Country #2 - the UK (London)
June 1992 - November 1995
A bench at the Bank
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Like many other people moving to the UK, I started off in East London, living in a student flat in Stratford. After an encounter with a mega-sized cockroach in my bed-room I decided I had to get out of there as quickly as possible. But I didn't want to give up yet and go back to Germany - even though the initially planned three months were over. There was still too much to be seen and learned. Through a friend, I met a great bunch of mostly Irish people, and we had loads of fun at the strangest places. I am still missing those times!
My next room was in a shared house, still in East London. It wasn't that clean either but at least they didn't have any cockroaches! My room was tiny, something like 2.2m by 2m. Nevertheless, I lived in that little shoebox for nearly two and a half years, always finding reasons to stay on in England.
As I had just finished my exams in 1992, I was quite happy to have some sort of extended holiday experience, but after a while I was getting bored with being unemployed and having absolutely no money.
My first job in London was voluntary. Twice a week, I was working in an institution for children with special needs, which was great fun.
As I had been unemployed for some time, I was eligable to go on a training course. I chose a five month course in Information Technology in which I learnt a lot of useful stuff about databases, word-processing, spreadsheets, and e-mail. After the course was finished, I was asked if I wanted to stay at the training company and do a work placement as a trainer. So the next seven months I found myself teaching other unemployed people the same skills I had acquired earlier. This was a lot of work (full-time) without any financial improvement - but I enjoyed nearly every little bit of it.
Quite a selection of chimneys
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Finally, after more than two years in London of doing this and that to keep myself alive, I managed to get a real job as a technical support representative in a software company; somebody was needed who was fluent in German and English and had some PC knowledge - perfect for me. I think I started one week after the interview.
A little later (January 1995), I had finally made it into a proper flat in Walthamstow, had even got all my furniture and other belongings over from Germany (thanks to my sister!!!) when my working life interfered and moved my job over to Holland. In the summer of the same year, the company I was working for was bought by another one, and it was decided to run support operations from Leiden, in the Netherlands. The decision wasn't too difficult, as London had started to get on my nerves (too big, too dirty, too expensive), Holland sounded very interesting, and if I wanted to stay in my job I had to go. So I had to pack my things again...
Things I liked
- Whoever I met was really nice and friendly and it didn't matter that my English wasn't very good at the beginning.
- Moving over pennyless, I was able to get social benefits, go to an IT training course and find my now 10 year job that way. Thank you, Great Britain!
- I loved the anonymity that London gives you. There are so many different people that it really doesn't matter what you wear.
- The amount of entertainment that was available, the free museums, the cinemas, the pubs, the markets...
- The food. Yes, the FOOD. Of course not the typical English 'cuisine', but all the different kinds of Asian food you can get. It was a revelation to me! Chinese food that doesn't taste German, Indian food that can be unbelievably hot but mixes so many wonderful spices, Thai food that just tasted different to anything I'd eaten before. I learned that curry powder is not what you get in Germany in the supermarket, but something that tastes 10,000 times better when you mix it yourself from different spices.
Things I hated
- My absolute pet hate: The dirty air around Oxford street. One day of shopping and your hair was full with black dirt... Yuck.
- Public transport, especially trains, being quite unreliable at times. One time a train didn't come. When we asked the station manager he pretended that the train had just left - but we'd been there for about 15 minutes before the train was even supposed to go...
- The high prices and the low wages. I could hardly afford anything while living in London.
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