Greetings

This is the beginning of my currently top-secret blog about the process of moving from Baltimore, MD, USA to London, England. I am creating it so that friends and family can have a place to check in and see how things are going, especially when we first arrive and settle in over there. It’s a little far off now; I’ll share it with others much closer to our departure date.

K and I are planning to move to London in 10 months, arriving on 1 March 2007. We can do this because I am a British Citizen and she is eligible to get a visa as my unmarried partner. We are saving up money now so that we will be able to afford to live there for a few (about 5) months without income while we look for work.

We went over to London for one week for my brother's graduation and while there looked around some neighborhoods to decide where we would like to live. Hampstead and Belsize Park, in the NW, are our first choices. Richmond, in the SW, would be next on the list. All of these areas are quite expensive, but according to my calculations we should be able to manage to live in one. We should be able to get a tiny place for about $1800 a month. That's an incredible amount of money compared to Baltimore. Here we could rent a full house or a large, luxury apartment for that, but in London we'll have a shoebox.

I am going to start applying for jobs in January, but I don't really expect much response until we are actually over there.

I am going to write out my expectations for how things will go. I think it will be interesting to compare my expectations to how things actually go! I am a planner, so I have most of this all worked out in my head or, in many cases, in spreadsheets.