House in Hackney

With the visa wheels still turning, I decided to make the most of my stay in England by moving down to London, where lots of old and new friends are living.

After a couple of weekend visits testing the water, I started looking for a place in the Dalston / Old St / Hackney area (because that’s where the cool kids live) on the 1st of October. I was amazed by how easy it was; 30 minutes after my Gumtree ad went up, I was already getting phone calls about places which fit the bill. That first weekend, I’d found a great place just west of Hackney and moved in that Friday. The whole thing took a week, start to finish!

I’m sharing the house with three Aussies: Tom, Anna and Nick, all from Melbourne. We have the bottom two floors of a converted Georgian house, with a kitchen and living room on top and bedrooms and bathrooms downstairs. I have a little double room with a window onto the garden; it’s still quite spartan, and I’ll probably keep it that way so that I can still travel light when the time comes.

Good gracious, London is fun. It’s strange getting used to the idea of regularly skipping really good nights and interesting events, just because there are so many options all the time: brilliant.

Visa saga part 3: tax records special!

My trip to the US Embassy was quite an experience.

The debacle really started while organising a time to go to the embassy and get the O-1 visa processed. Visa petitioners have to make a pre-arranged appointment (so far, so gravy), these appointments can only occur at 8am (inconvenient, but acceptable), and the appointment “hot-line” costs £1.20 per minute. One pound twenty per minute!? I was living on that much per day in Nicaragua.

On top of that, the ludicrously expensive phone call culminates in you authorising them to take a further $131 as a Machine Readable Visa fee, whatever that is. What are they doing which costs $131? Doesn’t machine-readable just mean a barcode? Specially formatted text, like we have on passports? An RFID tag at a push?

Onto the actual appointment itself. One of the warnings included in the appointment confirmation is that you are required to wait outside “even in inclement weather”, so I was quite pleased to find it a clement, if nippy, morning in Grosvenor Square.

Other warnings include the restrictions on electronics in the embassy: no mobile phones, laptops; even USB sticks are verboten. After enjoying my traditional English queue, the security drone’s eyes lit up when I produced a few coins and a pair of headphones from my pocket before going through the metal detector.

“You can’t take those into the embassy, sir”, he japed. “Ha ha, good show”, I chortled heartily. Unfortunately, the steely, lifeless eyes framed in his frozen, mirthless visage made it all too clear that he was actually serious. The headphones posed a threat to national security.

“Those could be used as a transmitting device”, he asserted with a mind-bending mix of inaccuracy and self-assurance. Not wishing to get down to the brass tacks of just how egregiously incorrect he was, I conceded defeat, and paid £5 (five sterling) to store the headphones in a plastic bag for an hour.

Security checkpoint cleared, I was in the building. After a modest wait, I was called for an interview with a chap from Texas. He seemed perfectly happy with all the O-1 visa stuff; perfectly happy until it came to tax records. As I’d spent a few months in the US last year, paid for in part by my company, it now appears that full tax records for me and the company are required reading for some lucky State Department employee.

Unfortunately, I don’t think we really have any tax records… We haven’t paid anyone any money, and I haven’t been paid any money, so there are no IRS filings. We have an ID for the company and an ID for me, with no documents associated with either. Still! I suppose in a way this is what they’re looking for: proof that I haven’t been paid. It just seems a little fallacious to prove something by producing a lack of evidence.

So this means that I’ll need to come back to the UK again, after my trip to Austin. On the bright side, it should be super-simple from here on – the hard part is over. All I need to do is mail in all the required documents (or lack of them), in a nice big envelope to really emphasise the volume of tax records which don’t exist, wait for them to check that the envelope really is empty, stamp the old passport and I’ll be heading back to Cali.

Frrreezing

The trip back from Costa Rica went off without a hitch. Only two things of note: the first was the delicious hot cinnamon bun I had at San Jose airport, made all the better by the preceeding 2 months of endless beans and rice combinations. The second was the fact that I managed to accidentally smuggle a knife onto two international flights.

My carry-on bag was checked by security normally in San Jose (X-ray machine, cursory search by the man in gloves) and again in Houston (more X-rays, more poking and prodding). It was only after I’d cleared security that I went to get out my phone and realised my Leatherman was in the bag, complete with 3-inch razor sharp blade.

Considering how much of a hassle security is, you’d at least expect them to find a large, lethal block of metal in an otherwise pretty empty bag…

Back in England, I went pretty much straight to my niece’s naming ceremony near Nottingham. A nice little excuse to get the whole family together and see the Welsh contingent who might otherwise have been a stretch to visit. The newly named Bea was very chilled out throughout the proceeding, as all the kids were I suppose. Perfect nap timing by the parents left them all in an angelic daze.

I spent Christmas with the parents up in Bury which was nice and relaxed, although there’s not really too much to do up there any more so I left to come down here to London pretty sharpish.

I’ve managed to wangle a free place to stay in Mayfair, which is pretty sweet. The offices of one of our investors has a spare bedroom which was available over the holidays. It’s actually not particularly convenient as most of my friends are either in Hackney or Canary Wharf – pretty much the other side of town – but I’ve enjoyed mincing down Oxford Street, delivering dismissive snears to as many mono-lingual tourists as possible. I went to Cambridge, dahling.

New Year’s Eve was relatively low-key, compared to some of the craziness of San Francisco, but great fun. I spent the evening in a bar with a bunch of friends and friends-of-friends before heading back to a house party, staying up till the early hours sipping peppermint tea.

My plans for the next few weeks are still pretty unclear. I know I’m going to Cambridge tomorrow, and Winchester after that. Depending on how quickly my lawyer can get the visa application in, I’ll then either go back to Central America – maybe Panama – or head straight back to San Francisco.

Looking forward to leaving this climate! It’s pretty much a 30ºC temperature difference Nicaragua to here, and getting more… -10ºC in London today!

Heading back to the UK

Up until a couple of weeks ago, I was unsure what I was going to be up to for Christmas. Nicaragua is great: I’d made a nice little circle of friends that I know I’d have a good time with, the weather was good and getting better, it’s cheap, … On the other hand, I’ve not been back to the UK for about 5 months, and there’s a bunch of family stuff that I should really do, even on top of the normal Christmas drill.

Then, one Friday night I was heading out to my normal 2-for-1 G&T at Pelican Eyes when I stopped off at the ATM to get some moolah. The ATM had power, a connection and money so it started promisingly, but my “Transaction was not able to be processed at this time”. Thinking that HSBC had forgotten I’d told them (twice) that I was in Nicaragua, and it really was OK for me to use my card here, I went to Pelican Eyes and made a note to call the bank the next morning.

When I did call them, it turned out that someone had cloned my card and used it to buy $1600 worth of (probably crap) stuff in a Wal-Mart in Houston, TX. So! The card that had been on temporary hold was now cancelled, and a replacement could only be sent to San Francisco.

As I now had $5 cash to my name, and no obvious way of getting any more, I decided take the hint and go back to the UK for Christmas. Apart from anything else, the Nicaraguans have a charming tradition of “waking the baby Jesus” in the run up to navidad, which involves running through the steets at 2, 3, 4 and 5am shouting, trumpeting, drumming and beating pots and/or pans.

So! I am now back in Costa Rica, flying to LHR via Houston on Sunday morning. Will stop off in Houston and beat the shit out of the first person I see in 800 pairs of budget white socks.

Back in the UK

I’m back in England a touch earlier than expected: my Grandpa’s funeral was on Monday so I moved my flight forward.

United Airlines have been awesome over the last few months – on the way out we got business class seats plus $1000 vouchers, and on the way back, after some initial quibbling, they pulled out all the stops to get me on the last seat from San Francisco to London, for what seems to be a fair administration fee.

The current plan for my time here is:

• South-west Wales with my sister & family until Friday morning
• Winchester on Friday night to see friends
• Castle Douglas in South-west Scotland on Saturday night for my cousin’s engagement party
• Derbyshire with my other sister & family on Monday
• Sleep
• Split my time between London and Cambridge for about a week, disco-dancing and raising money

The practicalities of getting to Scotland haven’t quite been finalised yet, but it’s on my list of things to do today. Along with playing frisbee golf and going to a breast-feeding group.