Finding work in the England
In October 2012, I moved to Bristol in southern England and I loved it there. Living in the UK’s street art capital, where an entire neighbourhood is repainted every year in Europe’s largest street art festival (Upfest), is inspirational. I don’t think I’ll find such a magical place to live again.
Sadly, like so many of the other EU expatriates I met through the CouchSurfing community, I struggled to find work. Between the savings accumulated living at home in Los Angeles for a year and the part-time, remote work I was doing for my previous employer in CA, it was rather expensive making a home in the UK, where the pound was quite strong. I started looking for a new User Experience position after my US work contract was finally completed. The British economy had only just come out of recession, so it wasn’t a great time to be looking for work.
While travelling around looking for the perfect place to live is still the ideal method of relocating, having sufficient savings to support yourself while looking is of paramount importance. After one interview where they suggested I was too qualified and another where the other candidates were better qualified, I desperately took the position I was finally offered in my 3rd interview in READING, in the county of Berkshire, UK.
Regretfully, I never reached out directly to the 2 largest UX consultancies in the UK, both of which were based in Bristol. I overly relied on my recruiters at the time.
Life in Oscar Wilde’s old prison town, just outside London
The plan was to work at my job for 1 year to establish myself in the UK and Europe, then head back to Bristol.
People mostly live in Reading because “it is so close to London”. However, it is simply too small a town to make a life. It was here that I finally had to expand my online search for events from CouchSurfing to Meetup.com and InterNations. Nevertheless, it was still not enough to make a sufficient amount of friends. Two of the groups I joined were looking for a new leader and a third was branching out, so I was eventually running 3 monthly groups. It was still not enough.
Just as the year was finishing two important changes happened:
- I got involved in a serious, long-term relationship.
- My boss quit.
Since I hadn’t had much luck in relationships before this time, I was eager to give this romance every opportunity. So I stayed in Reading. After about 1 year of dating, my girlfriend and I moved in together (into her two bedroom flat).
Bristol, united at last
About 2 years into the relationship, my girlfriend was ready to buy a house. It was during this phase of our lives that we took our first trip to Bristol together. She had been before, but probably at a time when the economy was much worse and before Bristol became the absolute street art leader of the UK. And she fell in love…
She didn’t immediately change her plans to buy a house in Reading, but step-by-step she agreed to include Bristol in her property search, and eventually she stopped searching in Berkshire altogether. Thus, after 3 years in Reading and 2 years together, we started our lives over in Bristol.
The Brexit split
It was around this time that the UK’s EU Referendum was taking place. David Cameron, the UK prime minister at the time, had to oblige UKIP and more conservative members of his own party (Tory) by finally allowing the British people to vote on their membership in the European Union. When the UK initially joined the EU, it had done so far too late. There hadn’t been a popular vote; the politicians themselves decided Britain’s fate.
None of my friends or colleagues at work thought anything of it; the vote to “remain” was a no-brainer. Nevertheless, it did seem like the UK had the largest burden from immigration than the rest of Europe, simply because English was more widely used throughout the world. Economically though, it would be fiscal suicide to leave the EU. On the 23rd of June, 2016, to everyone’s surprise, the British public did vote to “leave” the EU.
After the Brexit vote and about 1 year in Bristol, between moving cities, buying a house, getting new jobs, and a disaster house renovation, my girlfriend and I simply couldn’t handle all the stressors together. Although I had moved this woman away from all her friends in Reading and London, we broke up for the final time.
And then I decided to leave the UK for good…
