Five Years of Living in London

Half a decade ago in April 2018 I scanned my first ever one way ticket and got on a plane to the United Kingdom.  If you had told me that five years later I would not only still be living in London but married to an Englishman and parent to a British citizen I would have told you were nuts. However, Mark and Lily are two of the best people to ever come into my life and I am oh so grateful.

Since my brain is in a bit of a newborn blur of broken and nearly sleepless nights I almost forgot this milestone.  However, this past weekend as I was doing my US taxes (womp, womp) I realized that today I will have lived in England for five years.   I have blogged various times over the years about my expat life during this time and there are some things I still find really strange (post codes, eggs not being refrigerated) and others I have come to love like the thoroughness of the NHS in emergency situations or the fact that people actually take their vacation.

Two of the posts I recounted these differences were 10 Surprising Things After One Month in London though many of them still ring true and the same goes with the 13 Things I Wish I Knew Before Moving Abroad in case you missed them.  Living in London, especially during COVID, has been trying but it has certainly had it’s highlights as well.  There is a whole category of Sparkles & Shoes devoted to London as well as more than 80 highlighted stories on my Instagram page of my adventures here.

Five years is a long time, longer than the time I spent in Washington, D.C. for university and coming up on six years that I lived in Manhattan.  So is London forever? Realistically, I am not sure what is next.  If I had to guess I would not say that in another five years I will be living in England , I think my family will be on to our next adventure, be never say never!  And because everyone wants to see baby content it seems, the picture above is from one of our first walks with Lily this past weekend in front of her first London monument, St. Paul’s Cathedral!