So apparently I didn’t die in a fire in Washington DC
I’m still alive and I moved directly from the US to London (LDN).
Just the time to pack up again, two weeks in Milan and then get to LDN for another amazing adventure. Well, I have to admit it: DC was like the peace after a storm, 5 months of holidays, while here, for the first time in my life, I have a full-time office job. Well, let’s say, it’s not properly a full-time job, it’s more like a full-time underpaid intern experience; and of course London seems the right city where you can afford to live underpaid, right?
Now, it’s already been 2 months since I moved here. Bye bye my beloved lukewarm Washington and welcome to the most fucking freezing winter of my life (I’m joking, NYC was worse, but since it was snowing till last week I have to give London all its merits).
London has always been in my mind the perfect city (I have already been here a couple of time before and totaly fell in love with), I always wanted to live here since I was child; but as soon as I landed I realized that LDN is hell. The most beautiful hell in the world!
So just before starting blogging about this new experience, I would like to share some advices with you.
So first of all:
– Going to London is like going to Rimini, you can turn your head back and forth and everywhere you will find fucking desperate Italians like you. And no, they are not here for holidays, they live and work here.
Actually you can play this really great game every time you are on a bus or on the metro: “How many Italians are you able to spot?” If you are unlucky, you will be able to just find 3/4 Italians on the same bus/train, but in your luckiest day you will be able to feel completely ashamed by the myriad of your embarassing compatriots (yes, we are embarassing and I’m proud of being one of them!).
– Finding a place where to live is a nightmare. Houses in London are shit. If you want to come and live here, you have been warned. Plan to come here 1 or 2 weeks in advance just to find a decent place. And, of course, never give up.
The first places you see will be worse than the isolation room at Briarcliff, but they will help you lowering your expectations so that, after a few days, you will feel more confortable about the flophouse you find.
– LDN is fucking expensive… Not completely true, just public transportation.
All the rest is up to you, you can manage to live a decent life with less than 1000£ a month (rent for a double room in a shared house in zone 2 included, and, yes, double room doesn’t mean you have a room to share with somebody else).
– Never, and I say never, try to get drunk outside of yours or someone else’s home. Drinking in LDN (unless you like to get drunk with beers) is useless. And it is not because the alcohol is expensive, but it’s because Londoners are fucking ridiculous. I mean have you ever try to drink a Vodka Lemon with half a finger of Vodka? Well, the half-finger is the standard quantity of alcohol you can have in a drink, so give your heart a break.
For no reason waste your money on alcohol.
That’s the reason why on weekends you will find not only drunk teenagers eveyrwhere around but also respectable people lying on the ground at 9pm.
I once found a man crawling in the middle of Vauxhall at 10pm on a Friday night, but – OK – Vauxhall is a whole different thing…
