Official Photograph of the London Olympics from www.london2012.com
I have a way of making things difficult for myself.
Just in case it’s not challenging enough to pick up and move overseas to London, I’ve decided to do it during what is possibly the most inconvenient, busiest and most expensive time ever, in the middle of the 2012 London Olympics. I arrive in the same two weeks that millions of other people are expected to travel to the UK, when the transport systems will be ridiculously busy and accommodation will be in extremely high demand.
You may ask yourself, why? Why does she insist on arriving during such a hectic time of year? Let me assure you, I ask myself the same thing and still haven’t been able to come up with a logical explanation other than ‘because I can’.
The way I see it, work will always be busy, there always seems to be a colleague away on holidays and it’s never a good time to up and leave. There will never be a good time financially – as you may have noticed with my budgeting rants of late, real saving never commences until the final hour anyway. There will never be a good time to say bye to friends – birthdays, weddings, babies, houses – the older I get, the more often this is going to happen. Most importantly there will never be a good time to say ‘See you later’ to my darling parents who I’ll miss like crazy (but just think of the amazing family holidays we’ll be having over the next few years!).
What I’m getting at is that there will never be an absolutely ideal time to make this move. If I want to look for excuses not to go, I could easily find five hundred of them, but I’m not willing to put my life on hold because work is too busy, I haven’t been doing a good job at saving, my friends are starting to get married, or because of the damn Olympics.
The best that I can do is choose a time that feels right and grab the bull by the horns when the opportunity arises. A couple of months ago, our landlord asked my boyfriend and I if we would extend our lease for another 12 months. We sat on it for a couple of weeks, umm-ed and ahh-ed, discussed what we wanted to do with our lives, and came to the conclusion that we are willing to extend for 6 months only. That was where the planning really began. We had basically just made a commitment on paper to be homeless in six months, so if that wasn’t going to push our butts into gear to make this move, then nothing would.
Whilst arriving in the middle of the Olympics may have some perks such as going to watch some Olympic events and seeing the city abuzz with atmosphere, it probably has many more downfalls for a couple of newbie expats like us, namely with the cost and availability of accommodation. This situation has pushed us to explore a whole array of accommodation possibilities, and it would be a shame for all this research to go to waste, so this Monday I will be posting up a new page about Accommodation options upon arrival in London.
So please stay tuned, and until then (if your weather is anything like our freezing Melbourne temperatures at the moment), stay warm.
The London New Girl
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