Our Neighborhood

I've had a request to post pictures of the neighborhood where we live. Luckily, I just a variety of such pictures yesterday.


The first shot is of our street. You can just see the corner of our building if you look down the road. its that very last sliver of a building lit up by the sun. I'll try to remember to take an actual picture of the building, but this gives you an idea of what it looks like for Russell and I as we walk home. You can see one of the entrances to the mall we live behind/next to (it wraps around us) in the foreground.


On the other side of the mall there are a number of higher-end stores lined up along a pedestrian street. As you can see, it has a bit of old world flavor above the stores, but this is definitely the trendy part of Reading. Some of the stores include the Body Shop, Clarks (as in shoes), specialty chocolate makers, and every mobile phone company and its spin off you could possibly want. There are easily eight different cell phone companies packed into the equivalent of two blocks... we had to give up on our cell phone shopping the first day we were in Reading simply because we were overwhelmed. I kid you not.


This last photo is of the grocery store we frequent. It tooks some Internet investigating to locate it because it blended in so well with the other shopping. We walked by it a number of times without realizing it sold groceries. We were happy to discover it is only a few blocks from our apartment. I actually took the first and third picture of this post standing on the same corner. I will probably have another grocery store post shortly, but I have to say, I love having a small grocery store close by that sells SMALL portions. I was able to buy a two-cup bag of flour, marinara sauce for two, etc. Things I normally have to overbuy in the states and hope I can use them up before they go bad.

The downside to the small grocery store is that it lacks in some areas. At the moment, there seems to be a serious absense of vanilla extract. This may not seem serious to some, but once you get a hankerin' for homemade chocolate chip cookies, this becomes a grave issue. It also lead me on my adventure of the day - on a five mile (round trip) hike to the nearest supermarket in hopes that THEY might have vanilla extract. Luckily they did. This also got me out into the city for some sightseeing and a nice long walk. Plus, I discovered that I could get two liters of hard cider for the same ammount it had cost to get a pint of the same in the local pub. So in the cart went THAT.