As some or all of you know, I am finally settled in to London with a job and a place to stay. I'll start off with the place. I'm situated in South East London in zone 3. For those that don't know about the London zones, basically zone 1 is the most central and the further away you go from the centre, the higher the zone. Zone 1 or 2 was ideally what I wanted, however, you can imagine how expensive it can get in those zones. The area is not too shabby. I'm about an 8 minute walk to a train station, that takes me right into the heart of London in 30 minutes. Literally 1 minute walk to a beautiful park. I have a pretty spacious room considering the sizes of rooms you'll find in London. The house is with 3 English fellows who kind of keep to themselves and have their own lives. Now, it's only for July and August which is what I want. Ideally, I want to be closer to central London and potentially also share a place with people a bit more social come September.
The job. I apologize if I bore you or just lose you altogether. I've already worked two days and to be honest, I still don't even fully understand the company I work for. The name of the company is called Gemserv, and from what I gather, they're a consulting firm. There are many sectors to it and I particularly work in just one of them. The area I'm in is called the Microgeneration Certification Scheme or MCS for short. Still with me here? MCS is something the government created so that people installing renewable energy source products are protected by this scheme and the installations have standards. One of Gemserv's job is to administer MCS on behalf of the government. My job is to answer customer queries through phone and email and while that might seem super easy, I have to know the answers to the questions they're asking and know what I'm talking about. At the moment, that's taking some time. Luckily, they're putting me through training. The position was given to me as temporary for 2-3 months but they could offer me an extension, depending on how well I do. The company seems fast growing so from what I've heard, I most likely will be offered an extension. It just doesn't make sense to hire and train somebody for only 3 months when the company shows no signs of slowing down. Anyway, sorry to bore you with all that!
Other than starting work and moving in, this last week has kept all of it's fun as well. Tuesday, my Canadian friends and I celebrated Canada Day. There's a Canadian bar in London that we went to go to but it was absolutely packed and lined out the door so we went to another pub, although not Canadian, across the street and it was packed with Canadians. Wednesday night, I went and saw War Horse and it was awesome! Dare I say I teared up a little. Mom, you would have loved it. Friday night, I went and saw a contemporary play called Mr. Burns...and it was interesting to the say the least. Saturday, I went to this food festival in Southbank and I probably could have eaten everything there. It's dangerous too because they do it every weekend in the summer. There's always so much going on in this city, it's hard to keep up. Without being a part of BritBound, I can't say I would be discovering as much as they've shown me and I can't say that I would have as many friends as I do now. I've already signed up with them to go to Oktoberfest in September so I'm looking forward to that. Now that I'm settled in, I'm going to try to do as much with my weekends as much as possible. My not too distant future plans are to go see my friend Robyn in Dublin, see Stonehenge, visit Brighton and other parts of England, and possibly venture over to Amsterdam, Paris, etc. The list goes on!
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