The month that I lived in London
Obviously, it is not the same going on vacation to a city than living there.
Even though my experience in London was like a long vacation (one full month of August visiting the city without working there) I tried to be there not as a mere tourist, but as a citizen. I read the news, I walked around the city looking for cultural differences, I saw the diversity in the streets and visited different neighborhoods, I tried to meet local people (unsuccessfully due to my low English level at that period)...
Now I am going to explain my experience there.
I travelled to London some years ago with my boyfriend at that time (he is my husband now). It feels like it was about five years agoapproximately, but if I check the dates, it was, actually, ten years ago. Time goes fast.
In general terms, I think that London is not so different from Barcelona. It is the kind of city we are used to.We felt there like at home.It felt like home. Multiculturalism is very obvious there, like here. It is also a city with history, and there is always movement in the street, a lot of cultural events, etc.
When we arrived there, the first thing that shocked us was the weather. Even though we already knew that the rain is very common there, we are not used to carrying an umbrella or a jacket if the day is clear in summertime. Since it was cold, we ran to buy a jacket as soon as we arrived to the city.
We would drink coffee in the morning when we lived in Spain, but when we were there, it was difficult to get one coffee not so different to that we were used to. After several attempts (we tried with different expressions to order our café con leche: "milked coffee", cappuccino and cafe-latte). We finally found that cafe-latte was the better option. It took us some days :-)
We weren't usedeither to the kind of building where we lived at, either. It was a kind of big house with a garden at the back and a private area at the front. The house was shared with students who lived there during the university period. They were very polite and didn't use to be in the common areas. We tried not to disturb them as well. This is why we didn't use to talk to them in all the month. Just "hello" and "bye".
We decided to talk in English all the vacation but it was difficult and we used to change to Spanish all the time. Finally, we were getting used to talking in English all the time and we promised to keep up with this habit when we come back to Barcelona, but we felt embarrassed when somebody listened to us and quit :-(
It was a good experience and we came back later but it wasn't as special as the first time.
Even though my experience in London was like a long vacation (one full month of August visiting the city without working there) I tried to be there not as a mere tourist, but as a citizen. I read the news, I walked around the city looking for cultural differences, I saw the diversity in the streets and visited different neighborhoods, I tried to meet local people (unsuccessfully due to my low English level at that period)...
Now I am going to explain my experience there.
I travelled to London some years ago with my boyfriend at that time (he is my husband now). It feels like it was about five years ago
In general terms, I think that London is not so different from Barcelona. It is the kind of city we are used to.
When we arrived there, the first thing that shocked us was the weather. Even though we already knew that the rain is very common there, we are not used to carrying an umbrella or a jacket if the day is clear in summertime. Since it was cold, we ran to buy a jacket as soon as we arrived to the city.
We would drink coffee in the morning when we lived in Spain, but when we were there, it was difficult to get one coffee not so different to that we were used to. After several attempts (we tried with different expressions to order our café con leche: "milked coffee", cappuccino and cafe-latte). We finally found that cafe-latte was the better option. It took us some days :-)
We weren't used
We decided to talk in English all the vacation but it was difficult and we used to change to Spanish all the time. Finally, we were getting used to talking in English all the time and we promised to keep up with this habit when we come back to Barcelona, but we felt embarrassed when somebody listened to us and quit :-(
It was a good experience and we came back later but it wasn't as special as the first time.
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