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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