The weather has been atrocious in Bristol the last two weeks. First it was raining probably every day of the week and I was glad that I did buy that umbrella for two Lira in Turkey because it was the only one I had! I'd left that item out of the suitcase coming over due to weight limitations. Then this week has probably been the coldest week so far; there was frost on the cars in the morning and the first time that I started using gloves. I don't remember the weather being this bad the last two winters and think it might be a Bristol thing, being close to the coast. Needless to say it is dark when I head off to work and it is dark by about 4pm. The temperature is averaging about 7C max.
The good news is that after the first week of housing hassles I have settled into a nice house in the city centre of Bristol, on the docks. Will have some photos up soon I hope as the area is really nice and peaceful but only a short walk to all of Bristol city restaurants, theatres, shops, etc.
I've figured out the bus situation as well now so I am regularly catching the free Orange (in name and sometimes in colour too) bus to work. It does take a while but its free and its not a hassle, no changing of transport or trying to meet connecting planes/trains/buses. The bus stops are not clearly marked (sometimes there is literally nothing there, not even a pole!) and the bus stop numbers when they exist aren't marked very clearly at all. London does a great job of labelling their bus stops in high visibility lettering and providing an accurate map to where all the stops are but not here... Learning lots at work in the Telco industry, very large project as mentioned before, lots of complexity but really relevant as I am looking at the business processes for Pay as You Go mobiles. Can't say much more, a lot of stuff here is company confidential.
Now that I'm not busy looking at places to stay this weekend I'll explore a bit of Bristol that is within walking distance. The oldest Methodist Chapel in the world (originally built in 1739 by John Wesley) is right in the city centre but quite small and unassuming compared to some of the many others around town. (Bristol has more Georgian buildings than the popular tourist attraction city of Bath.)
I might start looking at tripping to Cardiff and Wales later on. Problem is that I have to plan quite far in advance because of the cost of train tickets (and the fact they cost more the closer you want to travel). I've already arranged my tickets for coming back to London for Christmas.
First week at work has been pretty stressful. Not from a work point of view, well yes, partly from a work point of view but also from everything else associated with relocating to another city at short notice without having expenses paid for! It is so easy when your company is arranging accommodation and you don't really care how much it costs, except to mention by the way that its a rip off for what you actually get, but generally hey, you're not paying for it so what the heck.
Doing the relocation to Bristol on my own bat has been challenging and more stressful that anticipated. Bristol is not an easy place to find reasonably priced accomm. I was paying £70/night for a two bed/two bath fully furnished serviced apartment. It was great! Almost brand new and built to a high spec, I was quite impressed with it and wouldn't mind living there long term but not at £70/night!! In fact that was the discounted rate, the standard rate was about £140/night. It does sleep 4 so I guess its not too bad if you had the numbers. I'm sure if I could find someone to share with I could negotiate £70/night for 3 months (split between two it becomes affordable).
Anyway, I had to move out on Wed as the place was booked out and I ended up getting a hotel about 20 miles away in Portishead and that still put me back £60/night! Luckily Stuart whom I work with had a car and offered to drive me out there and back to work the next morning otherwise I'd be forking out something ridculous for taxis. There are only two people that I know moderately well at work and they are Stuart and my lead Peter from Holland so it was nice of Stuart to offer and I quickly accepted! Stuart commutes from...somewhere...for 3.5hrs on Monday and Friday and is forking out £68/night at the Premier Inn.
I tried ringing about 10 places on Tuesday trying to find a place for Wed night. The reason for the shortage is that there are a lot of businesses around here and the accomm places do a good trade during the week. The part of work that was stressing me out was having no LAN or internet access for the first 3 days as that was when I needed it most to hunt for a place to live and put it into google maps to find out where it was! I also needed to figure out how to get there by public transport. So the actual work at Orange isn't stressful in and of itself but not being sure of where and if you'll have a place to stay sure is!
I am now in a B&B paying £35/night for what is basically a room, single room. Yes, it is differentiated here because a double room would mean you could fit a double bed in. It smells funny, wireless internet doesn't work and I have to share the bathroom but its warm and the bed is comfortable and I haven't bumped into anyone else using the bathroom or had to wait. On Sat I will be moving to a family's spare room. I know, sounds bad but I went to have a look at the place and meet the people on Thursday and its a nice, renovated family home and I'll get my own spacious private bathroom to use. I wouldn't call it cheap but I'll have everything that a house would have (washing machine, iron, wi-fi, etc) and its in Bristol city with a lot of restaurants nearby.
Orange is, I don't know how far out of the city centre as I don't have the internet to check, but it's not close. Yes, Orange is the mobile phone company same as in Aust. It's owned by France Telecom so there are a lot of French people around. The project feels like its one of the biggest I've been on so far. They're spending £100m, that's pounds there, over 4 years to put in this CRM system and Accenture is the implementation partner. Orange has a free bus that goes from the business park to the city centre. It takes about 30mins in moderate traffic and goes by a fairly direct route. It's pretty good, I've used it a couple of times myself already.
I will be looking to rent a more permanent abode and will using next week to check out non-hotel places around Bristol that is either close to the Orange bus route or the public bus system.
Istanbul was a very cool and different place. Lots of mosques (as opposed to churches when you go around Europe), markets and general upheaval and chaos around the streets! Actually my first impression of Istanbul was that it was very much like Melbourne! The airport is all new and modern and you go straight across to the car park where our driver had parked his car. We thought we'd get a car into the hotel in old city as it was night when we arrived and there was no direct public transport to where we wanted to go. We could have done it by making a couple of transport changes but thought it easier and it was only €20. The freeway to the hotel was also uncongested and the buildings fairly modern so that's what made me think of Melbourne.
However, that was night time and during the day on the smaller streets its very chaotic with cars weaving in and out, lots of honking but no road rage, people crossing the road when they're not meant to and jumping onto moving buses! You also get a lot of narrow roads where someone has to go back in reverse to let traffic through. Not as bad as Asia but a contrast to Europe or the West in general. And in that way it was a good difference to have. I don't think the mosques have anything on some of the churches you see and just like you get sick of going into churches in Europe I got sick of going into mosques to look around. I took a few photos and they have been combined with Denise's photos but its all on Facebook and I can't be bothered duplicating it here!
Denise bought 4 pashminas which got reduced from 82Lira to 20Lira rather too easily and quickly I thought. I didn't actually buy anything because I was feeling poor from being unemployed but seriously there wasn't much that I wanted that I knew I could bring back. There were some very cool chess sets in a lot of shops but I was going back to London, not to my own house in Melbourne. There were also these huge crystal things embedded in rocks, oh yes, they're called geodes, and they would have been so cool to get and not to mention cheap! One was about 120cm high and completely intact! It was really beautiful but if it didn't break on the plane it probably wouldn't make it through Aust customs. You have to be careful buying any old or rare items in Turkey such as coins because if they are classed as antiquities you can actually be arrested for trying to take them out of the country! And the assessment by the security guard at the airport can be quite arbitrary!
I did buy an umbrella because the last day of the four days that we were there it rained really heavily and did not let up at all! I thought I'd try and see how long I could go without getting one but there was no way around it, the rain was way too constant and heavy. Had to get one off a street seller for 2Lira (about $AUD2) and I'm pretty sure he was the cheapest one around.
The touristy things were did were Haghia Sophia, Topkapi Palace, the Blue Mosque, a boat tour down the Bosphorus Strait (1.5hrs), Kapali Çarsi (Grand Bazaar), Galata Tower, Misir Carsisi (Spice Market) (rather hard to find but got there in the end) and Suleymaniye Mosque.
The most memorable thing was eating at Köşebaşi (http://www.kosebasi.com/). It boasts being "voted as one of the "World's 50 Best Restaurants” by the 14,000 members of Conde Nast Traveler magazine" and "has received numerous bookings from all over the world and continues to attract many celebrities including Jack Nicholson, Chelsea Clinton, Warren Beatty, Sting, Tim Zagat and Donna Karan." Who knows who Tim Zagat is but it was a superb restaurant! We had the most difficult time finding it though! It is at the end of a train line way out of the city and then we had to walk for ages, backtracking numerous times, asking various strangers on the street and finally giving up and catching a taxi who took us about 100m to where it was! So close yet so far away!! The driver felt sorry for us and didn't charge us the €2.20 but I'm glad we did take the taxi because the street split and the restaurant was in a dark section in the middle of nowhere so we probably wouldn't have found it by ourselves! Was it worth the trouble? Well we thought so by the end of the night but while wondering around I was tempted to just go into any restaurant and eat! But then because we'd spent so long looking for it we didn't want to give up just on principle! Definitely recommend it though if you're in Istanbul, just make sure you print out the map first before you go!
It was while in Turkey that I got hit with a case of ATM fraud! It seems someone had used my ATM card and PIN to withdraw 400 Romanian Leu! Yes, that's right, in Romania! I must say that HSBC Bank were very good as they detected the suspect withdrawal and phoned me up. I quickly told them that I wasn't currently in Romania, had never been in Romania, had not withdrawn money from an ATM in Romania and therefore it must be a fraud case. They cancelled the current ATM card and I would have to go see my branch people back in the UK for a replacement one. How the fraudsters managed to get money out in Romania I'll never know because I had the ATM card in my physical possession! And I don't know much about the Romanian banking system but it would seem that they would need to know my PIN as well to get money out! Anyway, the money got refunded a couple of days after I saw the HSBC people at a branch. I'm sure they somehow got the details in London as I never actually used it in Turkey since we had got currency before we left and used credit cards when that ran out.
Lesson to all: be careful with your banking details!
OK, I'm really going to gloss over the first 7 weeks in London...or maybe I won't depending on how carried away I get with typing...
First 3 weeks in London was great; great to be back, slotting back in comfortably into London life. Had everything set up already such as NI Number (like Medicare), bank account, credit card, Oyster card, etc. Meeting up with a lot of friends for lunch and dinners, networking with people I used to work with in my job hunting, seeing a couple of theatre shows, reconnecting with people at All Souls church in Regent Street - everything seemed to be humming along.
After the first two weeks and nothing definite with work I was relieved to receive 3 interviews in week 3: an Investment Bank, a Department Store and a consulting Co. All three initial interviews on the one day! The next day I found out that I had been offered the Dept Store job which put me through a very technical interview. It wasn't paying very much and I was much more keen on the investment banking position. I put the Dept Store off for a week while waiting for the bank to get back to me and ended up saying no to them even though I hadn't heard back from the bank. It just seemed that if I didn't get the bank I'd get the consulting co job. Well to cut a long story short both the bank and the consulting co put their jobs on hold so I had nothing!
This was about week 5 when I was thinking I need to get something or else I'm flying back home early with my tail between my legs! It was in this desparate state that I agreed to interview for a CRM position with a pharmaceutical company that was outside of London (Surrey). Got through the first interview (manager then HR) and was the only one called back for a second interview with the VP of IT. Turned out it was 4 people grilling me and they decided I "didn't have enough functional experience". Well this is something you ascertain at the CV stage or the first round interview not the second round. It was quite an insult to be rejected for a job I didn't even want at the final stage no less! Well I can smile about it now but how depressed was I?! There were no more leads in the pipeline, it was getting close to the traditional Christmas slowdown and my colleagues in this space weren't having much luck either. How I rued that I had rejected the Dept Store job, that bird in hand!
That period of time really did work my trust in God and I have my own private theology on the whole experience. I say private because it relates to my particular circumstances in securing employment, my personality, my skills and abilities and therefore can't be applied generally to everyone. However, I can echo with the sublime hymn "for I know whatever befall me, Jesus doeth all things well" and "though my weary steps may falter, and my soul athirst may be/Gushing from the rock before me, Lo, a spring of joy I see".
And indeed He does things well as it was the Tuesday that I found out I didn't get the job and the Wed that I got a call from another agent saying he had a phone interview for me that evening. Then I had the face to face interview on Thurs in Bristol and they asked me to start straight away on Thursday afternoon! Most of you got the longer version of events in the email I sent out!
During that whole time there were actually a lot of jobs in my field in Germany, Holland and France but that was neither here nor there since I couldn't work there and the agents are too lazy to arrange a visa for you as they know they can get an EU person to fill those roles.
