Seeing the sprawling landscape for the first time, the boiling pot of different cultures filling the city streets, London was a far cry from what we had known so well in Tauranga.
With nowhere to live and just a prospective meeting with a recruitment agency that had promised the world, we arrived on a rather grey-looking Monday morning, jumping on the tube right in the middle of peak hour – fun!
Starting out in London, you don’t get to enjoy yourself much. Some people are lucky and land on their feet straight away (I’m looking at you accountants!) but for most, it is a real struggle in the first few months. Between finding jobs and accommodation, the culture shock and coming to the realisation that your support network is now a 30 hour plane journey away – it all takes its toll.
After realising how tough it was going to be to settle, we left the city just 4 days after landing. Who knows what would have happened, but if it wasn’t for friends and family, I think we would have gotten to know London’s hostels quite well in those first few weeks.
Our first taste of flatting in London was a share house in an area that you wouldn’t want to spend time in after dark. I’m talking about the kind of place you don’t tell your parents about. A place where shootings and gang warfare is common place. But at least it was cheap.
The problem with some of the landlords in London is that they simply don’t care about anything but money. They will cram as many people as possible into their flats – converting lounges, offices, even large cupboards into bedrooms. This is how we found ourselves agreeing to live in a 6 bedroom flat. 7 people and 1 bathroom isn’t exactly luxury, but what other choice did we have. It was either that or nothing.
At least by this stage, money was coming in from Nikki’s relief teaching and we could start to look forward to two things: getting out of this shithole of a house, and maybe getting out of London and doing a bit of travel.
“They say good things come in threes and we definitely got our fair share in the early parts of 2014.”
The housing situation didn’t improve. We soon figured out that we shared our walls with a family of rats, it took a month to get a fridge, hot water was a lottery and by the time we packed our things and walked out five months later, the oven had yet to be fixed. It wasn’t all bad though – after all it did have a roof.
For me, I think in the first three months after landing, I achieved a whole heap of nothing. I would have met with upwards of 30 agencies, countless interviews and yet no job. At this stage, Nikki was miserable; I was unemployed and ready to give up. It got to the point where I could have easily seen us moving back to NZ, but everything changed…
They say good things come in threes and we definitely got our fair share in the early parts of 2014. It all happened so quickly – our very own flat, the arrival of a good friend from NZ and an actual, real life marketing job.
It couldn’t be that easy, right?
SG