Itchin' To Travel - 7 Oct 2007
Hey everyone!!
Sorry it has been so long since I have written! I have been pretty busy here in London. It is crazy how different studying abroad is from living abroad. The "real world" has come and hit me right in the face, harder than I could have imagined. I work from 8:30 to 6 everyday with an hour off for lunch and then usually come back and hang out with the roomies for another 4 hours before we go to bed and it starts all over again. Luckily we have been able to do a lot of cool things on the weekend.
One weekend we went to Windsor Castle, the official residence of the royal family. I had been there before in 9th grade, but I still think it is one of the most impressive palaces I have ever seen. The whole town and castle seems like it is really far away but it is not even an hour away by train and is right next to London Heathrow, the biggest airport in the country.
Why is it that Steph is the only one that can figure out when to jump??
We should be models!
Hampton Court Palace
Clearly perplexed by the hedge maze!
Buckingham Palace (or Dollarqueenbacon Palace if your name is Steph)The British culture is still taking some time to adjust to. They use the words cheers and rubbish for everything. Rubbish is not only the word for trash/garbage but is also used for something you are not happy about. It is really common to hear my boss say "that's quite rubbish" when something is messed up in one of our systems (of course you can always substitute rubbish for various expletives!) It is also impossible to find a trash can (rubbish bin) anywhere in the city. They were almost all taken out of the city after a bomb went off in one in the late 1970's. In addition to this it is almost impossible to get any shopping done in the city. Everything closes at around 5PM (before most people get off work). Because everything is closed before most people can buy anything, the stores are total chaos on the weekends. All 7 million people in the greater London area go to the stores on Saturday and Sunday. Despite some of these frustrating things, I am still having an amazing time and cannot wait to see what lies ahead.
The food here is a lot better than I could have ever imagined! Right next to the office we have an amazing fast food Indian Restaurant called TiffinBites. It is so weird getting something like that fast food! There is another place right by work called Fuzzy's Grub which is like getting a Thanksgiving Dinner everytime you go! They specialize in roast meats and you can get any kind you want and add mashed potatoes, roast potatoes, cranberry sauce, dressing, all kinds of veggies, yorkshire pudding (an egg and flour pastry type thing), horseradish, cheese, gravy and anything else you could ever imagine. All of this is either mixed in a big tin or put on a sandwich. It is incredibly low calorie but still makes an amazing lunch!
We are going this next weekend to a place called Carcassonne in the South of France. It is a giant medieval walled city that was used as the main castle in the movie Robin Hood with Kevin Costner from the early 90's. Everything I have read about it and all the pictures I have seen make it seem like it will be one of the coolest things I have seen thus far. Thanks to discount airlines and cheap hotels it will be less than $100 per person for everything! Here is a link to a picture of it http://upload.wikimedia.org/
It has been great hearing from all of you wherever you have been in the world, I hope all is still going well and I will talk to you soon!!
Sean
Exploring London - 04 Sept 2007
Hello Everyone,
My email list was a little screwed up last time but I have been given some emails to add and found a few I thought I had on this list already. Everything should set now! I have really enjoyed hearing from the many of you that have emailed me and hearing how everything is in your lives. Things are still good here in London. My other roommate got here this week and she is really awesome. Her name is Stephanie and she is from San Francisco. So far she is a lot easier to live with than the other girl in the suite, so it should be a good year!
Steph is in, time for the obligatory roomies at Big Ben picture!Work is a lot more intense now, I am constantly doing something on the computer. Everything I do revolves around using spreadsheets in Excel or waiting for email confirmations of thing to do with spreadsheets in Excel. It is really amazing how much you can learn in few weeks!
Anyway, things have been really crazy around here between work and getting to know other people in the program so I just recently have had a chance to finally see more of the city than what is right around us. The weekend before last they had what is called the Notting Hill Carnival. Notting Hill is one of the nicest areas in the city of London and the whole area gets shut down for the weekend to hold this massive Caribbean festival complete with costumes, floats and Jerk Chicken. It is supposedly the biggest street fair in the world except for Carnival in Rio, Brazil as almost 2 million people showed up! I have never seen so many people in my life, it took almost 20 minutes just to cross a street! In the end it was a lot of fun though and it was definitely something interesting to see.
Notting Hill CarnivalThis last weekend we finally got to go see some of the tourists area and walked about 6 miles to the opposite side of the city. London is a really beautiful place this time of year, we have even been lucky enough to have it sunny most of the time (something really rare here)!
Trafalgar SquareHope all is well and talk to you soon!
Sean
Fresh Off The Boat - 24 Aug 2007
***Please note these were some of my first impressions of England based on 5 days in the country, I now realize certain things are a bit of a stretch. For example, cockney is almost NEVER spoken***
Hello Everybody!
I am just starting to really get settled in here in London and so far it is amazing! I am living in the London borough of Islington about a 40 minute walk north of the Thames. As of right now I have two flatmates. My roommate is a guy named Tim from Michigan. Luckily he is a really fun guy and we get along really well. The other person is a girl named Megan from California. She lived here last summer and has been dating a British guy ever since so she has become our walking atlas of London. We will soon be having another roommate to share a room with Megan but her visa was delayed and she will not be in the country for a few more days at the least. The world really is small as I have met a girl here that not only ended up knowing Pete, one of my best friends, but she lived at Emory with this girl Abby that is good friends with another of my best buddies Ryan back in the Denver. There is also another girl that lived and grew up in Highlands Ranch just about 5 minutes from where we lived and knew some of the Highlands Ranch high school people I got to know in college!
Just touched down...
Our flat, Ability TowersThe first few days have been super hectic, which is why my email is a little late. We had orientation for two days straight the first days we were here. Thursday (yesterday) was my first day at work. I am working for UBS in the REPO BUC of the MCC department of the finance division. For those of you that don't want to read the boring technicalities of it, you will probably just want to go ahead and skip the rest of this paragraph! Basically we are a division of the MCC which is the Moneymarket, commodities and currencies trading department. My job will be working with REPO's on Government bonds. A REPO is basically when someone lends a security to someone for an amount of money and then purchases the security at a later date at a higher rate. It basically ends up working like a bank loan. With our REPO's the security that is sold and repurchased is government bonds. Our BUC's (business unit controller) duty is to make sure that everything gets paid on time and that the right amount of money is either sent or received. A lot of people are late in making the payments of either the bond or the money and the systems at UBS end up showing all kinds of errors as a result. Our department goes in and makes sure that these are investigated and send off the details to someone higher up in the organization. In our group of about 8 I am working for a guy that is under one of the other guys that is under another guy in the group who is second in command to another person that runs our BUC who is under someone that runs all of the MCC division who is under someone that runs the trading division, etc, etc, etc, etc.
Workin hard for the moneyI know I have written a ton, but this will be the longest email I send all year, I promise!! The British culture is very different from the American culture. The first thing we saw on the news when we got here was about their drinking problem. Half of our orientation was taken up by people either joking about alcohol or telling us not to try keeping up with the Brits in a pub. There are a lot of the more obvious words that are different in the culture, but there are some that I had never heard before. They love to use the word "proper" before anything in place of words like "really" or "very" (that was proper fun!). They also reverse the words "at" and "on" (ie: "the meeting is at september 5th" or "call our phone number on 555-5555"). The word Asian here is used very differently here as it is used primarily to describe anyone mostly from India or Pakistan while people that would be Asian in the US (ie. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc) are Orientals here. "Cheers" is unlike any word in American English as it can mean simply cheers or excuse me or goodbye. Sorry is another word that they love to overuse, especially for excuse me. Cockney is one of the weirdest things I have ever heard, they find a name where the last name rhymes with the word they want to use and say the first name. For example they would talk about being in Barney meaning to be in trouble because Barney is Barney Rubble and Rubble rhymes with trouble. Another common one is calling a check a Gregory as in Gregory Peck because Peck rhymes with check. I will never understand this!! The also call thick cookies of any sort digestives. I am sure that I will think of more as the time comes.
Well I am almost out of time and just wrote an email that could probably be in the Guiness Book of World's Records for being the longest so now I am going to stop.
Miss you all and hope to talk soon!
Sean
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