ricardocabellov5.5

The first mission after I decided to move to London 2 years ago was to find a permanent job. It took me a while, as I had a really poor english level. After 4 months I got the first job (freelance), and after 1year I got the permanent job I was dreaming on. That fact acomplished the first mission.

I guess the second mission then was to get a property here. I've spent just one year renting a flat in Notting Hill, we have been paying the funny number of £1000 a month just for the rent, 250.000 of the old spanish pts. Yes, life here is expensive, but hey! we are paid with the same level in our jobs. As you know, I've booked a trip to USA as soon as I realized that I had a lot of free days left at Spring. But that was quite a bad idea, as some weeks later, the landlor of the flat didn't want to continue the contract with us for one more year, so we had to leave the flat in 12th December. I booked my holidays for 25th of November to 10th of December, so, from the beginning I knew that wasn't going to happen. Mainly because we decided to BUY a property this time.

We've been looking to some properties during the year, checking the offer and all that, and days after we decided to buy a property I found quite a nice one, the same day I was checking the property (very close to Victoria station, on the side of the Westminster Cathedral) and days after we started the process. It has been quite an stressful process, talking with solicitors, with the bank, mortgage advisors.. and all that. I thought I was not going to be ready for that but somehow we did it quite well. We had some problems doing the process but looks like everything went OK. We started in a very big confusion and we now know exactly what we need to do if we want to buy another property.

I really want to thank to my father as he had a lot of patience explaining everything and checking that everything was going alright. For me was painful to translate all the new terms to spanish so he undertood everything, and also at some point we had to translate big forms so he was able to full them (kudos to Sole for doing that). A shame those forms were useless.

So, the last friday, 25th of November, my plane to New York was departing meanwhile I was finally signing the contract to get the flat. That week was perhaps the worst one, as the bank had to do the survey, that means that if they find something wrong, the bank is not going to let us the money and all the money that we already spent were not going to be back. So, we went to the solicitor friday morning (my first day of holidays) and did all the signature, then I went to walk a little bit to the are of Chinatown and bought the book from banksy and also iCon Steve Jobs, checked the movies from prince charles cinema, bought a new head (and happy) waving toy (it actually makes you feel better :D), and after that as it was quite cool (2°C) I went home and went to sleep. On the afternoon somebody was calling me, and I woke up, I had a message on the answer machine that I wasn't able to understand after replaying it 5+ times. It was from the solicitor, it was short and with a kind of happy mood, so I thought that everything went ok. Minutes later, the Estate agent called me to congratulate. So that was the confirmation, the flat is ours! Finally.

The solicitor told us that we will have the keys for the flat next thurday (1st of December), maybe Friday. So, by now i'm just waiting to arrive this day playing all the games I had in queue (quake 4, pes5, most wanted, black&white 2...) and also feeling that my laptop is already crap :'( as the games are a quite slow. I still don't know how we are going to do the removal stuff. But well, that is going to be interesting.

So looks like with this, the second mission here is also acomplished (I wonder which one should be now the third mission, I'll let you know as soon as I know :D). As in any other place we will have to keep paying for the flat for 20 years.. but well, nothing is given for free.

Also, as I do have 2 weeks os holidays I'm doing a list of all the stuff I had to do, probably I will do like 15% of everything in the list (a lot of stuff really).. but hey.. holidays!! o/