A Lovely Rainy Day!

Hello all :)

Sorry about the lack of a New York blog yet but it is coming soon I promise! So after delightfully telling you all last time that my work permit has come through I am now stuck waiting for something else.... It seems that even though I am legally allowed to work, no one can employ you until you have a social security number (which you can't apply for until you have authorization to work) At the office they told me it would take two weeks.... that was on the 5th of February, but it seems for a immigrant it can take up to 6 weeks!!!! I'm getting fed up of all this now, I just hope it arrives before I run out of money! On a more positive note at least a couple of people are benefiting from this, I have been doing a ton of hours volunteering at the Metroparks and I am having a lot of fun keeping our new digs shipshape with Amanda :)

Since New York there hasn't been to much going on really, I'm cutting down on exciting things to try and save some cash in case this waiting never ends! Also the weather has been atrocious - today is a nice cloudy wet day and some of the snow is finally starting to melt - I believe that this morning is the first day I have seen a blade of grass since November :)

Next weekend is buzzard day in Cleveland, a lot of people head out bright and early to the Brecksville reservation to see if they can be the first to see a Buzzard (although it is an open secret that they have actually been flying around for the last week or two!). I think I shall go and join them, hopefully the weather will have improved by then too - it is amazing how your body can adjust to the cold, a couple of days ago the weather rose to a heady height of one degrees and sunny, it felt so warm I was walking around in just a sweatshirt, if that had happened last year back in England I would have been wrapped up in about seventeen layers!

I havn't taken many pictures since New York but here are a few from a nice walk me and Amanda went on :) except for the whole Social Security Card thing I am having a great time here, married life is going swimmingly and I have settled in brilliantly and I don't know what else to write to rhyme with brilliantly! any ideas anyone?

got a bit wet taking this...

Me looking very cool in my awesome new jacket!

Amanda looking groovy.

A perfect day for a swim....

We shall catch up soon when I shall tell you all about New York :)

Back to School

Good day to you all! So things have been extremely busy for me lately! First of all I must start off by saying that my work permit has finally arrived!!! yippeeee!!! i can now get a job! Unfortunately, the work permit decided it would be best to arrive right in the middle of us moving out and a couple of days before we go away to New York for a weekend, so I have not had a chance to test out the market yet! Hopefully it wont take too long, I cannot wait to get a job again, ever since the snow and the cold arrived in November I have been going slowly insane as it is so hard to do things like cycling or simply going outside in such freezing temperatures, at least Amanda has been here to keep me happy :)

Me in my swanky new basketball jersey in front of our third row seats, the Officer looks like he really doesnt want to be in my picture!!

However it has not all been doom and gloom, I had a lot of fun recently when thanks to coca cola I could be found sitting in the third row of the NBA game between the Cleveland Cavaliers vs the Milwaukee Bucks! These seats normally cost hundreds of dollars and the view was fantastic, there are no barriers between you and the players and we were sitting opposite the Milwaukee dugout so could see all of their angry and ugly facial expressions (of which there were a lot as the Bucks were doing badly!) You could practically smell the sweat off of the backs of the players they were so close! The game itself seemed much more fast paced from so low down (normally I buy the $7 tickets to sit up in the rafters or the 'nosebleeds') and I now have a lot more respect for the game and the players themselves, especially Kyrie Irving, he is the Cristiano Ronaldo of the NBA, his ball control and dribbling is phenomenal!

Brazilian Maestro Anderson Varejao downs a 3 pointer to cushion the Cavs lead

Here is a good bit of trivia for you, who is the highest paid British athlete playing abroad and who also happens to be the favourite basketball player of Barack Obama? Luol Deng would be the answer, even though he was born in Sudan he represented the Team GB basketball team in the Olympics and I'm really happy that he has now been traded to the Cavs so I can go and watch him strut his stuff! Hopefully he is just what the team need to push on into a playoff position even though it would be an understatement to say that the season has started extremely badly! I shall keep you informed!

A easy layup for Jack helps the Cavs grab a much needed victory!

In other news Amanda and Myself have also gotten our digs! We have moved into a old high school which have been done up into flats! It has all the old lockers along the hallways and they have converted the old common room into a gym for the residents, it is also rather cool because Amandas mum used to go to school here!!! the apartment itself is really brilliant, it has huge windows and lots of space and it is located on the lakefront a mere 3 miles from the city in a borough called Edgewater. I have gone to the liberty of taking some pictures for you, we have only just moved in so it isn't looking as cosy as we would like (no pictures on the walls yet etc) but it is getting there, what do you think?? It reminds me of the old Molly Ringwald teen movies like the Breakfast Club :)

And in some more good news I am pleased to announce that I have passed my provisional driving test (it was extremely easy, even if I did not know what a corporate municipality was!) Actually there was a few words that stumped me but clearly did not manage to trump me as I only got two questions wrong, one of them asked whether it was illegal not to wear a seat belt, I ticked yes or so I thought but apparently that answer was wrong, I don't know if I clicked the wrong button or what! Unfortunately it does not look like I shall be taking my test anytime soon as there is hardly anywhere to go to practice, all the car parks (no, I did not say parking lot!) are under about 10 meters of snow and so I think I'm going to wait until the arrival of Spring before I take my test! ahhhh... Spring :)

In more good news, I keep forgetting to add our wedding pictures to this website! so here they are, just click on the link.....

www.christopherdavidphotography.co.uk/wedding-gallery/amanda-greg/

They are fabulous wedding pictures and I hope you enjoy them more than my Dad did, the poor soul has not got broadband yet, and so he complained that in all the pictures peoples heads had been cut off, this was because his computer was too slow to load up the full size images and so he was looking at the thumbnails! And yes Dad you can take this as a very unsubtle hint that it is time you get broadband and Skype :)

A couple of interesting facts for you.... In 2012 there was 100 gun related homicides in Cuyahoga County (just Cleveland), that is higher than the whole of England and Waled where there was a total of  39 gun related homicides. Also, I was a little surprised to discover that in the state of Ohio there are 20 schools that teach creationism as fact instead of Darwins evolution of the species.... hmmmm!

Amanda sitting on the steps outside the Flight of the Conchords apartment in New York City!

Me and Amanda have just returned from our trip to New York to see the Arctic Monkeys and I'll do a blog on that in the next few days, if it does not appear here please feel free to give me a cyber kick up the ass :)

Good Morning from the Polar Vortex!

Hello Folks!

I am delighted to announce that all the snow has gone and I am starting to thaw out nicely now after the temperature dropped to a horrible -26 degres celsius last week! As a result I thought it was high time to bring my blog back from it's winter hibernation! yay! A little bird has told me that I have woken up the blog several months early, as it tends to stay cold till March or April but I figured it cant get as bad as last week and so much has happened recently I have decided it is worth risking the blog to the cold :)

A frigid and frozen lake Erie, I am not sure if it is frozen right the way across, but certainly it is frozen as far as the eye can see!

First of all I should say that I am still annoyingly awaiting my work permit (it can take up to 90 days!!!) I am getting such itchy feet and so to save my sanity I have started volunteering at the Cleveland Metroparks where the above pictures were taken. Cleveland is known as the forest city and has huge areas of mainly wooded parkland that needs to be managed and I am going to be helping out with the watershed stewardship program which means lots of planting and educating as to the best ways to keep water clean and trying to prevent flooding which can prove quite a difficult thing to do when rain comes down on top of 15 inches of snow! But I don't need to speak to you Brits about flooding..... I'm very glad I have missed the English weather this winter, it sounds like it has horrific!!!! I may have managed to successfully miss the English weather but I wish I could have managed to miss my bicycle yesterday - it is currently hanging up in the dry for the winter and while carrying logs inside for the fire I somehow managed to bang my head on the handlebar causing me to drop the heavy logs plum on my dodgy knee!!!! Luckily no damage has been reported back to my brain so its all good :)

Here are some nice pictures I took just the other day on a lovely warm and foggy morning, It was so good to be able to go outside without having to put on about a thousand layers! Can you spot the Coyote? :)

Greg the Coyote, Can you also spot his new doc Marties? My feet have been in a almost constant frozen state since I arrived here so I figured it was high time I got a pair of decent boots... I figured I should fly the flag for Great Britain too, even though my British designed doc Martens are now made in China :(

In some more exciting news me and Amanda shall soon be hitting  the big apple! We are going to spend a weekend in New York City to watch the Arctic Monkeys play in Madison Square garden! We originally wanted to see them play here in Cleveland but all of the tickets to all of the shows had sold out except for in New York. It is very similar to London as in everything is more expensive in NYC, the concert ticket was twice as much and sporting events are incredibly expensive also, in Cleveland I have had a lot of fun watching the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball NBA team play for $7 a ticket, yet when I looked into watching the New York Knicks (also a NBA team) play when we were in New York the cheapest available seat to see them play against the extremely average Denver Nuggets is $85! Although it is expensive I am really excited for our trip, there is so much to see and do in New York that I don't think 4 days will be enough but so long as we make it to the Brooklyn brewery and have a snowy romantic walk around central park I think I will be happy :)

While I was looking for brewery's to visit in New York I came across this incredibly cool map (Link Below), it lists every single brewery in the United States and by looking at it I was most surprised to see that the largest collection of breweries is not in Los Angeles, New York or Chicago but seems to be in San Diego, California and Portland, Oregon! here is the map, you should have a peep if you are interested. I wonder if anybody has ever managed to visit every brewery in the USA?Here is the brewery map... http://popchartlab.com/collections/prints/products/the-bountiful-breweries-of-the-united-states-of-america

The boys at the Great Lakes Brewery in Cleveland before the wedding!

Well that is all but I shall update you all soon with an exciting story about the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Richfield Coliseum. I shall leave you all with a nice picture of my Cousin Angus and me (in a basketball jersey that Amanda got me for Christmas! very cool! :). Angus braved an ice storm and 14 hours of driving in the snow to come down to stay with us for Christmas all the way from North Bay in Northern Ontario, Canada. It was great to spend Christmas with a member of my family, and I cannot wait for the summer, when we are going to spend a few days camping and canoeing through Ontario :)

Yes I know I need a haircut!

P.S I know it is a little belated but I hope that you all had a great christmas and that you all have a very happy new year :)

P.P.S I have just received a lovely Christmas card (on the 16th nJanuary) from my Aunty Mandy, the address on the front is perfect but the card was delivered with a big sticker underneath the address saying 'missent to Australia' I am pretty sure this card has almost travelled around the world, as it would have gone from the UK to Australia via Asia, and would have gone from Australia to the USA over the Pacific, not bad for 88 pence!

A cool shot of a suit of Armour at the Cleveland art gallery

A cute little cardinal bird in the garden :)

Queuing in the snow!

Today I had the pleasure to witness two American traditions.... The first one I'm sure you all know about, Thanksgiving day. Thanksgiving day is a celebration of the first dinner held between the indigenous American Indians and the Pilgrims fresh off the of the Mayflower. I suppose the dinner was held to symbolize a long and prosperous future for both sides whereas in fact I am sure the local Indians started regretting inviting those pesky pilgrims over for dinner from almost the first day! I know that some people say that the Pilgrims went to America to avoid persecution while others believe the real reason they went to America was to persecute!!

My thanksgiving dinner involved Beatrice - a Delicious succulent turkey of 18 pounds with all of your usual delicious trimmings - really it was very similar to your normal Christmas dinner with the added bonus of being in November, so you have another Christmas dinner to look forward to in about a months time :) In fact I can count myself twice as lucky today as I got to enjoy my thanksgiving dinner with Sheila and Ken (Amanda's Mum and Stepdad) and then another mini thanksgiving over at Amanda's Grans house! yummy!

This is just a quick little post to wish you all a very merry thanksgiving!

I shall sign off now but I shall leave you with something to ponder.... today the temperature outside was-5, it was snowing, most people have eaten too much, so what in the name of god are these people doing, queuing to get into a shop for that other American tradition 'Black Friday'?!?! My Black Friday experience was nowhere near as pleasant as my thanksgiving experience - while braving the cold to take these pictures for you on a Orange i phone or Galaxy Samsung or something fancy like that, Amanda and her car got swept away in a sea of people and traffic, leaving me stranded outside this shop in the freezing cold with everyone staring at me for a full 15 minutes! Poor old Greg! I hope it was all worth it to bring you these pictures :)

the queue stretched around 3 sides of the building!

The Car driving behind the sign nearly ran me down in its haste to be at the front of the queue

These people must be crazy! and no! no amount of deals or offers would ever convince me to queue up in the cold to go shopping! yuck!

Not a picture of the queue but a nice picture of some cupcakes Amanda and me made, aren't they cute :)

HAPPY THANKSGIVING :)

Weddings, Moon Pies and Thunderbirds

My Wedding :)

I just saw in a travel program on the television that in Britain the trains may be the most expensive per mile in Europe but they are also fast, frequent, the most comfortable and the most RELIABLE! What?!?!?! Clearly the host has not been privy to living in Edenbridge, missing his train by a minute and having to wait an hour for the next one which has been delayed due to leaves on the line, oh yes and having to pay an absurd amount for the privilege! Something I don't miss about home is the railways! no public transport is possibly better than that expensive and inadequate piece of....

Some other 'facts' I have enjoyed hearing on the tele about England is that 'hard up' means cheap and in a show called American Pickers (a little like the antique roadshow) they once visited a town "190 miles from London" Well.... 190 miles from London means you could be anywhere from France, Belgium and Holland to Bristol or Birmingham or Portsmouth! ha! I have no idea which town they visited!

This is a Rhino in the city of Southampton, they had erected 40 of them around the city and I went down there aiming to photograph them all (and watch a football game!) However due to a major cock up on the railways delaying me around 3 hours I only had time to find a handful of the 40 rhinos I was hoping to find :(

Well Good Evening world! This blog comes to you from the fingers of a husband, I am now a newly married man, yikes! First of all I suppose I should admit to being a complete and utter moron - in my last post I misspelled dEEr as dear! duh! it must be the American influence! just kidding :) I really wish I did not have to write a blog on the wedding as I really wanted all you folks from back home to be able to attend but as the 5 orangutans can testify the wedding was absolutely marvelous and I think a brilliant time was had by all. even if I did end up with cake on my face, quite literally :) A post about the wedding shall follow soon but as I only have 5 blurry pictures available to me right now it is going to have to wait! Do not fear however, as I still have lots of cool things to talk about from our amazing honeymoon in Savannah GA and Charleston SC

Quick quiz question mainly for the UK folk: what does GA and SC stand for?

if you guessed Georgia and South Carolina you would be correct :)

Our Hotel.

Savannah was our first stop and it has a warm temperate climate which means that it has seriously hot summers and also warm winter weather with stable highs in the 20s, a little like Greece in that regards, it is also prone to rather awesome thunderstorms and hurricanes and unfortunately for us the thunderstorms decided to stay away but fortunately the hurricanes did as well! Well I am pleased that me and Amanda did not decide to stay away as we had such a fantastic time! It can be really hard to find independent places to stay in America and so we were very happy when we discovered the Thunderbird Inn... located on the edge of downtown the Thunderbird inn is just full of retro charm from its red, orange and blue colour scheme to its awesome sign to the fact that when you enter your room you are greeted by 2 lovely Moon Pies on your pillows :) What are Moon Pies you may be thinking? well they are very similar to a wagon wheel except in true American tradition they are about twice the size and come in about a million and twenty flavours! yum! they definitely seem to be the candy of choice in the Southern states as you see them everywhere but unfortunately I am yet to see one in Ohio :(

Me and Amanda surrounded by Sunshine and Spanish moss.

Something that really helps to make Savannah unique is a plant called Spanish moss. Unlike it's name suggests this is not to be found in Spain but in very small areas of the Americas principally in Northern Chile and Argentina, through the tropics into Mexico and Honduras but mainly it can be found in Savannah. This stuff is everywhere! It hangs off of all the trees but seems to prefer large majestic oak trees and gives the whole town a really spooky (and Romantic!) feel. It is really lovely strolling through the tree lined avenues being shaded from the sun by the strands of moss hanging down.

Savannah is famous for it's historical city centre, an area consisting of 24 squares all stuffed full of Spanish moss, statues, fountains and surrounded by stunning colonial style houses dating from the last 400 years (very old for the USA!) the houses tend to have 3 floors - one for the slaves and 2 for the family, one of the houses we visited had up to 13 slaves at one point in it's history. We spent our first day strolling around visiting all 24 of these lovely squares and it really felt like stepping back in time, I have never been to a city that has been so well preserved without a single 60s tower block in sight! America may lack the history of Europe but the history it does have it certainly seems to do a brilliant job of preserving. My pictures don't really do the city justice, I found it so hard to photograph as the sun was so bright and the shadows so dark I couldn't figure out the contrast!!! very frustrating!!!

If any picture epitomizes life in Savannah, I think this must be it :)

Something else that America can do like no one else is food, as dinner in the Mellow Mushroom can testify.... pints of beer for $2 followed by a 'small' pizza for $10... the pints in America may be a little smaller than back home but the pizza certainly isn't! I am disappointed to announce that after 3 attempts at eating in Mellow mushroom (they also had a restaurant in Charleston) I failed to even once finish my pizza :( I think that even my friend Oz of the fish finger challenge fame would struggle with one of them!

For anyone who has read 'in the garden of good and evil' this is Jim Williams house. For anyone who has not read 'in the garden in the garden of the good and evil' I thoroughly recommend it!

A television program that Amanda and myself both enjoy watching is... ehm.... 'Ghost Adventures' where a team of paranormal investigators travel around some of the most haunted locations getting locked inside them from dusk until dawn scaring the living daylights out of each other and providing endless laughs during the process. As Savannah has a history of being one of the most haunted cities in the USA they have of course visited the city and so both Amanda and me were excited for our 'ghost day'! This involved a trip to Bonaventure cemetery in the daytime, followed by dinner in the moon river brewery (as visited by the ghost adventures crew) and a ghost tour in the evening. It was definitely my favourite day of our honeymoon, the cemetery was absolutely stunning, it covered a huge area, surrounded by steaming swamps and was home to a copious amount of sand flies and dead bodies, here are some pictures for you to enjoy :)

The Mercer family plot of Johnny Mercer fame.

A creepy angel with some Spanish Moss behind.

Our trip to the cemetery was followed by an unfortunately uneventful trip to the brewery - no matter how much beer I drank no ghosts seemed to be in the building that night :( The same could be said for our ghost tour, having happily taken quite a substantial amount of our money, the tour proceeded to take us to a 'paranormal location' this paranormal location turned out to be the tour companies own warehouse where they keep the trolleys at night and was apparently the location of a gruesome triple murder at the turn of the century..... hmmmmm.... I am thinking of entering the paranormal profession myself ;)

Me and Amanda at the Owens - Thomas house.

So I think I have written enough on Savannah for the time being.... But please stay tune as next up shall be honeymoon part 2: Charleston, South Carolina :)

in other news, after a lot of thought I have decided my future may lie in politics and have applied to be mayor of Toronto! I shall keep you informed on that one :)

The weather has been doing some crazy things here, I have only been in Ohio a little over a month and during this time I have experienced heat of 35 degrees, snow and -7 temperatures and currently there is a tornado warning issued for the area! ridiculous! but here is a lovely picture of the scene that greeted us on our return from honeymoon.

4 days to go!

Good Evening Everybody! There is only 5 days to go till the big day now, I am so excited! I am also very sorry there has not been much action on the blog front lately - things have been extremely hectic and busy lately and I intend to fill you in in a lot more detail post wedding! But to wet your appetite here are some pictures of things I have done in the past couple of weeks :)

The resident dear population - you may notice the lack of flowers in the gardens and these critters combined with the harsh winters are the main reason why!

Me alongside my lovely new bicycle going for our first ride along the towpath

My lovely new bicycle sitting up against a nice tree in all its autumn (fall) glory

Does this picture need a caption? it was an absolute beast of a burger and the beer is pretty good too!

This is something called a chocolate Smores... it is a chocolate covered pretzels with pieces of marshmallows in it! mmmmmm :)

The perfect place to experience a storm.... in the middle of a really long bridge with no cover at all :(

Another cool shot of the city shrouded in cloud... at the end of the bridge this time :)

A nice view looking over the Cleveland shoreline and Lake Erie 

HAPPY HALLOWEEN PEOPLE :)

Barry or Berry?

Good day to you! So confusion has reigned supreme in my new household this week, it all started over a simple cup of tea.... Barry's tea which is imported from Ireland is by far and away the best cup of tea you can get in America and I am very grateful that it is available in my new home. However I did not touch the stuff for several days as I was under the impression that the tea in the box was 'Berry' tea. In the US Barry is pronounced exactly the same as Berry, so there is no Barry Bonds, he is in fact Berry Bonds, ask any American to say Barry and then Berry and the response you will get bar none is 'Berry, Berry'! So for all you lovely Americans out there... there is in fact a A in Barry :)

 I apologise that after all my talk there has been no blog for a few weeks, I can only begin to tell you how busy I have been - In fact I do believe that trying to tell you how busy I have been is exactly what I shall do! 

The visa which I have gained for the USA is a fiancee visa, this means that it gives me permission to enter the USA once to marry, and as soon as we marry I need to apply for a change of status to permanent residency and a green card. I am allowed to work as soon as I entered the USA, as well as allowed to apply for a social security card, a driving license, healthcare and whatever else I should chose to apply for. That is all well and good, however due to those Republicans and Obamacare the US government has gone into shutdown, this means that the office which would supply me with my social security card is currently closed until further notice - which basically means no security card for me, which means no anything else for me until the issues in Washington are sorted out! so Washington if you are listening... please sort out your problems soon as I am relying on you!!

So as I have been unable to do much official stuff yet I have been very busy instead preparing for the wedding but mainly fun! I have purchased a really smart blue suit, a nice simple silver wedding band, a new phone and a gorgeous new bike (pictures will follow in a future blog) I was also very very lucky to get a ticket to see the Cleveland Indians play in their first playoff game for six years. I got the ticket because Amanda purchased them by mistake - she meant to purchase the actual playoff tickets but got the tickets for the wildcard game by mistake and as the Indians lost the game and there was no playoff it worked out brilliantly for me (the wildcard game is a winner takes all game with the victorious team advancing to the playoffs proper).

The Cleveland Indians came into the season as your typical underdogs and I put a bet on them at the start of the year to win the world series for the first time in 59 years at 100/1, they started off the year well with the best record in the division and hopes started to rise before they collapsed in a August which saw them lose 20 games and had their best pitcher arrested after being caught sending drugs to his own house under his dogs name! However they rallied in September winning their last 10 games in a row to host a winner takes all playoff game against the Tampa Bay Rays on the day after I arrived. If you want to attend any baseball game it would be this one, where 152 games or blood sweat and tears all comedown to this, and I was there - it was a truly memorable sporting occasion and the crowd were fantastic... until the Indians started losing... then my jet lag kicked in and everyone was left gutted after a crushing 4-0 defeat :( Still! It was a great game to watch and I am very excited for next spring where they get to try all over again for that elusive world series that the city so desires.

Waving the rally hankies!

And here is a picture of some more people waving white hankies! 20 thousand people Morris dancing at the Cropredy folk festival! good times!

I also feel I should say a big thank you to my new family over here, Amanda, Sheila and Ken - Thank you so much for allowing me to stay in your lovely home and filling me up with steaks and introducing me to pierogies and stuffed cabbages! Jim and Cheryl and Mackenzie - I'm sorry I have not gotten to spend a huge amount of time with you yet but I had so much fun at the ice hockey and I hope we get to catch up with the mullet men again soon :D I'd also like to thank the weather for being so beautiful! I don't believe it has dropped below 80 degrees since I arrived although I would appreciate a drop in the humidity levels!!!

Travel Tip of the Week this week is how to book a Transatlantic flight: A neat little trick is that they always fill up the economy seats from the front backwards, so to get lots of space all you need to do is change your seat to the back row (unless you chose BA, who charge you £20 to change your seat more that 24 hours in advance!). This trick has worked really successfully for me and so sure enough when I boarded my plane in London there is everyone crammed in at the front and me stretching out in my own row at the back, unfortunately a rather old, smelly, hairy and large English lady was too busy knitting to get the memo, I have no idea where she came from but she just dumped herself right in my row about 3 hours into the flight, fell asleep, started snoring and did not move until the flight landed in Cleveland! Bah!

I know that this picture has nothing to do with my blog, but this is my friend Tim from back home eating a sandwich, I thought I'd include it as a little nudge for him to reply to my email :D

And here is a lovely picture of my mum at Scotney Castle a couple of weeks before I left! I miss you mum!

Thanks for reading :) I promise the next entry will be much more interesting and witty as more silly things start to happen to me :)