Despite a rough day coming to England, the first day of work was really great! People seem to be very friendly and helpful. Since I have been with the company for 3 years already, I have a pretty good understanding of the corporate environment which is consistent to my home office in the U.S. It feels like the same place and same approach to the business, just with different people, different projects and different accents. I immediately felt at home.
It's hard to tell how our working relationship will be yet, but I really like my manager at the first impression. She is a brilliant young French woman, I am guessing early 30's, who is very organized and relatable. I can tell that she takes her work very seriously, but is flexible to give space for others to contribute. She is very organized, but not a micromanager. Her expectation of me is to take initiative, which is actually very motivating to me. The vast knowledge, skills and technical expertise that she has is definitely something I hope to tap into and learn from during this experience. The daunting thing is that my new role now is extremely different from what I have been doing the past 3 years. It is a another skill that I have general knowledge of coming from my degree, but I think is still quite a steep learning curve especially being out of practice for 5 years. I am praying I can excel in the short 6 month time.
After several meet and greets and a building tour, my day concluded at 5 pm. I learned that unlike the U.S., people take work-life balance very seriously. In America, it always felt like the longer you stayed at work, the better of an employee you were aka you're a hard worker. The European mentality is if you're working too much, you must not be productive and something needs to be done to fix that. Avoiding long hours and taking holidays are big deals - everyone gets 5 weeks of vacation! I heard stories about new mothers getting 6 months of paid maternity leave with more time as an unpaid option!! Say whaa?? Can I have a baby in the UK? America, get with the program. People would seriously be more happy and seriously productive if work-life balance was a reality. If the rest of the world can do it, you can too. No more pretending to work and faking to be busy bodies to be impressive because it's really not that impressive.
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| Las iGuanas Tapas |
Upon arriving home to a semi-gross apartment, I had nothing to eat. The positive thing about where I am located is that it is walking distance to the city center where there are a lot of shops and eateries. The not so great thing about it is I have to go out before sundown because the street I live on is pretty shady. The weather was pretty cold and dreary, so I did not venture out too far. Dinner was at a nice Mexican fusion restaurant called Las iGuanas. It was pretty mainstream, and certainly not authentic but was decent. I got the tapas deal, 3 tapas for £13.80. Not exactly the best deal ever, but it wasn't bad. I ordered the Spectacular Fish Taco (battered white fish with corn and sweet chili salsa on the bottom right), Pato Taquito (shreds of roast duck & caramelised onion rolled in a flour tortilla & char-grilled, with a spicy cranberry salsa on the bottom left) and Gambas (whole prawns, split & cooked in a garlic, lemon & chilli sauce, served with bread at the top). I would give it a B/C+ border. It was just shy of average on the slightly better side.
Uh... are you supposed to tip restaurant servers in the UK? Where's the tip line on the receipt?
Cheers!
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