FlyingSquid

People who have never been to L.A. really have no idea how insanely huge it is. Driving to my apartment from the start of city (before you even get to L.A. county) and having the city just keep going and going and going for two hours and not because of traffic jams is something you have to experience to truly understand.

Details here.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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?
3. 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?
4. 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?
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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?
9. 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.
10. 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?
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. 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?
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. 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?
18. 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?
19. Do UK institutions care about your US credit rating?
20. I hate Marmite. Is that still a capital offence?

The rich are not the only ones losing homes at this point by any means. This was not a wealthy neighborhood:

Daron's next-door neighbour at house 281, Dillon Akers, was at work at a donut stand in the Topanga mall - about 40 miles away - as smoke started filling their neighbourhood.

Since the election, Trump has promised to immediately impose a 25% tariff on Mexican and Canadian imports, along with increasing existing tariffs on Chinese imports by 10%. On the campaign trail, Trump said he would put tariffs of 10% to 20% on all imports.

Economists widely agree that prices will increase with tariffs. Though the policy is meant to encourage American companies to produce their goods domestically, the global supply chain has become so entangled and interconnected that for many companies, the most simple thing will be to pass the cost of tariffs on to consumers – executives from multiple companies, including Walmart, Columbia Sportswear and AutoZone, have said they will do as much.

In a November Harris/Guardian poll, nearly half (44%) of respondents said they were planning purchases before Trump entering office, while nearly two-thirds (62%) said they were at least adjusting their financial plans for next year.

It's like a run on the banks, except it's a run on the Walmarts.

"You're really out to lunch! Look at this world you've cooked up! And you expect to take over another universe?"

LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Patrick Stewart, and Brent Spiner at the wedding of Marina Sirtis and Michael Lamper in 1992

I said when Trump won the election that we were leaving to the UK. I am a dual national with the UK and the US, but I never actually bothered doing anything about it before. But my daughter is queer and she is just not safe in the U.S. in our view*, so we are taking the opportunity to get out. I think some people here didn't believe it, but we have our plane tickets and we will be there on January 21st.

We are leaving on the 20th because we are thinking that if Trump starts rounding up immigrants right a way, a lot of people who are in the U.S. legally will freak the fuck out anyway and who knows when we'll be able to get tickets. So we're just leaving. I'll have time to see what happens when the fascist rapist felon get sworn in and then we'll be out of here.

I was originally going to wait until I got a job to go because it will be easier to get a family visa once I get a job and, of course, I'll be eating through what money we can scrounge together from things like selling my car, but I have already had two interviews cancelled because I'm not in the country and I'm sure having a U.S. phone number doesn't help (I realize I could have spoofed that with a UK number, but it literally didn't occur to me until today). Even with the interviews I have scheduled next week, the chance of me getting hired before Trump gets into office are pretty low.

We will be staying with an old high school friend of mine for a few days until I find a place to rent by the week as I look for work. We have absolutely no plans about where to live. I will go wherever the work takes us as long as we're there.

My wife is going to stay behind and take care of affairs like selling the house. My daughter is in online school, so she can stay in that until we get the family visa and can enrol her in a UK school. Because she's my daughter, once she has a family visa, she can immediately apply for permanent residency status. My wife will also be able to much more easily get a job on a family visa.

The nicest part is that we can bring the dogs over without having to put them in quarantine. That won't happen until I get a job either, but I am glad we will be reunited soon.

So we will be off in a week. Will I still post a lot on Lemmy once we get there? That remains to be seen.

Goodbye, America. I don't know if I'll ever come back, but I hope I can at least return to visit.

*I know some of you are going to say she won't be safe in the UK either. They are banning conversion therapy there and schools have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to bullying queer kids. Plus, the education system there is not going to turn to dogshit to the point the U.S. already has and it's only going to get worse. It's all around better for her there.

The local TV stations have not been much help either. I guess there's nothing to know? You'd think there would be some local news that two TV stations and a newspaper might think about covering.