Getting started

Welcome everyone to my London diary. Here, you will find my comments about my experiences in London. I have thought of writing this diary in order to have a reminder of these months in Britain.
Today, it has exactly been seven weeks since I arrived in London. During the first six weeks, I have stayed with an English family, in a Victorian house located in the heart of Fulham (close to Fulham Broadway), within walking distance to my English school. This zone is quite rich: my landlady told me that her house is worth 1,500,000 pounds. It is a house with three floors, a garden and enormous rooms. During the time I have spent there, I have had the chance of learning about English traditions and customs in an authentic English family. However, the rent was too expensive and Ivete and I were missing our intimacy, so we decided to move to another place. It is a pity because my landlady enjoyed talking to me and I could practise my English with her.

Just a week ago, we have moved to a flat: it is a studio with separate kitchen and bathroom. It just has a wardrobe and a bed. It is located at Shepherd's Bush, on Uxbridge Road, in the west of London.
It has taken us three weeks to find a suitable place. As we visited different places, we were getting more and more desperate because of the difficulties we found. I have learned that when they say "cosy" room, they actually mean a tiny hole. When they say rooms available from 180 pw, they only have rooms from 250 pw. There are landlords willing to rent you a mediocre flat and, in change, they request all kinds of guarantees: work references, previous landlord references, bank statements, information about taxes paid during last year, someone responsible of paying the rent in case you do not pay it, etc. In other cases, there are flats with up to eight flatmates. Although we wanted to find some place near the school, in Fulham Broadway, at last we decided to widen our quest to the areas around, as West Brompton, Hammersmith, Putney and Shepherd's Bush.

In order to furnish our studio, we have used storage boxes as drawers, our suitcases as bedside tables and we have bought the most vital things such as kitchenware, toiletries and sheets.
It may sound odd, but I have seen foxes on the street. As I was told then, foxes are attracted by the rubbish in the street. The point is that rubbish bags are left on the street instead of being put in containers. I would have never imagined this image of London. In fact, I still feel reluctant to leave the rubbish in the middle of the street, but I have no choice.

Another achievement during this time has been to open a bank account. Most banks are very reluctant to open an account for unemployed foreigners so it has been difficult to find one willing to. Eventually, we have opened an account in Barclays (after providing a letter from the school to confirm our status as students).

On the course of these weeks, I have applied for several positions as volunteer in charities. However, most people were on vacation during August, so it has been difficult to get any responses. Finally, last week I had an interview with people from one charity looking for someone to improve its website. The interview went well, although I did not know WordPress, the tool they used to manage the website. The only problem was that they asked me for providing references from two different people. At first, I thought I could not cope with this since I did not know anyone willing to back me. However, I managed to get references from my previous landlady and from one of my teachers.

Finally, I should speak about my English classes. My first surprise was to find that most of the teachers are foreign people, they are not native speakers. Besides, I expected the classes were more focused on developing fluency skills instead on grammar.
The first day in the school, I took a short test to evaluate my level. After that, they decided that my level would be upper-intermediate. Every month, we have to seat an exam to measure our progress. Last week, I took my progress exam and, as a result, I have been promoted to the next level (pre-advanced).
After one week in this new level, I have noticed that it will be more challenging.

After these weeks, I think I do not speak far better than when I arrived, but I largely improved my ability to understand, my ability to write, my vocabulary and, above all, my confidence.
I still struggle to express myself because my thoughts run ahead of my language. Another problem is my pronunciation: in the beginning, I was unaware of my accent, but now I am trying to improve it (it is very frustrating to repeat three times a sentence to get be understood).

Finally, I just wanted to say that, yes, it is raining in London right now.

That's all by now.
I'll see you the next time.
Bye, bye.