Settling in

It's taken three long months but I think I am finally settling into London life.

A HUGE part of that is finally securing a job - unemployment is an enormous factor in happiness when you're in a foreign country without your network of friends and family.  And job hunting in London is so much tougher than it ever was in Sydney.  For a contract role at a Telco I had 3 rounds of interviews, a psych assessment, a case study and a presentation.  Only to be rejected for an internal candidate.  So it's tough, but I have finally secured a contract with a retail bank in the UK and I start next week so I'm totally stoked.  I can honestly say that since securing a job I finally had my first decent night's sleep since March.

I've been slowly making friends and getting out a bit more.  Reformer Pilates has been my saviour whenever I've been frustrated with the work situation.  I've been pretty diligent with my home life - doing laundry, cooking, dishes, cleaning.  I have to admit I did let the eating habits slide a bit.  I was eating out of boredom which resulted in eating 5 meals a day and eating chocolate, pastries, cookies - foods that I never used to eat back at home.  It all came to a head a few weekends ago when I ate so much lunch I almost felt like throwing up.  I decided immediately that I would get back to 3 reasonably healthy/normal sized meals a day and it was surprisingly easier than I expected.

I'm slowly learning the names of the different tube lines and roughly where the main tube stops are.  I've started getting annoyed if I have to wait more than 5 minutes for a bus.  BUT I haven't started complaining about the weather (give it a few more weeks) and I certainly am not used to queueing for everything.  Brits love to queue.  Everywhere.  For anything.  I don't know whether the queueing culture has created a culture of slow service workers or vice versa but it's bloody frustrating.

I had been keeping a shopping list on my phone and I said to myself I would reward myself when I finally got a job (and also because when you're unemployed for 6 months, how do you justify buying all the fancy things?).  Of course my new job confirmation came at the same time as Black Friday and I may have gone a little crazy.  That's another post....

I have a few things planned for my final week of unemployment and if I stop being lazy I will actually blog about it.