First Week!

Well, we’ve moved to London and we’re enjoying things a lot so far.   Lots of little surprises, annoyances, and experiences thus far.

When we first arrived, we walked in to our living quarters and were dumbfounded. 

We are living in a residence for international students a few blocks from the British Museum so the location is amazing.  However, it’s a studio the size of the average bedroom you would have in your house growing up, expanded by a few feet on either side to make way for a super long desk with a table that rolls out from beneath on one side and a kitchenette with a bar fridge on the other side.  There is a bed that folds out of the wall and closes behind some closet doors.  And we have a tiny bathroom of course as well.  It’s pretty much everything we need – but definitely the smallest place we’ve lived in for sure!  We also have a lovely neighbour named CJ with long blonde hair who introduced himself in the middle of the night.  Which is like knocking on someone’s bedroom door basically haha.  I was sleeping with my earplugs in of course and heard about the violation in the morning from Pheroze who answered the door totally naked.

Which reminds me of a funny story.  We were so jet-lagged when we arrived and our minds were so messed up that on our first morning here, Pheroze jumped out of bed when his usual work alarm went off on his cell phone in the morning and he raced into the shower thinking he was going to work and realized mid-shower he didn’t have work here :S

And last night at 2am or something the fire alarm went off and it was one of the loudest fire alarms I’ve ever heard so of course I jumped out of bed, obviously to see if there was smoke or anything in the building and I came back to our room like a good 15 seconds later and Pheroze was JUST waking up and was like “what’s going on?”.  Are you kidding me?  I had to turn the lights on in the room before he oriented himself to the siren going off.  Wow?

Anyways, we’ve done a lot for only being here just over a week I think.  I’ve done first aid and manual handling training, visited recruitment offices, and been to the hospital for tuberculosis immunization and blood test for my occupational health criteria.  I’ve learned that my professional registration that I need to be a speech therapist here may be at least another 12 weeks before they process my application I sent at the beginning of July so I’m going to start looking for other random jobs to do in the meantime. Pheroze started school yesterday and has been busy registering and all of that stuff in the last week.  It’s a five minute walk for him to campus.

As for fun things we’ve done so far, we’ve been to four pubs, a “beach party” at our residence pub, a really bad fish and chips place, the British Library, the Imperial War Museum, Soho, Chinatown, St. Paul’s Cathedral on Sunday while it’s big church bells were tolling (loved that!), I walked over Waterloo Bridge the other day and saw the London Eye and Big Ben, we’ve been to a couple markets with my cousin Ingrid and Mike with amazing food stalls of every kind, Camden market filled with all sorts of “dark angel” clothes and tattoo parlors and the like, Hampstead Heath park which was like walking into a gorgeous coffee-table book on England, and generally we’ve walked around all over the place.  This weekend we’ll probably do at least part of the British Museum and possibly head over to Trafalgar Square.

Basically, our first impression is that we love it here and there is tons to do. 

There are all these little signs that make us feel like it’s the 80’s here though.  A few examples.  You need a tuberculosis vaccination here to work in health care.  Also, at my first aid course, the instructor told everyone that you basically you go nuts pumping the heart in CPR.  No BeeGees staying alive rhythm or anything.  Just pump as fast and hard as you physically can.  The demo was crazy!  Also, they do this back-slam thing here instead of the Heimlich maneuver which the instructor demonstrated on the CPR dummies causing the dummy head to severely whip-lash which was quite amusing.  As well, many things seem to be done by mail here that would otherwise be done online in Canada.  There are other things that I won’t go into.

That’s all for now!  I’m going to try and start taking more pictures as well for the next update.