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Hello, Britain! I will be emigrating to the UK in a week and I have questions and could use advice. Here are 20 questions!
(lemmy.world)
I have most of the big details sorted, but because I am going to be new in the country aside from a few family visits and one business trip, I have far from expert knowledge on living in the UK. I try to research as much as I can, but there are limits.
These questions are going to probably be subjective, and some may be dependent on where we're going to live in Britain long-term, something I can't tell you until I get a job, but I trust people on Lemmy more than some random Google search to tell me what they actually think.
So, here are my 20 questions- although some are really multipart questions- and I will probably end up asking more based on what I find out. I felt like 20 was an exhausting enough number. They are not in any particular order, I had about 8 and then I kept thinking of others and stopped trying to organize them. Please feel free to answer as many or as few as you like. Assume we won't be getting rich off of my salary, but also won't be living in a council flat.
- Which mobile phone company would you recommend and why? Getting a UK phone number for both me and my daughter is going to be one of the very first things on my itinerary.
- Obviously, I will need a place to put my money. I would rather go with a building society than a bank. Which would you recommend?
- Which supermarket(s) would you recommend? Which should we avoid and why? Believe it or not, my daughter is happy to eat the cheap supermarket sushi they have in supermarkets here. Is that available there?
- What should I think about when getting us a GP? I have health issues and need to get a National Insurance number as quickly as possible, but should I wait until we have a more permanent place to live? What are my options there?
- My daughter is a 14-year-old neurodivergent lesbian who has no problem letting people know exactly what she thinks and also likes to go on long tangents about esoteric subjects that interest her, which makes it difficult enough for her to find friends in the U.S., but I have no idea how she's going to find friends in the UK. She will hopefully make some in school (it's sure as hell been hard for her here, and it's going to be hard on her there being foreign), but I'd love other suggestions on ways she might make friends in the UK that might not be a way in the U.S. She is super into Japanese stuff, but slightly off Japanese stuff, like obscure anime and electronica bands from the 1970s and 1980s, although she also loves punk rock and Hello Kitty 🤷. She also is a very talented artist and spends all day sketching in sketchbooks and on her iPad.
- This is going to sound really stupid... do I just carry around my passport or how do I show ID if someone needs it? I'm not going to have a driving license.
- What difficulties do you think I might encounter trying to rent a flat or house? I really don't know how the process works in Britain. In the U.S. they often do a credit check and you provide first and last month's rent, plus a security deposit. Utilities are not always included.
- Once we get settled, is Ikea the best place to go to get furniture (I don't find what they have to be all that comfortable), or are the similar affordable options?
- How about house wares? We care much more about utility over aesthetics, especially when getting established. I'd rather have cheap, durable plates and bowls and pots and pans than pretty, expensive ones.
- And how about clothing? I do not care at all about fashion, I just want decent clothing that will look appropriate at a job. Obviously, I have plenty of that already, but it will need to be replaced eventually. Where do I go for cheap and durable over expensive and fashionable?
- Are ISPs as dependent on where you live as they are here? We have very few options available and they are entirely geographically dependent. ISP recommendations would be great. I would especially love an ISP that didn't have data caps.
- If I watch everything on a monitor via my computer, do I still need to pay a TV license fee or do I only need to play it if I want to use iPlayer? How does that all work? I definitely will not have an actual TV for a while.
- My daughter's absolute favourite breakfast treat is going to a diner and getting corned beef hash. Is that a thing over there? Is there an okay breakfast place to take her to so she can have it once in a while?
- I'm guessing this is a no, but if anyone knows of anywhere in the UK that serves decent Mexican food, even if it is just somewhere I can take her to as a weekend treat, please tell me. That is her absolute favourite kind of food in general. By "Mexican food," I mean "the shit they call Mexican food in America which isn't really Mexican food" (you might notice I'm not a fan), so you would have to be familiar with both in order to answer this.
- I have been looking for a long time and I just haven't found anything good- does anyone know a video or series of videos I can show to my kid as a basic "life in the UK in the 2020s as a teen" primer? I try to tell her all that I can, but it's not like I can tell her what it's like to be a teen in the UK in 2025. I was last there as an adult in the 2000s, before she was even born, and Britain was already a noticeably different place from the last time I was there in the 1990s. I mean I know she's going to make a lot of cultural faux pas, but it would be nice to find a way to minimize them beyond me telling her things like what "pants" means in the UK and that "cunt" is not thought of in the UK as the horrific word it's considered to be in the U.S.
- This is just something I've been wondering from job ads: when they say "casual dress," what do they mean? In the U.S. that means you can show up in a T-shirt and sweats. I don't want to make my own faux pas there.
- If we end up having to move to Wales- I am interviewing for a job in Swansea this week- it's my understanding that my daughter will have to study Welsh in school. Does anyone have any experience moving to Wales with a teenager who is suddenly put into a (what I assume would be very remedial) Welsh language class? Any advice there?
- I basically never carry cash on me in the U.S. at this point. What might I need to carry it for there or is it also unnecessary?
- Do UK institutions care about your US credit rating?
- I hate Marmite. Is that still a capital offence?
There are 4 major UK carriers (called networks here) they are Vodafone, o2, EE, & Three. Popular MVNOs are GiffGaff & Tesco Mobile (both run on O2), ID Mobile (runs on Three), and Lycamobile (runs on EE) Most if not all of these will offer 30-day prepay SIMs with unlimited calls and SMS but limited data, all the way up to 2 year contracts. Pick whichever is the cheapest and try it out, if the reception is crap on one, try another. They all have the major cities down but can get patchy in the countryside.
Building societies are mostly local to the area you end up and others have mentioned the one national brand is Nation Wide.
Lidl and Aldi are the two main low priced ones, they are quite small but stock everything you need. Then the big names are Tesco, Sainsbury's & Asda - bigger places with name brands but more expensive (even the "value" brands) and at the top of the tier you'll find Mark's & Spencer (M&S for short) and Waitrose - these are the "Whole Foods"-esk places where you pay the maximum but you get the best quality going. To give you an idea, my boyfriend and I spend ~£70 a week on a delivery order from Morrisons, if we were to go out ourselves and shop we could get in under 60 but then we'd have to carry our bags full of stuff back home. A similar shop at Waitrose would easily reach over £100.
You go with whichever GP has the space to take you as a patient. There's really no shopping around.
The NHS website has a page on Autism support with links to organisations that can help: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/autism/support/ And the UK has our fair share of weebs. We even have the Hyper Japan expo every year along with many other events. Manga can be found in bookshops and communities both online and off exist for culture sharing, language learning, etc.
Yes you'll need your passport if you don't have a driving licence as those are the only two forms of ID that are guaranteed to be accepted. The good news is that you can apply for a provisional licence (like a learner's permit) and use that like I do. I have never needed to learn to drive but I have it in my wallet all the same.
Same in the UK. Bills are rarely included and you'll have to pay a deposit upfront - that can be 1 to 3 months rent.
Ikea is the ever-present safety net/baseline of furniture that everyone can get everywhere. When you can spring for it, get something nicer but don't settle for paying large sums for some cheap crap when Ikea makes the same thing cheaper.
See above. Ikea/supermarket is fine and you can splurge on nicer ones later on in the future.
Primark is on every other street in the country and will sell you a plain white Tee for £3. When you get tired of them wearing out so fast, M&S, Next, Peacocks, and Matalan are there for your perusal.
Almost all home ISPs here run on the OpenReach network. That used to be BT (the phone network) but now BT are one of many ISPs that run over the same (mostly copper) network. The only other ISP with it's own network is Virgin which is full fibre. There's a new Community Fibre network starting up but it's slow going so most people are stuck with whatever runs to their house.
Yes you need a TV license to use iPlayer.
Very much depends where you end up. Every cuisine in the world is cooked in the UK, but you might have to travel to find a good place.
You're in luck! We have Taco Bell as of just a few years ago. There's also Tortilla, Wahacca, Benito's Hat, and I'm sure many other places.
https://www.youtube.com/@evan - an American who moved to the UK a decade ago. Bit of a mixed bag content wise but a lot on current UK seen through American eyes.
Jeans and a T-shirt are fine and probably preferred in Summer since old buildings don't have air-con
Not yet and she might be done with school by the time those government plans get set in motion. School ends at 16 years old here and from there it's typically a 2-year A-level (advanced level) in one subject to prep you for university. Nothing is mandatory after leaving school at 16 though.
In the cities there are many small businesses that don't even take cash. I haven't handled paper money since before they swapped to plastic several years ago. Outside of the city though, there is still the occasional place that wants cash only. Typically they have a sign in the window letting you know to go to an ATM before you go in.
If you have a credit rating and it's good then you MIGHT get more favourable mortgage rates. It is functionally useless for any other purpose.
The best kept secret in the country is that Marmite is actually very meh.
Giffgaff accepts international billing addresses, so is easy to set up even if you're not a UK resident. I have maintained a UK sim with them for years, despite being based in the US.