Running out of pants @thefuerst

Settling in London is harder than I thought it would be. There are many differences between Austria and UK, most of them are very obvious, traffic, food, language and so on. But some are just not.

Love

The first time I was in Cafe Tana, which is right around the corner, I thought the waitress is flirting with me. Yeah, I know now how stupid, but to be honest, I was a little bit disappointed to find out everybody is called Love or Honey as soon as they got into the cafe. That experience counts as one of the funny ones.

Chicken or Egg

I thought Austria has a complicated bureaucracy, but London is disabusing me. Getting a bank account in the UK, or at least trying to get one, is astonishingly difficult. At first, you need to get a proof of address, but you can not get one without a UK number, and you can not get a phone contract without a UK bank account. It feels like solving The never-ending question. What existed first, the Chicken or the egg?

ZXYÜÄÖ

Where is the ******* minus? You probably guessed it already, right The keyboard. At first sight, there is not much difference between an Austrian and a UK one, except the ÜÄÖ keys. But if you try to work on them you discover some quickly, especially if you are a heavy user of shortcuts. That's a problem, which I can easily solve. I just use my MacBook. But one day I have to type my name on a UK keyboard. I have to find a solution for that; maybe I should change my name.

Loot, Dosh, Bread

At least the one pound sterling looks very similar to one Euro. I mostly pay with these. So you can imagine my wallet is pretty thick at the moment. There are some opportunities to get rid of them, e.x. The coffee machine (sorry for the one who has to empty it, it was me), The ticket machine for the tube or simple at Sainsbury's (the queue is not very amused by this). I think I will stick to this habit until I've learned all the different shapes and sizes.

Delayed, broken and missing

Thank you Royal Mail, you have done a terrible job. My first package I sent over to my new address contained my art installation Schabmeister. The fact, it arrived delayed didn't bother me much, but the fact that Royal Mail has wrecked it does! ARRRR!! Now I have to rebuild it, which took me a whole year to craft at the first place. I opened the package on Friday after we all had a couple of drinks at the Market House. That helped me a little bit not to freak out completely. To be fair, this isn’t really a difference between Austria and UK, more between Post AG and Royal Mail. My second package is still missing, and nobody knows where it is. I hope it's going to arrive soon, most of my pants and other clothes are in there.

I need it! I'm running out of pants!

Hopefully, everything turns out well for me in the future.