Moving to London

You know how I spoke about staying committed to blogging and reflecting on my experiences? Yeah, that went down the drain over the past two months. I know it is not what I initially intended to happen but I had a major life event…

I moved to London.

Ok, quick backstory. I study in Lancaster University on a 4 year degree. This is how my degree is structured:

1. First year
2. Second year
3. Placement year (one year of work)
4. Final year

I am done with the first two years and this year I am on my placement. Finding a placement is pretty intense and if you are planning on doing a placement year, I would strongly suggest you get on it early.

Fortunately enough, I managed to find a placement at IBM in their London location. That in itself was a task and it is not even the hardest part! The most challenging part is packing up your life, finding an affordable place in one of the most expensive cities in the world and starting fresh.

It was an exciting time for me, but also an anxious one. Until now I had only been part of the structured university student life. I had tasks and deadlines and everything was in place, I just had to pass. But now, I found myself starting a working adult life and I had no clue where to begin.

I managed to find a few other interns who were also starting at IBM and found a place with them. So I got a moving company, packed up my shit, and got to London.

Right, task 1 complete. I’m here now. The city of dreams, opportunities and Boris bikes. It’s all easy from here now isn’t it? Well, no.

I was super lonely. I was in a new city all by myself with people I have never spoken to before. It was a very difficult period for me to get adjusted to being away from everyone and everything that was familiar. I was way out of my comfort zone and I wanted to crawl back into the warmth. But I just had to be patient, everything was happening so fast that I had lost my composure. I started to take time to figure out life here and started getting into a routine. That helped a lot.

You know what didn’t help? Not having fucking internet.

YEP. WITHOUT INTERNET IN 2017.

Apparently in the age of on-demand everything, you need to wait half a month to get broadband. So here I was, in an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar people and with my not unlimited mobile data. Believe me, if you want to do anything more significant than superficial social media consumption, it’s hard to be without broadband.

I tried to welcome the challenge — I decided that I would read more, explore the city, get in touch with ‘myself’; basically all the bs people tell themselves when Facebook has a temporary outage.

On the plus side, I befriended the neighbour’s dog.

For a while it was fine, I was doing all of those things I mentioned. My quality of life had definitely gone up. But I was still unsatisfied. It was unreal, the magnitude of influence that digital has on our life at present. I would have given up shelter for a few hours of internet (which I did by roaming on the streets, connecting to free wifi). I even tried to get my work laptop to be a hotspot for the house, by connecting it to free wifi on the street.

…finally the day came. The house went apeshit crazy.

Our human interaction dropped, we resorted into our caves, plugged ourselves into the cyber-drug and peace was restored.

At this point I was feeling more comfortable in London and I had gotten acquainted with the city and my neighbourhood. Things were looking good and my first day at IBM was soon. I will leave my experience of joining IBM for another post. For now, I have a favour to ask you.

When we moved into the new house, I got the smallest room. In order to compensate for that, I was given a small spare room. I could do with it whatever I wanted.

….. so I converted it into my super-hip workspace.

I love this space. I spend most of my time here and it gets my juices flowing. HOWEVER, I have been unable to come up with an equally cool sounding name for this space. For now it’s known as the ‘office’ and the cool factor drops by a thousand, every time someone calls it that.

SO PLS HELP ME OUT.

COMMENT A COOL NAME FOR THIS SPACE DOWN BELOW OR ON FACEBOOK.

I look forward to hearing the wacky stuff you all come up with!