Start of my visit to UK

This is my first visit outside the Indian subcontinent and it is a funny feeling. It has been more than a month since I landed up here. I came to UK on the 13th of August, just 2 days after the UK police nabbed suspected terrorists. The timing wasn’t that great as I had to make lot many changes to my trip plans. I had to buy a new bag so that I could accommodate many things in one bag including the hand luggage and handbag. I had to leave behind quite a few things. All the flights that day were delayed and there were long queues in the airport. I was happy to see one of my pages being filled in the passport after 6 years of getting it. I was flying from Bangalore to Mumbai and Mumbai to London Heathrow. The Air-India flight was peaceful and it is not that greatly different from a domestic flight except that there are more number of seats, the food is served couple of times more and there is alcohol provided too. I finally landed in London Heathrow after 22 hours from the start of my journey. Three of us had started the journey together – Raviraja Dubba, Pradipta Nayak and myself. We were expecting some amount of frisking and scanning of our bags or a thorough check, but did not find anything of that sort. There was a big queue for the immigration check and were apprehensive. But it was just a cakewalk for us. Then we boarded a Taxi to Basingstoke and realized the stupid system of communication while finding the roads here. They call a circle a Roundabout and the call nth exit for getting out of a circle. Hardly any landmarks are stated as we often do in India and finally after a while we landed at the Copper Beeches hotel at 11.30 pm on a Sunday night.

We checked into our respective rooms and found out that the rooms were ridiculously small in terms of the size. I was put up in a 10 x 10 ft room including the bathroom and a cupboard. We had landed up in the second half of the English summer and found that the day breaks at 5am and night is realized around 8pm.

We were at the office by 8.30am the next day. In the next week or so started to get accustomed on the work front and trying to understand the scope of our work. Still most of us on the assignment are getting a feel of the work environment in UK. It is quite different to that India. People come on-time or early and leave after exactly 9 hours of work irrespective of the workload. Unless very very critical they do not hold back at the office. People hardly are on the phones, and they do not chat around much. People use more please rather than a thank you. People are at various positions irrespective of their age and most of the people like to do the same job day in and day out. Atleast this is the understanding. People speak primarily for work-related things only. I was also exposed to some British sense of humour but it would take a longtime to start really understanding them.