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hi i am seriously thinking of moving to london in the very near future and was wondering if you could recommend any good web sites or agencies for someone looking for a career in the funeral business or chauffeur trade i am moving from ireland and have 10 years+ experience here kind regards PAT

Until Culture Class takes off and starts paying for my mortgage (one can always dream) I have to have a day job.

For me this means working with web 2.0 and elearning design. Fortunately I loooove doing what I do so I am in no way complaining.

My latest contract has taken me to Oxford (yup, the city with all the history and the universities). Oxford is lovely. Seriously lovely! The town is vibrant with students and tourists and as far as I have seen it is ever so multicultural.

In my office we have a few Australians, a Canadian, an American, me (the token Dane), a French administrator and a Welsh manager. We even have a few English people.

So far we have not had any cultural hiccups and as we work with the international baccalaureate I doubt it will happen…. I will simply have to cause mischief somewhere else :o)

However, the reason for the blog today was to let you know that the job market seem to have massively improved over the last few months. Getting my new contract took only a few days or searching and I still hear about many new free jobs out there…

So if you are planning on moving to the UK now could be a better time than it has been for years. I seem to remember posting some employment stats in the forum a few weeks ago. Please take a look here if you want more information.

See you around! Morten

PS. My “one blog a day” commitment is dead. Long live the new “blog when you can” commitment..

As things turned out yesterday's trip to the dentist ended up being much more of an intercultural experience than I thought it would be.

First there was the walk through London's St. Johns Woods. That area really has turned into a super expatriate area. The houses are huge, the schools look well looked after, and the number of Chelsea tractors (this is what the English call big SUVs driven in town) were plentiful. In addition there were quite a few small delicatessen and boutiques.

If I was an expatriate family moving into London I would have a look at that area. As far as I am aware they even have a very busy expatriate organisation called St john's Woods Womens Club.

The other cultural thing that happened was at my dentist. The receptionist was a lovely Polish girl, the clinic assistant I believe was Israeli and the dentist was Spanish.

This meant that I had a five minutes informal chat with the receptionist about getting there, where I heard about them, and how I was feeling about going to a new dentist. I then had 30 seconds of instructional directions from the clinic assistant leading me to the chair, followed by a warm welcome from the dentist who promptly started talking about my family :o)

That was all good and well. However, what I did not get was an overview of what she intended to do to my teeth and how long it was going to take. This meant that I 30 min into the treatment still had no real idea about what was going on... Talk about a little mismatch of high and low context cultures.

Maybe the dentistry chattiness of the receptionist and the clear instructions from the clinic assistant made me assume that the dentist would have been more forthcoming with clinical information, or maybe I, coming from a low context culture, should simply have been more explicit telling the dentist that I wanted to know what was going on....

It was probably the latter, but with my mouth full of hardware it was difficult saying more than a muffled hmmmurph.

Laters!

morten

Yes it's correct. I did not manage to blog over the weekend and now fear that committing to blogging 365 days in a row might be a bit too optimistic. However, I will bang on and try as well as I can.

Friday – What a day. We had a super lunch at Covent Garden's Clos Maggiore, then went bowling at All Star Lanes at Brick Lane (It rocks!) and finally ended up at Lounge Lovers for a few cocktails and beers... Nice.

Saturday and Sunday I paid the price for attending my private session and the gym (ouch) and I must admit I also suffered a bit from the party on the Friday. However, I would not have been without the events Friday and it was great meeting some new expatriates (Hi Clementine and Joe, we look forward to welcoming you to London on a more permanent basis!).

This week is going to be a busy one (but I will blog - I promise!). It seems the highlight will be the Chelsea v Manchester United game on Wednesday, but hay-ho... who can say.

So... Hmm... no cultural observations today. I will work on that in my next blog

Today I am going to my new dentist. This will be a small experiment as I have managed to find a dentist with no English dentists employed. I bet it will be grand and the service excellent. More about that tomorrow...

No! I am not talking about the whole "friends with benefits" thing. There are other types of websites for that kind of social interaction. What I am talking about it a great way of meeting and making friends with real British people.

A few weeks ago I started going to a gym. I met a lady on the street who was selling low price memberships which allowed me to join Fitness First for only £300 a year which apparently is almost half price. Thank you Fitness First.

To make a long story short I have now been going to the gym for a few weeks and I am still waiting to see the results. So to improve my chances of succeeding I went and had a talk with one of the in-house instructors.

This lead to me instantly meeting pretty much all of the staff and 4 or 5 of the other club members. In addition to getting the advice I needed, I now know 10 friendly faces when I go to the gym,.... and I was invited to a number of upcoming non-fitness events organised by the gym. Nice!

Having gained a few new friends the only problem is how I will get through the one hour personal training session I foolishly agreed to.... It's gonna hurt!

Feeling tired in London

Day 7 – 348 days to go

I have just received the receipt for the tickets I might get to the London 2012 Olympic organisers if I am very lucky.

You see, before you find out whether or not you are getting any of the exotically priced tickets (each ticket cost between £20 to £900) you have requested, you first have to win a lottery.

Apparently, the way it works is that everyone who are not a member of parliament, royalty, or a personal friend of one of the Olympics organisers, are entered into a huge ballot system where the winners will get the tickets…

Coming to think of it, it actually IS fair that everyone has an equal chance of getting tickets to the grandest show on earth. And the plan with the lottery is kind of cool. In true Olympic spirit it’s sort of a competition within a competition...

Nice Day

6 – 349 to go

Two days ago I was commenting on how we were waiting for spring. Guess what, it arrived today. Ladies and Gentlemen it is currently 16 degrees and sunny.

The trees have started sprouting leaves, the first people in t-shirts have shown up on my street corner, and in the city most men left their coats when they went out for lunch.

This weekend London hosted a very traditional boat race. The’ race as it was. In other words it was Oxford versus Cambridge. 

This means that (as per tradition) Saturday was busy social day for all that watched the race. Tons of Pimms and pints were had, and people lined the river in central London. In addition, England played and won a European Football Cup qualifier. This in turn meant that plenty of lads in football t-shirts spend the afternoon drinking beer in pubs and beer gardens across the country. It was a fun day.  

The downside of this was (also per tradition) that Monday morning saw thousands of people with a pinkish red tan, a slight hangover, and a cold or a sore throat.

Day 5 – 360 to go..

Getting from A to B is easy. Getting on the tube and traveling the 800 yards from Aldgate East to London Liverpool Street is not always that straight forward.

The London underground, loved by the tourist and often hated by the Londoners, has been around for a good many years. Most of the time it transports 2 million people a day. And in my opinion it does a really great job!

However, ever so often the train drivers and the tube support personnel decide to close down London for a day or two. Well, they only close down the tube network, but with 2 million journeys a day the damage is normally done by that.

Those days getting from for example Paddington to Bermondsey, which is normally a 20 min tube ride, can take you 1 ½ hours jumping in and out of busses or 30 minutes and £30 in a black cab.

So.. before you travel, please visit http://journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk to find the best way of travelling.

The website rocks and can help you plan your journey wherever you may wish to go.

Day 4 – 361 to go..

Today is 27 March 2011 – One would think that spring should have arrived by now. But no. Outside it is still less than 10 degrees and there are no leaves on the trees.

However, a petty little small thing like the weather cannot stop true English men and women from celebrating the coming of spring.

This weekend I saw a group of five young girls heading out for a night on town. I do not remember this simply because they were wearing next to nothing, but because I caught myself thinking that I personally was wearing more clothes than all five of them put together. In fact, the only thing that could have kept them warm must have been the “beer blankets” they were wearing. At my grand age of 37 I can only say that it neither looked smart nor clever!

Having said that, I now seem to recall a somewhat hazy memory of me taking off my winter jacket for a 30 minutes spell during Chelsea versus FCK Champions League game Wednesday last week.

That was different though! That had to do with me showing my true blue colours at the footie and almost definitely nothing with the four hours we spend in the pub warming up for the game…

What can I say, the youth of today should learn from us seasoned veterans :o)

Ehhrmm… Perhaps I should conclude today blog by saying that the successful expatriate should always try to learn from his environment – but that does not mean he should also pick up all local habits.

Day 3 – 362 to go… :o)

Come back for more!

Morten

In the UK Saying somebody “has gone out for lunch” does actually mean they have stepped out to eat their lunch. Rather you are implying that the person is slightly “off the wall" or in layman terms "not completely right in the head"…

However, I digress.. When I went out for lunch earlier today I struggled finding any English food that was not a two day old sandwich. England, and especially the big cities such as London, is today really multicultural and in some areas the English (food) culture seems to play only a small part.

In fact, my area of London (right next to “the city” and Liverpool street) is called Spitalfields and Banglatown and is a nice ethnical mix of international bankers and Bangladeshi immigrants – with a sprinkling of Japanese, Greek, Danish, German, American … and the rest of the world mixed in.

Lunch-wise, which is where we came from, this means that my typical working lunch can be either Mexican, America, Pakistani, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Ethiopian, …. In fact, anything but English.

Coming to think about it,l it may not be all that bad, afterall there are only so many egg and tomato sandwiches one can eat in a life time….

Day 2 – 363 to go… :o)

See you for lunch in Banglatown?

Morten