London – 3 Weeks In

by Jul 15, 2012England, London Life, United Kingdom1 comment

What a busy 3 weeks we have had here so far!

Our most exciting piece of news this week is that I accepted a job offer on Thursday afternoon (for a permanent role at a Hedge Fund) and joined Dayna in the working world on Friday (the best day possible to start a job).  It was a quick turn around from being unemployed to joining the masses on the way to work on the tube in the morning but it’s nice to know we’ll both be getting paid next month now (it’s scary how quick your money dwindles away when you’re not earning anything).

I am especially glad to see the back of recruiters for awhile.  I dealt with a few that I quite liked and might even catch up for a beer with at some point but the majority of them are worse than used car salesmen.  To make it worse, I think I (unintentionally) set records for “Most Recruitment Companies Talked To” and “Most Recruiter’s Business Cards Collected” (15 and 33 respectively, just in case you’re curious).

Dayna on the other hand met with only 2 recruiters and got a job from her first interview.  Not really fair right?

We’ve also made some progress on the accommodation front as well.  We started the ball rolling with the agent yesterday so he now has everything he needs to complete all the checks before we can actually sign a lease for the flat.  It all sounds pretty positive so far so possibly this time next week we’ll be signing the lease.

Another annoying task we got around to was setting up a new bank account (we’re not big fans of our current bank).  This is exactly the sort of task that is strangely difficult in the UK (especially when you’re new in the country).  We thought we were doing pretty well until about 40 minutes in to the process when the guy asked “Christine” to fill in her details on one of the forms.

We figured he had just confused Dayna’s middle name with her first so we ignored it, thinking there’s no way he would put it in the system wrong given he was filling it in off her passport.  Turns out we were wrong.

He had managed to open up a joint account for me and a girl named Christine Dayna (Dayna’s surname didn’t make the cut apparently).  So not a big win for us there.  His excuse was that the layout of the Irish passport makes it an easy mistake to make.  Not really sure how that is though because Dayna’s name is clearly printed in the correct order with the large bold surname on top.  We’ve left it to him to fix up and update everything so hopefully he can redeem himself anyway.

Having somewhat failed at our banking mission we consoled ourselves by visiting Borough Markets again (our second visit).  It’s one of my favourite place in London so far – loads of different stalls with really yummy food in a nice setting (other than the thousands of other people strolling around).  Between us we managed to get through a roast topside beef sandwich, a roast chicken and stuffing sandwich, a couple of glasses of Sangria and a huge chocolate brownie.  All tasted amazing.

I would share some photos of it but it was raining (a recurring theme here) and we didn’t have a camera on us.  So this is the closest I can get.  If anyone makes it to London to visit us we will definitely be taking you there.

Now that we’re both working we can finally start to plan some more exciting trips away (our furthest trip since getting to London has been a trip on the tube to Tooting Bec to get our national insurance numbers sorted).  The only issue is that since we have just started our jobs it may be a few months before we can take leave easily.  At least it gives us plenty of time to plan!

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