It seems yesterday, instead it's already one year, wow, lot of things happened this year, and I feel like I need to make a summary of everything and maybe give some smart conclusion over that.
I started working in London the 12th of November and I had to make lot of stuffs the firsts weeks like:
- opening a bank account
- moving some money on the bank account to pay the rent
- going to the job's centre to make a NIN (National Insurance Number) that's needed for working in UK
- paying the TV Tax
- calling the electricity company, and the water company to set up an account and pay (this should have been done by the estate agents but eventually the water one was done but the electricity one for some reason not)
- trying to make myself connected to the internet through a normal provider
- failing to connect to the internet through a normal provider, finally switched to a mobile one with unlimited data plan
ok, that just the first weeks, then in the following months this happened:
- discovering that for Christmas London became a ghost town
- contacting the HMRC because I was paying too much taxes (I'm still waiting for the refund)
- getting my tax code corrected to the proper one
- getting some issues sorted because it seems that my bank reject some direct debit I set up for some still nowadays unknown reasons.
- register to the AIRE(Italians living outside Italy)
- get all my documents stolen
- going to the police to do the notification
- going to the consulate
- waiting for the AIRE registration to complete (it took months)
- asking a new ID once registered
- going to the post office to retrieve a package that I didn't expect and contains all my documents after 3 months!
- going to the police to update my notification
- going to get my new ID (it took weeks to be done)
- trying to buy a flat, got an offer accepted for like 4 hours before being gazumped
- trying to buy another flat, but after a survey discovering that some works in the flat were done without the proper permission
- back to Italy to change the address of my car, so my insurance is not void
probably something else I forgot (and some other things I prefer not talking about).
Workwise it was a great year, I got a couple of boosts and I really enjoy the company and what I'm doing within this company.
Businesswise I met a fuckton of people, followed lots of meetups and made some friends, I had the opportunity to met some really smart people, and to learn a couple of things.
London is really nice, there's lots to do, lots to see and not lot of time to do most of the things I would have done.
JavaScript (or better ECMAScript) wise I should return writing something here, I know I've still visitors, most are probably bots (Hey I can even see one still browsing with Netscape Navigator 8), so I think I will eventually write something in the next months, after I fix a couple of things that need to be fixed, I've plenty of things to talk about so it's just laziness on my part here.
Englishwise: my english still sucks, I think I'm not anymore in the `bearable understandable` status now, still way better than some Italians I heard everyday speaking in english (you can't imagine the number of Italians here in London), at least I don't have any of this kind of accents, even though I'm still making confusion over vowel pronunciation, making some basic grammar errors, this is especially true when I'm tired.
I've changed lots of habits and seen things I would never seen in Italy like marmite or the aeropress coffee maker, people standing in queue in order, people that excuses himself even when they're the one that needs excuses, meritocracy, the sony ps4 months before it was out, working fast post offices, less burocracy, people that can walk on the street dressed like he wants, trains on times, .
Blimey! It was a really busy year!
I think it was definitely a good year, while a bit busy I really enjoyed it, I'll look forward to the next one with a positive outcome and a positive mind.
-- Cristian
