One Week In

Milk in your tea? Be sure to cut
through the cream at the top of the
"pint" bottle they delivered today!

Yes, it has been a week since I arrived in England, and I'm learning new things every day. Like saying "Ah-men" instead of "AY-men." (I think that may come relatively quickly, since we say "Amen" quite often in a day!) Zucchini are "courgettes." My driver's license may be utterly useless, not only because I would panic in a driver's seat on the right side of the car, but because I don't know how to drive anything but an automatic shift vehicle!

The "lift" was out of order when I first arrived. Not a problem for me, but a real hardship for the sisters in their eighties who had to take the stairs. What has been really taxing for me, I'm coming to realize, is navigating communication--the regular interpersonal kind. I am just not that used to processing so many different accents in a single day: Irish, Kenyan, Filipina, northern Italian, Sicilian... I have to really focus to keep up with the conversation. When the superior comes back to town tomorrow, the learning curve will go up steeply. (She's a Scot!)

One of the weirdest adjustments I've had to make involved technology. Not one of the four wifi devices I brought with me managed to connect to the convent wifi. Sister Mary Lou, God bless her, thought to check the IP address, DNS settings, all those techie things that ordinarily happen on their own. So I went in to each device, at each wifi network, and carefully copied those same settings (though I did modify the IP address). As you can see....it's working like a charm!

This weekend there will be a meeting for all the sisters of the UK, and a celebration of the Golden Jubilee of two of them. It will be a chance for me to get to know more of the sisters. Pray that I can start to get the names down!!!