Tag: Expats

Posted in bloggers, family, Moving to London, relationships

Bad Dreams and Irrational Fears

Posted on by Miss Blabbaholic

Yesterday I had a long shift at work that eventually ended in me sprawled on the couch at 9pm trying to decide whether I’m more tired or hungry, and whether it was worth giving up being horizontal to prepare dinner. Needless to say, I wasn’t in the best of moods.

In the middle of all this, my mum FaceTimed me from the Philippines – as she usually does around that time. She gets up early every morning to go to church (every morning without fail! Now that is a woman who does not feel conflicted about her faith) and she makes a point of ringing my sister and I before she leaves. Maybe so she’ll know if anything’s come up in our lives that necessitates her praying for our eternal souls.

Anyway, I’m ashamed to say that I was too tired last night to bring myself to have a decent conversation with my mother. I was so self-absorbed and cranky that my dad eventually told her to just let me off the phone and rest because I seemed so tired.

I felt incredibly guilty after that. I mean, I so seldom see my parents because I live abroad and these phone calls are their only means of ensuring we stay connected. I’m very lucky that my mum makes an effort to call every day despite the 8 hour time difference; its gotten me through the worst of homesickness when I first got here and through tough times and seemingly insurmountable challenges. They made me feel supported and loved.

Of course my neurotic subconscious chose to express my guilt in the form of a nightmare where my mum was on a ship that had problems at sea and everyone on it has been now been declared missing and presumed dead. I woke up at 2am still in the grips of emotional upheaval and thinking that the last thing I ever said to my mother was that I was too tired to FaceTime her.

I of course rang her telling her about this nightmare and she laughed in my face and told me I was crazy. I probably AM but that’s beside the point. The point is I’ve always had this irrational fear about phone calls. I don’t like receiving missed calls because you never know who was trying to ring you and whether or not it was something catastrophic. Especially missed calls in the middle of the night. Or missed calls from work or your boss.

My mum once rang me in the middle of a working day (London time) and when she couldn’t get a hold of me proceeded to leave the most serious voicemail in the world asking me to call her back when I can. I thought someone in the family had died. It turned out she was just testing whether her new sim card for international calls worked. I nearly had a coronary. I told her never to do that again.

I also sometimes think about how life can suddenly throw curveballs at you. This may seem fatalistic but we never know when a certain conversation with someone we love may be our last. And if you think about it, we take so much for granted that we sometimes forget to even say ‘I love you’ at the end of a conversation with our parents or siblings or partners. This really gets to me, the fact that you never know. So you have to make the most out of it, out of every moment.

I guess what I’m just trying to remind myself is that you should never get to the point where you’re too busy to make time for the ones you love. You have to learn to prioritise, see the bigger picture and remember what’s important. In addition, just because it appears to be ordinary doesn’t mean its not important. Life is made up of small ordinary moments; its what you do with it and who you do it with that makes it extraordinary.

Now that I’ve done this little self-talk, I’m going to ring my mother again and hope I can now sleep better tonight. Lol

Cheers!

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Posted in london, Travel, United Kingdom

I see London, I see Sam’s Town: Part I

Posted on by Miss Blabbaholic

Nobody ever had a dream ’round here but I don’t really mind that it’s starting to get to me

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First day in London, jet lagged but eager to see Big Ben

It’s only fitting that the first post on this, my resurrected blog, would be an ode to two of my favourite things in the world: London and The Killers.

There is nothing like moving to a foreign country to show you that you’re made of much sterner stuff than you thought you were. Up until I moved to the UK, I had no concept whatsoever of what the millenials so fondly call “adulting”. I mean, I like to think of myself as fairly responsible in my own way. But let’s face it, I went 23 years without having to cook my own food, or to do my laundry or pay my own bills. My “life skills” consisted of being able to drive, one that is absolutely useless on this side of the pond seeing as they drive on the wrong side of the road (insert arguments here).

I don’t know who was more petrified of the prospect of my moving to London and living on my own for the first time in my life: myself or my mother. The days leading up to my flight, she kept giving me these reminders like making sure to separates my whites from my colours when using the washing machine, or how not to burn the house down when using a gas or electric stove. The latter she needn’t have bothered with, as I spent the first 6 months of my life in London subsisting on a steady diet of Marks and Spencer’s ready-made meals.

I had a seemingly endless list of things that I needed to organise and see to. There was the question of accommodation, obviously. I had friends living here already and it was easier to just defer to their judgment. How was I to know that Tottenham was in fact different from Tottenham Court Road, and that the commute from work to home would take me through some really rough areas?

And really, who in the world could have foreseen that I would be renting a room in a house owned by a family who just happened to be fond of dogs and that said dogs would be equally fond of my legs? So fond, that they chewed off a huge chunk of my skin one day as I was about to head out to go to King’s Cross Station to meet my mum, thus necessitating my first ever trip to the hospital as a patient.

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If you think that’s bad, imagine what it looked like before surgery!

 

National Insurance Number. GP Registration. Opening a bank account. Buying an oyster (no, not the kind you eat). Locating my nearest bookstore. And then figuring out where to move after the whole dog bite incident made it impossible to stay where I was. I wish someone had given me a roadmap back then. A how-to guide on surviving London. All I had to rely on were my own instincts, helpful advice from friends and Google.

Fast-forward to five years later and I get to meet batch after batch of wide-eyed fellow countrymen who are trying their hand in London, just as I did.

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My own welcoming committee, taking me through my first tube ride. 🙂

Some of them I know from school and I invite them over to dinner at my hard-earned flat in Soho and I try to give them the benefit of my experience, patiently answering their questions so that they’d have a much easier time than we did. So here’s my way of giving back. My own version of a survival guide or as i like to call it in my head “How to make sure you don’t end up in an operating room at the Royal Free Hospital within your first six months in London”. I’ll be doing a series of these posts on my blog for anyone who’s thinking of moving to London, or for nurses like me who’ve recently been hired through international recruitment, or if you’re already here and may want some tips on how to make life just a little bit better. I don’t claim to be an expert, and these tips are largely self-referential but hey, they work for me.

Tips and guides on part 2 of this post. Read on, blabbaholics. Xx