life2gether.nl

Most of you have known for quite a while that we’ve been looking into moving to London. Some of you even knew for a while that we’ve been able to change mere hopes into actual plans. Everything went so fast and there was so little we could say with any real certainty that the writing of a post has been somewhat delayed. But here it is, an update on what we’ve been up to:

Sometime at the end of the summer of 2008 some serious options started to become viable. All along we’d known that if we would indeed go, it would be early in 2009. But it took until December to have things actually arranged…we’d be moving to London some time around the first of February 2009. And here we are, smack in the middle of the city trying to let it sink in.

I’ve moved quite a few times since leaving the parental nest, but this was definitely the more interesting one! We’d discovered that it’s quite cheap to send parcels from Israel to London by regular post. They have an EMS service that delivers your parcel in 4-5 days or they ship it which can take 4-6 weeks. So we started collecting boxes…and while trying to figure out how many boxes we would need I realized that we collected quite a lot of things during our stay in Israel. And that made me realize that maybe using a professional moving company wouldn’t be so bad an idea. So on the 31st of December (the western New Year isn’t really celebrated in Israel) we had a representative over at our apartment to have a look at how we could have everything moved to London. And we were offered to have our stuff taken on the next ship…that would leave on the 5th…which meant they’d collect our belongings on the 1st of January…
So on the afternoon of the 31st we started packing. We took a break in the form of a nice Sylvester dinner, which is Israel’s way of celebrating the western New Year at least a little. On the first morning of 2009 we continued sorting out our stuff. And around noon that same day we waved our things good bye!

The next 4 weeks flew by in a haze. Emanuel had a lot of things to round up at work, and I tried to make a start with looking for a job in London. Soon I realized that most companies were not interested in someone who was not yet in the UK, so I invested most of my time in upgrading my CV, registering at all kinds of employment websites, and trying to figure out what kind of jobs are available in these economically challenging times…

In our last week in Israel we planned to see our friends, have dinners and say our goodbyes…it wasn’t until then that it started to dawn on us…we again were about to leave a live behind to start a completely new one somewhere else. And even though leaving behind so many friends made us feel sad, and the idea of not living in this beautiful country made us feel homesick already; there was also the thrill of going to a city as exciting as London, the excitement over Emanuel’s new job, and all the possibilities for a new job for me.

On the 29th of January the day was there…that evening we had our last sushi dinner at our favorite restaurant River and only a couple hours later we were on hour flight out of Israel. We’d planned a short weekend in the Netherlands for a quick ‘Hi’ to our families before flying to London on the 2nd of February. But on arrival at the Eindhoven airport for our flight to London, we had a surprise waiting for us… Remember that day that it snowed so much in the UK? Yeah…that was that day…so our flight got cancelled. We were booked on the only other flight that day, late in the evening, but sometime that afternoon it became obvious that we were not going to be able get to London at all that day. So we had our flight rescheduled again, this time to Tuesday evening, hoping that by then things would be back in control.

And that’s how we arrived in London on the evening of Tuesday the 3rd of February. From the plane we could see that most of the country was still covered in snow, but in the city most was gone. What was left of that week we spend arranging appointments to have a look at apartments, getting to know our surroundings and enjoying the fact that we could finally understand everything that was said to us again.

By now we’ve seen quite a few apartments and we’re hoping that by the end of the month we’ll have a new place to call home. I have been on my first interview and have two more planned for next week. Who knows, maybe some time next month I’ll be working again too.

In the meantime we will try to keep you update, here on the website. Although I’ll continue completing the information on Israel, at some point I also want to start adding some info on London, maybe also on the UK in general. And you’ll see some more changes around here as soon as we’ve settled down a bit more. Until then you can enjoy some of the minor additions that have already been made: for example have a look at Tel Aviv, if you’d like to get an idea of why we liked it so much there.