Living in London: A 5-Month Retrospective
Part I
In December of 2010, I arrived in England ready and willing to embrace it with naivete and enthusiasm. England, as it turns out, didn’t seem to feel the same way about me. At least not at first.
Straight off a 12-hour flight from balmy Las Vegas, I schlepped my tired, weakened frame towards the airport connector and was immediately blasted with air from the UK’s coldest winter in nearly 30 years. Unphased, I soldiered on to border control where I made a comment to the immigration officer about how empty the line was. “That’s what happens when world economies crumble”, he responded as he stamped the UK Tier 1 visa in my passport.
I laughed nervously, picked up my freshly stamped passport and sauntered out into the great unknown. Previous to that day I had spent precisely four days in London – two on a weekend break and another two looking for an apartment. After 5 months here, I know now how lucky I was to secure a flat within the span of a weekend.
My boyfriend had the unfortunate honor of moving into our little slice of London two weeks ahead of my arrival. He greeted me at the airport looking gaunt and a little worse for wear. The man who spent his childhood on the island paradise of Hawaii and his adulthood in the scorching Las Vegas desert suddenly found himself on an alien planet where the sun goes down at 4pm and little white flakes float down from the sky. The transition had certainly taken its toll.
After a brief, yet exhausting ride on the tube, I took my first steps on London pavement as a resident. It was pitch dark by then, and walking to the flat with my luggage took nearly 15 minutes. Limbs numb, hungry and completely worn down, I entered into our poorly insulated room and collapsed onto the bed, shaking from the cold.
“So this is England?”, I said to myself.
