Curious.Lucious

One of the major reasons I wanted to move to move to a new city/travel is to experience living out of familiarity; obvious things like new friends, new work, new environment.

Then there are the little things that you never think about. From the water pressure when you shower to having space to dry your laundry to buying coat-hangers (because you don’t have the ones you’ve accumulated from years of dry cleaning). This list could go on, but I speak today about the experience of finding a home.

It’s been almost 3 weeks since we’ve arrived in London. And 2 days ago, we officially moved into a new place – Hurrah!!

To say we were excited is a gross understatement, and I’d say our excitement was on par with relief. When Thursday rolled around, we couldn’t wait to finally settle in and create our own little bit of peace in the brilliantly hectic city that is London.

We unpacked, cleaned and took inventory of the necessities we had to purchase (like coat hangers and a drying rack!). All in all we were quite happy with how we’d done. We’d found a decent place, good price and there was even a window. The landlord was friendly and from what we’d seen of the housemates they were nice and clean. We fell asleep that night with a smile on our faces.

That is, until we were woken up by loud thumping noises at 4am.

Did I mention the housemates are a gay couple?

Unsavoury noises came from the room next door for the next hour. We heard a phone drop among… other things.

Needless to say, we were traumatised, and wondered what the hell we’d done. We lay in bed, exhausted from the disturbed sleep we had and decided the best way to go about it was to just introduce ourselves – maybe they were loud cos they didn’t know we were here? After all, we haven’t had a chance to say hi to them yet…

We knocked on their door 3 times before we gave up with no answer, our imagination took over and we were in panic mode. For the rest of the day, we came up with contingency plans about what to do about unfriendly housemates. Confront them? Move out? But what if they don’t even talk to us? How can we trust having our personal belongings in the same house as these people???

To add fuel to the fire, our friend started to make us panic about scammer landlords and the dangers of London. We literally spent the day in a blind panic running around learning about cancelling cheques, lease agreement and trying to figure out who we could call if we had to bail from our new home.

We finally calmed down and decided that we really should try to get to know the house mates before we did anything stupid/drastic.

Turned out they were drunk, they apologised for the noise (I don’t know how fair their apology extends, but I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt). They were friendly – still private, but I think the worst is over – for now.

Lets just say, it was an adventure, not necessarily a good one, but I’m still glad we had it.

Keep you guys update!

Here’s our new ‘home’ so far!