SaffasintheUK

The best piece of advice I got when we first arrived, was be a tourist.   You might now be living in the UK (or planning to), but you will be a foreigner for a very long time.   You have no knowledge of the area, you don’t know the history or the landmarks.   The best way to integrate yourself into your new country and your new life…is to explore. The person who told me this also told me to buy a travel guide for the part of the country I was settling in, but of course you can’t buy English travel guides in England!   Go figure.   So I had to get creative. I am well aware of how expensive this can be and I have become queen of cheap outings and budget tourism.   Unless you are fortunate enough to land a high paying job, you will find making ends meet a bit of a struggle at first, which means luxuries such as travelling and exploring are not on the priority list at all. And yet it can still be done! As a family, we take at least one day per month to go for a day’s outi

I haven’t been in the UK long enough to not find it funny watching someone walk on a train while it’s in motion.   It’s quite entertaining to see how each individual counters the movement of the train, or how they recover (or not) from an unexpected lurch. Trains a huge part of life in the UK and even though it can be pricy, for me, it’s the preferred option when commuting.   My job also takes me to all parts of the country and I’d far rather spend 4 hours on a train than in a car, especially if I’m expected to complete a quick meeting and turn around straight away to head home. Getting into train commuting can be quite daunting at first.   If you happen to be using a large station, you’ll be getting on and off different platforms and may get disorientated with the different exits and figuring out where you are. But once you’ve worked out how to check your train times, where your train is, what the costs and connections are….it’s an absolute treat!   Using the national ra