Exploring the town center

Banbury is the small town we will call home for the next couple of years. It is situated about 78 miles northwest of London and about an hour by train. With a population of 47000 by recent estimates, it is smaller than Döbling, the 19th district of Vienna where we last resided, by about 20,000. The city of Vienna has a population of 1.7 million by comparison. Some history can be found here.

Today, we headed to the Castle Quay mall, pronounced Castle Key. I have to keep reminding myself that we Americans are the ones who changed the language. We had been offline for almost 24 hours and the natives were getting restless. Phone service with data was the goal.

Three is a big mobile phone provider in Europe. There were other providers available like O2, EE and Vodaphone, but I was we were familiar with Three from Vienna (it was Drei there) and the people here were friendly and eager to assist.

One of things that Three offers but Drei did not (back in 2012 anyway) is free roaming. No need for a travel plan now even in the U.S. We can use our phone for data and calls in the U.S. and most European countries except Germany. Can't blame them for excluding Germany. Coincidentally, they also don't teach German in schools here. Something about being bombed by them just didn't sit right, know what I mean?

As we left the store with mobile service for all, we saw a Sky TV booth.  I had researched them as well before we came over and we were planning on subscribing so we did.  While we really don't need TV service - we have Apple TV hooked up to a U.S. cable provider - everything is in English here so it is not the waste that it has been at non English posts.

This has been a seamless experience compared to Vienna where there were bureaucratic hurdles to set up anything on your own or Warsaw where we had someone as a proxy to do everything for us. It was nice, but better to not have to depend on anyone to do it for you.

The other big change I noticed is that you could buy over the counter medication without having to go to the Apotheke that only sells medicine. Now, if we are low on cough medicine, I can pick up toothpaste at the same time.  Like in America.

So, now we have internet on our phones, but have to wait two weeks for in home set up. What to do? Buy a few board games for entertainment and discover that our youngest is quite the tycoon on the Monopoly Brands game. Fun times!