It turned out to be hard to do weekly updates, ha-ha. But here’s another “weekly” one, almost a month later.
We moved from Bali to the UK for our next tourist destination. The trip took us 24 hours and two connecting flights. Alena had food poisoning on the first, the longest, flight. Luckily, all went well and we arrived safely to Manchester.
We rented a car to move all of our 9 suitcases over to Sheffield where we booked a hotel. The trip from Manchester to Sheffield was nice. I was driving, and it didn’t take me long to get used to driving on the left side of the road, especially after Bali where they drive the same way. We stopped at a park not far from Sheffield to have a break. All of us fell in love with the nature, sounds and wonderful smells of the forest. Half an hour later, we arrived to the Sandman hotel in Sheffield. They had construction going on for several months, which they didn’t tell us in advance. The main entrance was closed and we had to drag all our suitcases through a narrow side door. They didn’t have a concierge service, which surprised me a lot.
Initially, we hoped to find a house to rent within our first four days or so. The reality proved us wrong. Most properties we viewed were available no earlier than mid- or late August because they were occupied. And short-term rentals are very expensive, like £3,000 per month for an Air BnB apartment. Finally, our agent suggested to have a look at apartments in Soho Yard, a nice block of apartments. We liked the one with 3 bedrooms. And despite it was well beyond our desired budget of £1,000 per month, at £1,700 a month, we decided to go with it. The apartment was available instantly.
But our hopes to move in the next day after viewing it was crashed by another reality of the UK. The letting department needed another three weeks to run checks. Three weeks! To run checks!!! And they requested proofs of address, which we didn’t have. Getting a proof of address in our case deserves a separate post, I can only say that neither we had had at the moment satisfied Soho Yard.
With tremendous help from our agent, we could get something that was good enough for Soho Yard to start the process. It was an employer letter with our address in Kazakhstan in it, I think. But it was better to try and open a banking account to have a statement with the address on it, the proof that letting agents requested.
Most banks expected us to have a proof of address again. So we needed a bank account to have a proof of address in order to rent an apartment to pay the bills to have another for of the proof of address. It seemed like Chicken and Egg problem, given that neither of our official documents from Kazakhstan were sufficient here.
Luckily, HSBC was willing to open an account for me without a proof of address. But it rejected Alena’s application without any explaination. Having an account with them, I could finally send a statement to Soho Yard, the letting company, as a proof of address when they requested it once again in the course of their checks. But they asked for a proof of address from Alena again.
She applied to Lloyds which didn’t ask for a proof of address but rather checked the address by sending an activation code over the post. So we’re waiting for it to arrive to send her bank statement to Soho Yard.
Meanwhile, we travelled a bit around Yorkshire by car while we were renting it. England is lovely. When we, hopefully, settle everything with our long-ish rental, we’ll try to buy a used car to go around the country without breaking the bank with renting cars.
And I continue to work on Panda Pu books. I’m getting increasingly more invested in creating characters. I’m lucky to have about two hours devoted to working on the book. I will most definitely need to write about the process here. Hopefully, I’ll be able to squeeze writing about it in those two hours.
Leave a Reply