If anyone is still considering
moving to Britain, despite the Brexit situation, here's a few things that no
one will tell you about, until you are living here. Take note:
The cold call nuisance in UK is officially the worst in Europe. Basically, it means that you have to hide from aggressive sales people with basic English skills and hard to understand accents who invade your privacy in your own home. Some of them are scammers after your personal details and money and they can legally call you and bother you because thanks to the wonders of telecoms you will never be able to find out where they called you from. And so your landline will always be on silent and you will miss that important call from the doctor's and you will stop answering calls from unknown mobile numbers on your mobile and so no one will ever be able to talk to you. Thanks, UK.
Most people who come to Britain have to rent a house first and this is when you discover that the rental market is heavily skewed to be as accommodating to landlords as possible. Of course the fact that any private landlord can give you notice to move out for such important reasons as no reason whatsoever and that there is no minimum standard which makes property rentable has nothing to do with the fact that many Members of Parliament are private landlords. No, of course not! Just a coincidence. Be prepared to have conversations about how mould is your fault because you dry socks on the radiator, how the ripped and dirty carpet became ripped and dirty during the two months you lived somewhere and so you have to pay for new carpets for the whole flat and the one next door too and how eight vertical lines that your cat scratched down the wall in a moment of huff cost 140 pounds to paint over. Thanks, UK.
And I have to mention the bloody taps. There will be one on the left hand side of the sink, that will spew boiling hot water (when it eventually travels up the pipes from some mysterious source that seems to be near the boiling centre of the Earth) and there will be one on the right hand side, that will spew icicles. One of your hands will be permanently semi-cooked and the other one - semi-frozen.There is some moronic explanation about how Brit folks in yonder times would plug the sink and mix the water, which is kind of hard to do when there is no plug and no standard size of a plug hole (if anyone wants any plugs, do let me know, I have a collection of the ones that wouldn't fit anything). Newer flats now have mixer taps like in normal countries but the gas-less nineteen century flats are still popular and this brings me to...
Central heating. It is 2017 and so you would assume, if you move from a so called civilised country, that it is a given. Wrong! In the aforementioned flats from nineteen century, and older ones, there often is no gas supply and so - no central heating. You will be reassured (by the private landlord) that electric heaters are the God's answer to this problem and so you will spend one truly miserable winter, torn between feeding the constantly beeping electricity meter with half of your wages and simply sleeping on the couch under all the blankets and cats that you have handy as frost forms on the abandoned bedroom windows. After which life changing experience you will shun any rental ads for flats with 'electric heating'. Thanks, UK, I've never experienced being cold inside the house before!
And one more thing - the blasted British obsession with gardens. Say you escape the city centre and you find a place within the suburbia, which has mixer taps and central heating and is quieter... until you wake up one Sunday morning, heart thumping in your chest wondering what woke you up... and then you realise it's 7am and your neighbour is busy doing something to the bushes which sounds like he's using a giant electric toothbrush. Then another one starts with cutting the grass and another one takes the radio out to do the Weeding. If you don't watch out, the mad pruning weekend party will roll across your garden too, leaving you with a Perfect Garden that you will never have time to maintain cause you know, you have a life... And in the afternoon, bbq-ing will commence. You genuinely start to pray for rain at the weekends. Thanks, UK...
If you read this and shrug, you sir or madam, are a strange person. Come join us in the madhouse!
