I really like it over here. I mean, I like it a lot. Part of it is still the novelty and part of it is how much I like what I’m studying, but there’s also a million little things and big things that have conspired to make these last few months the happiest few in a row I can ever recall having. Life here is good for me — very good, and better than I’d expected — and if any of my contingency plans pan out I’ll be able to make a go of staying over here for a while longer.
The catch, of course, is that is kuh-ray-zay expensive here, even when you stop constantly calculating exchange rates in your head. And I say that as someone living in a relatively cheap town in the UK, and who is used to living in an obscenely expensive city in the US. Perhaps this little sample from a “quiz” urging British tourists to rape and pillage their way across New York will illustrate this point:
Now when you look at that, please remember that a pound is also worth about 2 dollars. So remember to double all those numbers when you do the exchange in your head, and then when your brain shuts down from the horror of it like mine does every day, just try to relax and breathe deeply until the sensation passes.
Luckily, my modest day-to-day life in Reading doesn’t really include any of those expenses. I actually spend next to nothing aside from rent a food when I’m here, but any trips into London immediately make up for the monastic simplicity of the rest of my time. I’ve always joked about how New York you pay a twenty-dollar penalty just for going out your front door, but the joke is a lot less funny when it’s in pounds.
Still, I have so much more to learn before I’m done. And the candy they have here is really, really good.
I’m totally with you on the candy. As you know.
Yes, I did the dumbest thing possible and actually went shopping while I was in London a few weeks ago. Deliberately. More than once. But at least the math was easy: take the price in pounds and double it. Done. Much easier than the 1:1.33 conversion to Euros while I was in Paris.
But the important question: Which candy are you liking? My impression of British sweets is that everything’s made of milk chocolate, which I don’t care for. Did I miss something?
>a pound is also worth about 2 dollars
It just isn’t fair!!!
This is a depressing reminder for me of something I already think about fairly often (although when I lived in NYC there was only 1.40-1.60 dollars to the pound, so I never enjoyed the two for one craziness.) As well as feeling twice as expensive as the US, it seems to me that the UK is also 50 percent more expensive than most of the Eurozone. We must be doing something very wrong here! Having said that, I wonder why it is that compared with my UK friends, my US friends never seem to have any spare cash to travel and seem to live paycheque to paycheque. There are hidden expenses to US life like the obligatory tipping and the sales tax added at the register (not to mention the health insurance you wrote about recently) that bump up the cost of things there. Anyway, I’m glad you like it here all the same.
Who pays two dollars for a bagel with cream cheese?
From this post and the previous one about healthcare costs, it sounds like you need to meet a British husband and revolutionize the world of fonts from there…..
I understand how you feel. The last time I was in England was in 1994 and it was about $1.80 exchange rate so I just did the rough mind calculating of just doubling what the price tag said. I landed up buying very little. I loved visiting there otherwise and hope to head over again one day.