I’ll save writing about leaving home for a later time. That was a lot to process, leaving everyone and everything we love and know behind and forging into the unknown, but we did it. Tassa and I left St. Louis on Friday June 14th and flew to Philadelphia then on to London. It was an overnight flight and we arrived at 10:30 am on a drizzly, overcast, cold, and windy London morning. Our intent was total minimalism and we purposefully only packed what we felt we would really need, but man, we had some heavy ass suitcases to get from Heathrow to our Airbnb in Tottenham. So, there we were with backpacks, three full suitcases (one of which didn’t roll very well) and had to figure out how to get to north London. When we got off the tube at Tottenham Hale station it was cold and raining. We were tired and we were both thinking “I don’t know about this” as we walked in the rain, just taking in the initial shock and awe of everything.
View from our Airbnb
We got to our Airbnb and our host Dan greeted us, he was a cool dude. We had a single room in his flat, but we did have our own bathroom and shower. The flat was on the 12th floor of a high-rise apartment building with a great view towards London. Dan was a few years younger than us, and he was renting out his spare room to pay off his loan as quickly as possible. He told me that he could earn close to 8,000 pounds a year renting out his apartment tax free. He had a fixed interest rate for only five years and when that is up, he could possibly and very likely have to pay much more for his apartment. Interest rates work differently here, you could go from affording your place to not affording it. He said that since his flat was on the side viewing London it had gone up in value significantly and he needs to pay off as much as possible before he goes to whatever the current rates are. I liked Dan’s style. I think we all had very similar life perspectives. He seemed like a minimalist and into natural living. He was also a mostly plant-based guy like we are.
Our first Brewery in England, Beavertown. Just down the street from the Airbnb.
It was shockingly just like an American Brewery. My first English beer was an American Pale Ale.
The first weekend was fun. We didn’t do much Saturday since we were jet lagged but we did look around Tottenham Hale and went to bed early. Sunday, we went down to the London Bridge area where Tassa would be working. Our first objective was to figure out how she was going to get to work. I must give big props to Tassa, she is such a badass. We literally just arrived, and she was starting her new job that Monday. We navigated the tube fairly easily. We found her building and then spent the rest of the afternoon looking around. We saw some cool sites like London Bridge, Tower Bridge, the Tower of London, and Shakespeare’s Globe. The highlight was the Borough Market. We walked around and checked out all the vendors. We ate some really good paella and had a beer. Then we found this cool place called Vinegar Yard, which is an outdoor beer garden/pizza place where you can watch Euro football tournament games. We had a couple of good beers and watched the Netherlands vs. Poland game. Our first outing in London was great and we learned how to move around the city, but we also learned that this new lifestyle was going to entail a bunch of walking.
Tower Bridge
Tower of London
Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre
I have taken numerous Shakespeare classes and have read most of his plays. This was a bucket list check!
Watching football at the Vinegar Yard.
English style!
Our second big objective was to find an apartment. We only had our Airbnb with Dan for a week, so it was critical that we find a place to stay. We realized right off that there are a lot of hoops to jump through to be able to rent as a foreigner. I’m sure it is a source of security in many ways that you must have a UK phone number and bank account in order to get an apartment, but then you have to have a UK address to get a phone number and an account. You must have a bank account and card, but you have to be able to prove residency to get the bank account and card. So, we found ourselves in this weird loop that had no beginning or end. It wasn’t like do this, then this, then this. It was more like you can’t do this until you do that, but you can’t do that until you have this other thing. It was frustrating. Little things added to the frustration, like for example Tassa set up a UK bank account for her job from America before we left but they sent the bank cards to our address in Red Bud after we left. It’ll take three weeks to get new ones sent. Anyway, we had an account but that was for when she started getting paid, which we found out to our dismay wouldn’t be until the end of July. Now we had to get all of this done with no bank card and from money that we had to transfer from our US bank to the UK bank, which takes days to transfer.
I was starting to feel like this coffee shop.
To try to get things moving, I tried to get a UK phone number first. I canceled my phone service in America and lost my number, so I can only use my phone on Wi-Fi. I thought that I could just put my phone on a cheap plan and get a number. Nope. New iPhones in America use an E-sim card, which is digital and not one that you can physically put into your phone. I ended up buying a cheap phone and a pay as you go sim card, and voila, I have a UK phone number. Now I have two phones. One is for whenever I need to move around outside of Wi-Fi and the other is my nice phone that only works on Wi-Fi but is my main device. I wanted to come here and actually use my phone less and ended up with two.
Monday was pretty much a bust as far as getting things together. Tassa put a few inquiries out there for places and we went to look at one that afternoon. It was 1,000 pounds a month for a one room place, and a shabby one at that, right above a fish market. The other odd thing was that a realtor didn’t meet us, instead the guy who lived there and was moving out showed us the place. It felt awkward and an imposition to say the least, plus our immediate reaction, even though we didn’t say it out loud but I’m sure our expressions told the guy that we thought his place was a shithole. Maybe that was why he was moving. When we left there, I looked at Tassa and said, “No way I could live there. I’m sorry but I just couldn’t.” She agreed, and we left feeling stressed out, thinking that maybe this would be much harder than we anticipated.
Tuesday was a better day by a wide margin. We went and looked at a place in the morning and it was very nice. An actual realtor met us and although we were at the wrong place, the place the realtor met us at didn’t accommodate doubles, she said she had a nice newly renovated place right down the street. We went there and really liked the place. It is a six-room terraced house in Tottenham. A terraced house is a connection of houses all along the street. This is the main style of housing in London. We would occupy a room and then share two bathrooms/showers and a kitchen. We jumped on the deal. We feel good about paying 1,100 pounds a month and the only real negative thing is that it is a mile from a tube station, so rain or shine it’ll be a walk to get anywhere.
22 Higham Road, London N17 6NF, UK
Our room…small but cozy.
Why did we decide on Tottenham? Football of course! Tassa and I have watched a lot of Premier League football in preparation for this move (that was my reasoning for getting her into English football, we had to “prepare”). We looked at different areas based on football teams. Tottenham is further away and has a longer commute but it’s cheaper. The team here is the Tottenham Hotspurs. They have a new state-of-the-art stadium a mile away from our place. The really cool thing about being Spurs fans is that they are a team that could win the Premier League, but in all honesty probably won’t, at least not while we are here but if they did it would be epic to be a part of it. They finished 5th last season and are a solid team in my opinion and I think it’s cool to root for a local team rather than jump on the Arsenal or Chelsea bandwagons or some other team outside London, like Liverpool or Manchester City. But really it came down to money. We can afford to live here.
Tottenham Hotspurs Stadium, one mile walk from our place.
After we said yes to the apartment our next objective was to get 150 pounds to the realtor. I had the cash in my pocket, so, easy right? No, not at all. We had to transfer money from a bank account to that account. Again, there were issues that made anything we tried to do more difficult and time was of the essence and that only added to our frustration. We first tried to go to a HSBC Bank, which is where Tassa has an account, but we walked to one following GPS, and it wasn’t there and the one right by Tassa’s work was closed for renovation. We requested money to be sent from our bank in America, but it would take up to four days. She had to go to work, so that was a bust. We tried wiring money but that didn’t work because it had to come from a UK bank account. I tried to open an account at a Barclays, but I had to have proof of residency, which is why I needed the stupid account in the first place. Luckily the realtor was flexible with us, and we eventually found a bank on Wednesday and deposited the cash and sent the money. Phew, deep breath…It’s all going to work out.
We also had to go down to Brixton on Tuesday afternoon to the post office and pick up our biometrics card. This card is basically our ID and functions as our visa for traveling in and out of the country. Brixton was a cool part of London. It’s down on the south end. We got our cards with no issues and that was a major relief, especially since we both got our cards. We thought that perhaps I wouldn’t get mine till later because Tassa’s visa date was ahead of mine by a week or so, but it all worked out. The next step was to apply for the apartment and for our national insurance numbers. Tassa really amazed me by totally taking charge of all that and making sure that everything was done quickly and correctly. I am not sure how she knew what to do but she did it. We figured our money would not transfer from the US to the UK in time and that we would have to wait to move into the apartment, but it came in on Thursday, so we put our first month’s rent and deposit down and Tassa had all the forms filled out, so we were set to move into our new place on Friday! Six days after moving here! Our Airbnb checkout was on Saturday but being able to move on Friday saved us a few hundred pounds at least on a hotel that we would have had to get for Saturday and Sunday nights, and maybe even Monday. So, we lucked out there and moved in Friday afternoon.
After moving in Friday afternoon, we had a rough time that evening. We really needed some things like bedding, pillows, a couple plates and bowls, towels, stuff like that. Some things were more immediate needs than others, but we had to get some basic living items. One thing you need here, for example is a drying rack for clothes. They don’t have dryers here, or air conditioning. I really think people here should try them out, I’m positive they would like them. Anyway, we had to make our way out to west London to an IKEA. We had to take the tube and then an overground train. We got on the wrong train, but a couple of nice ladies helped us out and got us on the right platform and some general directions on how to get to IKEA. We got out of the underground and had to walk a mile to the IKEA, which was no big deal at this point. By the way, it takes a long time to go just a few miles in this place. So, by the time we got to IKEA it was after 8pm. We were tired and starving. We ate some not great but ok IKEA food and then went shopping. We got pillows, drying rack, mattress pad, a duvet, cover, sheets, pillowcases, etc. The mattress pad alone was 30 pounds. There we were, 10 pm now and had a big load of stuff that we had to get all the way back to our new apartment. We lugged that stuff a mile to the tube station and then another mile from the tube to our apartment. I wish I had a picture of us carrying all this stuff walking down the road. By the time we got home we were completely wiped out. But we did it and our room is very nice. We like it a lot.
The rest of the weekend we settled into our new place. We had to get some cooking stuff and bathroom stuff but for the most part we got to finally relax knowing that we were set and stable. We went down to central London on Sunday and saw some more major sites like Big Ben, Westminster Abby, Trafalgar Square, and the National Gallery. We had a great lunch and some amazing cask ales at The Sherlock Holmes Pub. It was a great way to finish off our first week in London.
The Sherlock Holmes!
Cask Ales!
Yorkshire pudding is just fluffy bread? What? Delicious though.
It has been a whirlwind for sure but also very gratifying to know that two small town Southern Illinois kids can go to one of the biggest cities in the world and take care of business. Tassa and I also celebrated our 25th anniversary amidst all this chaos and stress. We celebrated by going to M. Manze Tower Bridge Pie Shop for a proper English pie and mash and that was the evening we were able to pay the first month rent and finalize the apartment. I am definitely proud of us. I am also happy we are doing this. Being away and out of your element puts life into a different perspective, but more on that to come. For now, we are settled in our little room in our shared flat, we are good, and we are already planning our first adventure out of the city to explore the English countryside. Stay tuned.
MeatSpace Adventures 
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