Hello Guys,
I hope you are well and enjoying the lovely Spring weather. Lately, I have been thinking a lot about what to write. So many things have happened since I last wrote to you. Luckily, there are many nice things, but I decided to talk more about the past. I have left my moving to London story before the actual flight. (You can read the first part The Beginning and the second part The Preparation here.) Back in Hungary, I realised that I must explain my years in the city to understand what is happening in my life right now. So here is the third and last part of this story. I hope you will enjoy it.
In January 2013, we arrived at London, Luton airport. That was the first, I had ever been on a plane. I was scared and sad. I was excited, but I felt sorrow to leave everything and everyone I knew behind. Luckily, my best friend was with me. A silver Mercedes Benz waited at the airport to take us to our new home. I remember it was snowing in Hungary and bright sunshine in London.
We arrived at Wood Green, which is a not-too-nice part of London (zone 3, North London). Our new home was a shared house. 9 people, including us, lived in a 5 bedroom, 2 toilets, one bathroom and a small kitchen house with a tiny garden (at that moment looked like the garden was a rubbish place). There were couples, older people, young guys… we felt lost. Our room (because do not dream about that you have your own flat first you arrive in London unless you have at least a year’s savings, which we never had) was small, with a double bed and a cupboard… that’s it. Well, we had only one suitcase each, so we did not need it in a bigger place, but still, it felt so claustrophobic. The housemates were not nice. They were a bunch of people who lived next to each other.
The next day, we had an appointment at the lettings agency’s office on Halloway Road. It was a couple of miles away from us, so we decided to walk there. As I said we were naive as Hell. We did not have mobile internet or GPS on the phone and we had no idea where we were. After a couple of minutes galavanting on the street, we asked a girl at the bus stop where is Holloway Road. She was Hungarian luckily, but she wasn’t sure. Either way, that girl was kind enough to help go to Wood Green station and buy a weekly bus-only oyster card (an oyster card is a kind of travel card, which you can top up, weekly, monthly, for zones, only for the bus or including tube and every other TFL services) and told us that 29 bus will take us to Trafalgar Square and that’s the bus route we need to get to the agency’s office.
We managed to find the office and sorted out our letting contract, plus they gave us a list of the job agencies. We thought we were fine, we would visit all the agencies during the next couple of days and everything would be just perfect. But life isn’t and wasn’t that easy, at least not back in January 2013.
Here I wish to stop and before I continue the story, I would like to mention a teeny-tiny issue that we discovered. I thought that I spoke English because back in high school my lovely teachers taught me and I had amazing grades… well, what you learn in the school in Hungary has nothing to do with the actual language that people speak in England especially not in London. Let me explain. What you learn in the schools is the “perfect” literature English, instead in England most of the born Britts do not speak properly their mother tongue. There are many slang and figures of speech that you who study this amazing language never learn in school. Not to mention the fact that London is a huge mix of people come from different countries, cultures, races, and religions, which is beautiful and helped me a lot to accept people around me the way they are, but in the meantime, everyone uses their mother tongue melted in the English they speak. So until you just learn a language and not live it, you cannot say that you speak it.
Now back to our first full day in London. We thought that we were done for the day, so we bought some toast and salami (we had to pay the deposit the first week in advance, so we did not have left money to buy anything else) and spoke with our family on Skype… well, Life thought otherwise. We found the 29 bus back to Wood Green destination, but when we arrived, we had no idea where we were. We had no idea how to find our street with our house in it. We tried to ask people, but they had no idea either or they just ignored us. So the only thing we came up with was to call my brother, back in his Hungarian High School. Why him? Because he was in colleague and we knew that in the dorm they have internet access, he can check the map. We told him that we were standing in front of a building called Wood Green Crown Court and our address of course. He navigated us back to our house from Hungary. 😅
The agency said that we were lucky because we had an appointment to get our NI number (TB number in Hungary) the next day at the Camden Job Centre. We knew which bus we had to use from Wood Green and drop off at Camden Station ( we had no idea how many variations exist of the “Camden” bus stop, but let’s slow down 😅). The only thing we didn’t know that which side of the road we had to catch the bus. After a while, we realised that we were going in the wrong direction as we picked the bus on the wrong side, so we had to drop off and catch the other bus. The good thing about London is that buses and tubes come every minute or so, but we were way too far from Camden to make it on time to the appointment. Anyway, we tried.
Once we saw the first “Camden” bus stop (which was still a 15-minute walk from the one we needed) we just left the bus and started to run like no tomorrow. But we were unable to find the Job Centre. Here is another fun fact about how different London and Hungary are. The Job Centres in Hungary usually take place in a nice, old historical building which you can never miss, but instead in London, they look just like a chicken shop in the corner. So in the end, it became cold, it started to rain and we were lost in Camden Town. We called the agency and asked them to make another appointment and begged them to try and tell us where the Job Centre is. They were laughing at us and they said that no one ever lost in Camden or was unable to find the place. But in the end, we found it. I remember we had our lunch (sandwiches made at home) in a park and we decided to see Trafalgar Square as we saw our life-saving bus, the iconic 29. That bus was our guide for so long after that. So we were freezing, wet, humiliated, lost, sad and miserable, but we saw the famous Trafalgar Square first in our life. We had no idea how many memories would be attached to that place in the future and how the square would become one of the most important places for us, a bit of a centre point not just for that large city, but for our lives too.
The next couple of weeks was quite the same. We woke up early, got ready, grabbed the bus and visited all the agencies on our list. We started to know better the city, understand more about the places, the public transportation (only buses because we had no money to pay for the tube), the people around us and how things are working in London. Our housemates told us about the cleaning agency where they worked, so we went there and my best friend finally got a job there as a night cleaner. A few nights later he called me and I was able to start there too. That was our first job. I do not wish to tell the name of the agency, but we became night cleaners in one of the Michelin-star restaurants in London, called The Delaney. Our supervisor was a young Polish guy, who grew up in the city and he helped me a lot to learn the language. He sat next to me for hours to make sure that I could tell what I wanted. The job just came on time. I will never forget the night before our first payday. It was a Thursday evening. We used our two-week deposit so we had to pay the rent on Sunday or at least one week otherwise the agency said that we would be homeless. That night was our off night ( we worked 6 nights a week and only one was off). We decided to see Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the Parlament and the London Eye (from outside of course). The weather was nice and we crossed the river Thames on the Hungerford and Golden Jubilee Bridge. We were in the middle of the bridge, the view was breathtaking and we heard a song played by a guy with his guitar. I do not remember the song, but I do remember that we only had 75 pence left in our wallet. No more, no less. We expected our salary the next day morning. At that point, we bought food from the money we found in the restaurant during our shifts. If we did not find anything, we had to portion our bread and butter to make sure we had something to eat every day. But we gave all of our money to this guy on the bridge and just enjoyed the view. The next day we got our first salaries and they were more than we had wished. Not that much, we only be able to pay one week’s rent and we were still a week behind, but we finally could breathe a bit. That’s when things started to be better a bit. It was millions of ups and downs, on the career path, personal relationships and accommodations, but after that, I have not cried every day (maybe every other day 😋) and did not question my decision that much. It will be parts of my past in London that I will share with you guys, but I thought I could not write down every major thing that happened in London because in the end every little thing formed me and needed to help me become who I am and I am unable to write down all of them. So that’s why I decided to write “my diary” under the story of my life” section because I think I can help you more to get through life and all its difficulties during my daily/weekly stories. (Please feel free to let me know if I am wrong. 😅)
Sometimes you have to give everything, leave everything behind, lose almost everything to be able to receive what the Universe wants to give you and those things will be much better than the things you can imagine. We just have to let Life guide us. So SpitFire up and let go of what bothers you. 😘
Oh, and please don’t forget: Don’t have to be always strong to be a Hero.😘
XOXO,
Krisz😘
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Spirit of Spitfire 