Little Differences: floor numbering

In Europe ground floor is usually considered the level 0 while in the USA ground floor is numero uno.

Little differences: card payments

One of the things that has confused me the most here In the USA is the way card transactions are handled in restaurants and bars. The transaction happens in the following way:
1. Waiter hands me the bill
2. I hand him my debit card
3. He swipes it and gives me a receipt with a field for tip, total and signature
4. I fill the receipt, sign it and leave

The waiter then has to input the tip on the machine. If he mistypes it I will only find out by checking my bank account statement (if I ever do that).

Never seen this in Europe... In Europe I confirm the amount on the terminal, add tip and then finish by typing my PIN.

How NY Times sees Lisbon

A colleague who is passionate about food pointed me to the following two interesting articles from NY Times:

How I Fell for Lisbon
But [sidewalk] tiles like these, used this way, were a revelation. It was as if Lisbon wore a set of jewels that other cities didn’t bother to.

4 Lisbon Restaurants Not to Miss
Cervejaria, in the elegant residential neighborhood of Campo de Ourique, to which few tourists venture, has a menu with a more diverse selection of clams, saltwater snails and even barnacles than I’d ever encountered before.

US vs British English

Some different use of words I've noticed so far:

• Subway vs Tube or Underground
• Cafeteria vs Canteen
• Trash vs Rubbish
• Apartment vs Flat
• Line vs Queue

There are also some interesting pronunciations, like the word mobile. Here they almost say moble, in the UK is mobIle, where the I is more pronounced.

Little Differences

After 6 weeks in the USA I've been noticing a few interesting little differences between here and Europe. First one was the use of certain different words. I'll keep registering them here under the little-differences label. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, some little differences noticed by Vincent (Travolta):

London Starter Pack

A few of my friends who moved to London/UK asked my advice regarding a few common topics so I've compiled the list of things I've told them and I'm putting it here for anyone else who may find it helpful.

Housing
I've always shared flats in London so these websites may be better suited for people renting a room:
Spareroom.co.uk: my favourite one, offers are filtered and it has a great search engine / alert system. Early bird option is worth the cost as it may help you secure a great deal.
Gumtree.com: Lots of offers but be careful with deals too good to be true. Some are fakes to lure you in to get in touch with an agent who will try to offer you something else (generally more expensive).
Moveflat.co.uk: Not as many offers as the above ones but not bad.

Regarding British tenancy laws, your landlord has to put your deposit in a Deposit Security Scheme (DSS), make sure you ask him for the DSS details.

Final advice: if you see a flat/room in London that you like and the price is good take it immediately. If you don't chances are someone else will. It's a very competitive market.

Foreign Exchange
Transferring money home, or to the UK, using conventional banks may become very expensive as their rates and fees are not amazing. You get better deals using specialised Foreign Exchange providers. I've only used one and I've been very happy with all the transactions I've placed through them.
SmartCurrencyExchange.com: You call them and get a quote for the amount of money you want to transfer (I've got rates as good as 2% above spot price). Transfer pounds to their pound bank account and they will transfer euros the destination account you wish in 3 business days. They also support other currencies.
ATM Machine / Debit Card: I've written about this here (in Portuguese), the summary is you get charged fees for every transaction. If you are doing many (6 or more) it's better to withdrawn as much money as possible as opposed of several small card transfers.

Taxes and National Insurance
The best website to get information about this is HMRC. Some companies will help you get a National Insurance Number, while in other cases you'll have to take care of it yourself.
IRS: For people whose only source of income is their salary they don't need to fill IRS forms. Taxes will be deducted from your salary and HMRC will repay you some tax back if you started working half way through the fiscal year or if you leave London before the fiscal year ends.
You got a Per Annum offer but now you are wondering how much you'll get in the end of the month after taxes? Check listentotaxman.com. BTW, contrary to certain continental countries, in the UK you'll only get 12 salaries per year. There are no extra subsidies for Xmas or holidays month.

Getting Around London
Don't forget to buy an Oyster Card once you get to an Underground Station.
tfl.gov.uk: TFL handles Buses and Underground and they have a great journey planner on their website
Barclays (Boris) Bikes: For £45/year it's a great way of travelling in London!

Getting out of London
By plane, check skyscanner.net to find the best flight rates, don't forget to chose "London All" as this will find flights to/from all airports around London.
By train: NationalRail.co.uk
By bus: MegaBus.com, low cost buses, NationalExpress.co.uk, normal coaches service

Health
UK has the reputation of having one of the best Health systems in the world. It's called NHS and you can use their website to find out all you need to know.

Communications
Calling home from your mobile phone/landline can be expensive. There a few other cheaper methods:
Skype.com: obviously you can use Skype to make calls using the internet but you can also use it to call to phone numbers (rates)
Voipcheap.com: A cheaper way to call phone numbers from the web is Voipcheap, not only the rates are better thank Skype's it also offer freedays to call landlines for free. If you have a slow internet connection you can also call a Voipcheap's local phone number from your phone and then dial the number you want to call using your voipcheap credit.
WhatsApp/Viber: have a smartphone with an internet connection? Chances are you are already using one of these apps. They are great to keep in touch with folks back home either by sending messages of phone calls.

Living Costs
So you got a big offer to work in London, but how much does it actually cost to live in London?
Expatistan.com: Expatistan helps you compare the cost of living in your present city to the one you are moving.

Shopping
You got yourself a flat and now you need to buy some appliances, bed linen, gadgets, etc. Where to go?
argos.co.uk: There are many Argos in London and chances are there is one close to you. There will find very good prices on a very wide range of products. You can oder what you want to buy from the website, go to one of the shops, pay and collect.
amazon.co.uk: With free delivery on so many items it's hard not like Amazon. Probably the best website for electronic products, media and books.
ebay.co.uk: Most renown for its auctions ebay also lets you buy from shops, including shops in China that will sell you incredibly cheap adapters and gadgets. After you search for something click on the "Buy Now" tab and this will show you item for available for sale.

Enjoy your stay in London and have fun!

Why you should stay away from Talk Talk

This article is probably the one I have the least pleasure writing but is a deserved one.

A month ago I moved to my new flat in Limehouse in which the internet is provided by Talk Talk. We have their (advertised) 24Mb service. From the beginning I felt the speed wasn't very fast but for normal web navigation it was bearable. It was when I had to send my first email with a 5MB attachment that I noticed something was definitely wrong. It timed out a few times and when it finally was sent it still took some 15 minutes or more. I decided to take their speed test to find out our speed was actually 1.5Mbps dowload and 0.02Mbps upload. Called them, endured the standard obvious questions and finally the guy told me there was an issue and he was going to fix it in 48 hours. Two days later, nothing, new call, obvious repetitive standard questions and finally a helpful guy who recommend us to connect our router directly to the test socket. That implied disassembling our BT wall socket but that night we saw 8Mbps download speeds and 0.24 Mbps upload speeds, the fastest we ever got!

A few days from then slow speeds again, for example, it was impossible to do a Skype video call and even sound calls were difficult. We called them, answered the same repetitive questions and this time they sent an engineer who might have charged us £50 if the issue was inside our flat! The guy came 2 days later, brought his own router and did tests for a hour. After which he concluded the issue was not at our place but probably on the local exchange. He also filed some sort of report so the issue would be fixed.

After a few more days without any improvements we called them. At every call they would always give us the same BS about checking our wireless connection or about trying connecting with the cable, etc, etc. This time the phone operator had the nerve to say he could fix anything! 5 min later he admitted he couldn't actually fix it, LOL! Then he said he would escalate it. Later we got a text message asking if it was fixed. Obviously it wasn't. In another phone call the guy asked me to change the Router Wireless Channel, I tried to explain him that wouldn't fix the issue and even so he insisted me to do it...

More or less at the same time I exposed our situation to @TalkTalkCare on twitter, they asked the standard boring questions and provided me a form. I filled and.... you can guess: nothing!

We finally got tired of this, my flatmate called them (yes, they tried to ask the scripted questions even though we have a long story with them) and asked to speak with a manager. The manager said our connection was "normal" even though or download speeds were varying between 2-3Mbps, our upload speeds between 0.02-0.15Mbps and since we had internet no reason to complain. He also said he could send another engineer for £130!!! My flatmate asked "will that guarantee the issue is fixed?" Answer: "no". Since we were not having the service we hired we asked to cancel it and get our money back. Unfortunately Talk Talk charges £140 for contract cancelations!!! Their solution? Subscribe their fibre optic service. In my book this is only comparable to extortion.

I've been speaking about speeds because those I can objectively measure on their website but that's not the whole story. Quite frequently the connection is down momentarily where I have lots of ping timeouts, I drop out from gchat and msn messenger and downloads/upload get dropped. It's quite sad that in this day and age Talk Talk provides such a bad service and is not willing to do anything about it. It seems I'm not the only one complaining according to this article from BBC.

If we ask me why Talk Talk is called Talk Talk, my answer has to be because they talk a lot and don't do anything.

PS: My flatmate just told me that today a so called Talk Talk "specialist" phoned her, said he had just fixed the issue and asked her to confirm if it was fixed. She answered she would need at least a week since the speed varies and he was offended by it. Later during the call she asked for a refund and he said we weren't paying for our broadband as in the invoice it only said phone line. That's brilliant, apparently we hired a phone line and the broadband comes as an offer, love you Talk Talk! Our speeds tonight, before a 5 min connection failure:

Travels

Some friends say I travel a lot so I've decided to do some statistics since it's been almost a year I moved back to London. So, in
12 months I've made
40 flights in
19 trips, from which
12 times to Portugal and
7 outside,
3 new places and
0 new countries.

Same will say it's a lot but I do know some people who travel more than that, usually professionally or academically. On average I went to Portugal once a month for festivities, birthdays, weddings and to visit family and friends. Ironically I don't know the UK that well which is a shame.

Juhannus

Juhannus is Finland's celebration of Midsummer (equivalent to S. João in Portugal) and it's their most important holiday after Christmas. During Juhannus Finns flee from the cities into wood cottages near the water. This year I was fortunate to be invited to celebrate Juhannus in Finland with 20 people from all over Europe.

My trip didn't start the best way, my first flight (to Helsinki) was delayed 40 minutes. Upon arrival I had to run full speed to my next flight's boarding gate barely arriving on time to find out that flight was late 40 minutes. Life has its ironies... From Helsinki I flew to Tampere from where part of our group drove to the eastern coast, somewhere around here (google maps).


We reached a peer and took a boat to my friend's cottage which is in small island with some other 10 cottages.


The cottage has no running water or toilet but it has a sauna! The toilet was located outside in another sort of cottage. And it has a window so one could contemplate nature while he did his thing :) Quite relaxing!


But life in the cottage implies working, usually before doing sauna, or as the Finns say sauna Hiki (to sweat before sauna).


Here is a boulder we dug up to move it to the lake. It took some 5 or 6 of us, a couple of heavy metal rods and two logs used as levers and a hour or so. But after that hard work the sauna felt sweeter :)


Juhannus is all about tradition, so we had Karelian Pies for breakfast (pastries filled with rice and covered with egg butter).

We also had our Juhannus birch tree.

On Juhannus night we did a big bonfire near the sea, of course.

We also had 90 liters of Sima, a typical Finnish homemade brew ranging from 5% to 9%. Very pleasant and refreshing :)

And on Juhannus day we had pea soup! Not the best tradition...

Another Finnish tradition, the vihta, made of boughs of birch tree it's used in the sauna to beat oneself on the back for relaxing the muscles and calm the skin after some mosquito bites (which were huge there). We ended up beating each other not very gently :)
After sauna we usually went to swim in the sea which felt quite good. We usually alternate between sauna and sea some three times. Here's the access we used to dive in the sea.

We usually would this till quite late. At that latitude it never really became dark so we never quite knew what time it was... The sun rose at 4:30

The rest of our cottage life was relaxing, some traditional games, some barbecues...
Enjoying nature...

And of course, drinking.

New hair clipper

Since my teen days I get my hair cut with clippers more or less once a month. Not only is convenient (I don't have to comb) as it is cheap. But moving to London deprived me of two things, my hair clippers and my hairdresser (= mom) meaning I had to go shopping. What did I get? This:



The Philips QC5170

The great thing about it is it's made to cut your own hair so the head rotates 180º to reach the back of your head more comfortably. What can I say... it works! It could be a bit more powerful but nothing is perfect.

And to be honest it was not expensive: £25

My first job suggestion got accepted!

Now you are thinking "he proposed a major project that will save his company several thousand dollars per year" or "he optimized a business process making it 50% quicker"... not really, but let me tell you the whole story to make you suffer a bit.

On Monday I talked with my manager for the first time since I joined the team and we started with some casual conversation. He asked me how was to be back in Portugal after having worked in London. I explained to him some of the professional and cultural differences like having long lunches (essentially eating away from your desk) during weekdays.

Today, on the street, as I was walking to get my takeaway lunch I bumped into him walking the opposite direction (with his takeaway lunch). He asked me what I was going to get and then, to my surprise, he pulled Monday's topic and asked if I didn't miss the Portuguese lunches and Portuguese food. An obvious YES was my reply but I added "we should do a team lunch now and then to improve team bonding". He said "good idea" but I thought he was just being polite.

Some hours later I receive a calendar invite for a team lunch next week! He was serious :)

Back to London

After 7 months here I am again, not my original plans but life is unpredictable... :)

This time I planned my farewell to Portugal very well. On Friday I spent the morning at Galapos beach with my parents. Afterwards we went for some grilled fish in one of Setúbal's typical neighbourhoods, Fonte Nova. Then said goodbye to my grandmother, our family's authority. The night was spent in Palmela during Festa das Vindimas. A lot of people showed up to say goodbye and offer me a glass of Moscatel, thanks everyone! I think I arrived home at 6 or 7 am...

A few hour later my brother took me to the airport. During check-in I found out I got the executive seat upgrade I asked a few days before (to use my expiring miles) :) Spend some time in TAP Lounge eating and drinking... Unfortunately I didn't have much appetite for the alcoholic beverages which were available with a good variety... Later at the boarding gate we had to wait a long time before actually getting on-board and we ended up arriving one hour late. From there, straight to my assigned accommodation near Bethnal Green (where I am now) and then a little drinks event with old friends and new colleagues :)

The place where I am now temporarily is quite nice, it's a very compact studio but very functional. Here are some photos:



My ironing board:


The smallest dishwasher ever:


And the bathroom:


Today is cloudy for a change, but the temperature is not bad.

From this water I shall not drink

In Portugal we have a proverb that goes like this "Never say from this water I shall not drink" (Nunca digas desta água não beberei). It basically means you never know how next day will be, so don't deny something as you may need/do it later.

7 months ago I was saying I wouldn't live in London again. I was careful enough to keep my doors open, but honestly I didn't think I would comeback. Tuesday I was proven wrong as the good old proverb goes...

Don't get me wrong, London is a lovely city, with lots of attractions and full of professional opportunities (and in my case friends). But at my current stage I don't feel it's an advantage over living in Portugal. The personal trade-off balances the professional one.

On Tuesday I started my afternoon cancelling my contract for London and ended it saying count me in. What happened? I had an unconfirmed offer from the same company to work in another city and I decided to bet on that one. But when I said no to London I entered a corporative game. Immediately that unconfirmed offer became void, I was pressured to accept London and get an opportunity to be transferred one year later to that city. I wasn't satisfied with that and expressed an "opportunity" wasn't enough. A few hours later I get a call guaranteeing they would do their best to secure my transfer as it still depends on a visa and my performance, without any traps or stunts. So that's it, London for a year and a new place afterwards :)

From this water I shall drink again!

Fire Destroys School

While I was in Portugal on holiday, something very sad happened, the primary school near my flat was destroyed by fire. It was really sad to approach home on Sunday and feel the burnt smell...

Here is a link for the news article.

And here are some photos taken by my flatemate:

Random things you discover while googling

5 minutes ago I was googling for someone's name to find some things about that person and instead I've found something completely unrelated: Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation Institute Clinics in EUA and Brazil :S

What is "Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation"?
"Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation® (LVR®) will effectively enhance the vaginal muscle tone, strength, and control. It will effectively decrease the internal and external vaginal diameters as well as build up and strengthen the perineal body (the area immediately outside the vagina and above the anus). Sexual gratification for the female is directly related to the amount of frictional forces generated. We can accomplish this with LVR®." -- drmatlock.com

Now you know! Seems like a good present to offer someone you love, LOL

Pearl Jam @ Shepherds Bush Empire

One week ago, Pearl Jam announced what every fan wishes: an "intimate" concert for 2000 people on the welcoming Shepherds Bush Empire. If you consider most their concerts are for 15 000-50 000, it's quite a limited opportunity. Even though I already had bought other tickets for their European tour, this was the concert to be at. One lifetime opportunity and it was happening in the city where I'm only living for 18 months. I couldn't miss it but it would be a painful process to get tickets...

First I pre-ordered their album Backfixer from hmv.com to be eligible to buy the pre-sale tickets on Tuesday. Tuesday arrived and I never received the email with the link :( From what you can read in the Pearl Jam forum, the tickets disappeared in something like 2 minutes.

Second attempt, Ten Club (the fan club) lottery. I didn't get them... Only hope to wait for the general sale today.

1st ray of hope: hmv recognised there was an issue sending me the email with the pre-sale link so they sent me an email yesterday with a link so I could have some advantage today at 9:00.

Before 9 I was refreshing my browser like mad at both the hmv site and the general sale site. 9'clock arrived and I was able to start ordering tickets from hmv but at some point it failed with some error I couldn't get through. On the general sale site, I got in, put 2 tickets on my basket and when I submit the last form I get an error complaining about the phone number format (because it had the + sign). I corrected it, repeated some steps and as I checkout the tickets they were no longer available! Argh!!! From then on I was unable to even start a new order and I was feeling completely gutted...

2nd ray of hope: hmv sends me an email stating there was a technical issue during the morning and that they would repeat the sale again at 3:30. The only problem was that I would have a meeting with a vendor representant at that time. When he arrived I told him I would need 15 min of "personal time" around 3:30 which he didn't mind at all. The funny part was that at 3:30 he actually stayed by my side me and help me with the ordering process. 3:30 came and everything went very smoothly. 2 tickets for the 3rd level bought:) I couldn't contain myself and lifted my arms in excitement. Funny thing to do during work:D

I still don't who will come with me to the concert but I'm sure it's going to be one of our best concerts ever! Today I'm smiling :D

Yui - Again

Today I discovered the name of a song/artist I've been hearing and loving for the past few months:

Again played by Yui and you can download it here.

Again is the opening song of the new series of Fullmetal Alchemist called Brotherhood.

I recommend both the song and the anime ;)

It's official...

Apparently I forgot to write a post about this... :$

It's now official I'm staying here for an extra 6 months, my contract was extended until 29th January 2010. Another Winter in London...

So until then feel free to visit me and stay for a weekend. I have a spare room for friends ;)

Coraline 3D and Star Trek

Last month I found some time to go to the cinema and saw Coraline 3D and Star Trek.

Coraline 3D was my first 3D film and I actually enjoy it quite a lot. It took some time for my eyes to get used to it as 2D images don't demand so much. The plot itself is not innovative, the average kids tale but is very well told and very well drawn. Totally worth it!

I confess I wasn't expecting much from Star Trek, though it would be just action and nothing more. Even though is not MUCH more it does have some extras. The actors did a terrific job imitating their predecessors' gestures and expressions. Even though I wasn't a huge fan of the 70's shows/films I felt I was watching their younger versions. The humour is quite good and the film is fast paced as the trailers suggested. Quite good.

Trading Floor Architecture

For those seriously interested in Front Office Investment Bank Technology I recommend you check this website:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/solutions/Verticals/Trading_Floor_Architecture-E.html