Tag: Weekly Update

That’s been quite longer than one week since the last update. It’s been quite a busy time. Two of our applications for apartments were cancelled, as we learned later, because of our citizenship. We had a nice car trip to Oxford, London and Colchester. And ultimately we moved into a house that we rented through booking, although for a much higher price than initially expected.

We applied for an apartment over a month ago. They had been dragging things for over three weeks before finally cancelling it. That time they said it was because of the afordability criteria, although they never asked for our bank statement showing our savings. We then applied for another apartment. They were much faster and turned down our application in about five days. One of our references shared with us that during the reference process they had mostly had to persuade the other side that we were not some kind of “Russian spies”. The other side didn’t seem to be persuaded anyway.

I could understand many concerns, given current geopolitical situation, but spies… come on! What kind of looser spies we should’ve been to be looking for somewhere to rent for an adequate price for so long? Being unprepared for every step of the renting process? And my wife and children can hardly speak English, they’re just learning.

I have no idea what spies are like, but I would imagine they would have every document in order, definitely all housing questions arranged in advance. And they would speak the level of English that could make most natives doubt if they really can speak good English themselves. Perhaps, they would also know what they were looking for. That makes us a complete opposite of that image. And maybe I don’t know anything about spies, but this whole situation is ridiculous.

To distract ourselves from that very unsettling events, we decided to rent a car and go on a three-day trip to Oxford, London and Colchester. I wanted to show my family the places that I had visited 20 years ago. My memory failed me only in Oxford, where I couldn’t find the beautiful building that I had remembered before. All other places were just as I had kept them in mind. The trip was refreshing and entertaining. Everyone seemed to enjoyed the views. Mike had dreamed of seeing Big Ben, and he was impressed when he saw it in real life. And Nika was most interested in the places I learnt and lived during my stay in Colchester.

Last week was finally time for us to move out of the apartment that we were kindly offered to stay in during the process of selling it. We’d been thinking of buying a used car to save on £100 a day renting cars. We’d had two concerns with that, our non longer-term address and vague prospects of having nice insurance offer. But just on Thursday, the day before our move out, I called up three insurers and, on the final call, got a nice quote of £780. So we went ahead an bought a 2009 Ford C-Max. It’s rusty, has some issues that will hopefully be addressed by the dealership tomorrow. But it drives rather nicely, and it allowed to move houses on Friday.

And for the place to go, we’d finally given up on looking for normal rentals and went with an option from Booking.com. It cost us almost three times the price that we hoped for initially, but it includes the council tax, utility bills, broadband and parking. The area is nice. It’s a bit remote from the Sheffield city center, but with a car that’s not much of an issue. What’s more important, we didn’t have to go through that goddamn referencing which failed us twice just because of our citizenship.

So we’ve got a little bit of calmness now, I hope. The stress didn’t go without consequences, though. I fell sick the day after our moving in, when I could emotionally relax just a bit. And I haven’t been able work on the illustrations for Panda Pu because my hands have been trembling immensely since when I discovered why our applications failed. The reason meant that we just couldn’t do anything about it, and given that nobody told us about it openly made it impossible to even discuss any ways to resolve the problem. It was a big emotional hit for me. I’ve never had my hands tremble like that before. But I hope I’ll recover soon and will be able to draw normally.

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.

I’m trying to restart my personal blog and mailing list with short weekly updates about our relocation, family life, and the development of Panda Pu. This is the first one.

We’re one week away from flying to the UK, and the rental market there has turned out to be more frightening than we expected.

Compared with Kazakhstan, Vietnam, or Bali, it feels much more landlord-biased. Short-term rentals in cities much smaller than London, such as Sheffield, Chesterfield, and even Hull, often cost around £3,000 a month. Long-term rentals look more reasonable, around £1,500 in Sheffield and £900 in Hull, but they often come unfurnished and expect a minimum rental period of twelve months, not five or even six.

So we may end up staying for only a month, paying for something on Airbnb, and returning to Bali much earlier than we hoped.

My granddad passed away this Saturday. His illness developed very quickly. Less than a month ago, he could still speak and walk, although with significant difficulty. I’ll miss him a lot. He was almost a father to me.

On the bright side, I’ve finished working on the story for the first Panda Pu book.

As I moved from writing the story to actually crafting the book, hoping to create the illustrations with AI, ChatGPT suggested that I create the character references myself. I jumped into that, expecting to spend maybe an hour or two on it. What could be so difficult about creating characters, right?

Oh, how wrong I was.

I’ve now spent a week learning how many tiny nuances influence the overall appearance and perception of a character. I’m still nowhere near the final designs, but I’ve learned what to look for: which features matter, what they communicate, and how small differences can completely change the feeling of a character.

At first, I had the idea that there were no details worth crafting by hand instead of handing everything over to AI. Now that idea seems as far from reality as the same belief would be in writing.

That was our week: rental panic, grief, and a surprising amount of time spent staring at panda faces.