to be in Oxford again and it was nice for us country bumpkins to revisit one of our favorite old haunts, ASK Italian restaurant on George Street. I completely forgot to take any pictures of our dinner, but at least that means it was tasty and fun.
We ate at this restaurant not too long after our arrival in the UK and over our delicious pasta dishes we reflected how far we'd come since then. This time we didn't blink at the prices on the menu (in fact that place seems downright cheap now, with pretty much nothing over £10!), we weren't surprised in the least that all our waitresses were from somewhere in Eastern Europe, and the American girls sitting next to us sounded weird. We finally speak fluent British (the vocabulary, sadly not the accent) and have started to use terms like "lift," "lorry" and "car park" even with each other.
In other news, despite what the above pictures might suggest, summer seems to have left us again. Yesterday was beautifully sunny but very cold, down to 40 degrees in the morning and not all that much warmer during the day! And today it was cloudy and windy in addition to being very chilly. Oh well, at least it's nice and cozy in the farmhouse. I turned on the heater for the first time today, which led to that burnt-dust smell that always reminds me of winter.