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?
  • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝AEnglish
    5·
    4 days ago
    1. There are lots of good price comparison sites - I tend to run through a few but often use Compare the Market as you can save off your details and it makes it easier to check next time. This works for phones, utilities, broadband, insurance, etc. You could probably box off the lot with a few hours on this.
    2. Money Saving Expert/Martin Lewis is your go to for finance, see what his most recent recommendation is. You can do comparisons for banks/building societies too but moving isn’t a big deal if a new deal pops up.
    3. I do my Big Shop at Aldi - they’ve started stocking pulses and brown rice, so my supplemental shop (usually at Asda) has shrunk to half a dozen items I prefer elsewhere (their hot chocolate is far too powdery). Aldi and Lidl can’t be beaten for price and I’ve had no issues with quality. They do sushi too, apparently, but I don’t eat it. I’d recommend shop at Aldi/Lidl and see what meets your needs then try Asda and then Sainsburys for anything else.
    4. You can check out a GP’s rating online but you’ll usually find they are all decent and you can switch. Getting a dentist can be trickier.
    5. Sounds like you want a Comic Con, rather than a comics convention (although if she draws she might like one of those too - Thought Bubble is the big one but there are others). The big one is in London but most cities have large well organised ones and they are all very LGBTQ+ and ND friendly but it might help if she’s met a few people online who go. There are also specific anime cons around the country. If she’s good she might want to see if there’s a small press title looking for artists. This feels like an area I am qualified to help in, so I will follow up on this but feel free to message me directly. Other than that arriving late in school can be tricky (I wasn’t born in the UK and moved around a bit, I had friends turn up at a similar age but my friendship group was a ragtag bunch of misfits so we swept up most of the strays) and getting special educational needs (SEND) help can be a fight, more helpful if she already has a diagnosis. Friends and family have been through the wringer and have struggled (even my cousin who is a formidable and in the health field) and I won’t lie, this could be the trickiest aspect if your move. She might get lucky and fall in with a good bunch but it might be she gets by on extracurricular activities and perhaps has a better experience in sixth form and Uni (from what I’ve seen anyway).
    6. You can get ID cards but it’d be an idea to apply for a driving license as the provisional one is universally accepted.
    7. Not done this recently.
    8. IKEA is a good shout but there are other furniture stores - flat packed beds and drawers are good go tos from them (as is a lot of household staples) but I am not a fan of their chairs. Try Sofology and the like.
    9. You can get them from IKEA too but I tend to get all that from Asda (used to he owned by Walmart, if that helps give you an idea) - they do big box sets of crockery that I am still using years later, and have cutlery, glass, pots and pans, etc as well as air fryers and microwaves, although if you want a bugger selection of electrical items, try Curry’s. I moved a few years back and helped a friend’s son move to Uni and the advice in this point and the previous one just got everything up and running quickly at a decent price and quality. You might want to shop around at M&S or John Lewis for specific better quality items but to get your basics sorted these IKEA and Asda will sort you out.
    10. Kind of a similar answer, for your basics (underwear, t-shirts, jeans, coats, etc) the George at Asda isn’t bad. If you need better quality items then go to M&S or Next - I went to them for a suit, decent quality shoes and a good raincoat (they have a bigger stock online so I tend to click and collect a bunch of stuff then return it). As my sister-in-law tends to get me clothes for my birthday and Christmas, I suspect most of my general clothing is from Next, if I was buying it myself, I’d tend to go to Asda. Which might be a guide to price vs quality.
    11. See 1.
    12. Sounds like you need a TV licence.
    13. I suspect we run into cultural differences here and someone else has addressed the specifics. Generally, a nice area will have cafes that do a good breakfast, avoid greasy spoons (unless you are after that experience) and keep an eye out for a cafe that is mixed in with a good bakers or cake shop.
    14. Again it depends on the area but if there’s an area with a decent selection of restaurants you might find a “Mexican”. There is one near enough to me that, if I wanted it I could have it but there are also Turkish, Greek, Indian, Chinese, Moroccan, Nepalese and Indonesian so it rarely gets a mention (I’ve been once, it was fine).
    15. Others may be better placed to offer advice but I am sure there’s plenty on YouTube and TikTok that’ll cover the basics but it won’t really substitute for diving in and knowing you’ll make a few mistakes. People are generally tolerant of that kind of thing.
    16. I’d avoid sweats (jogging bottoms) in work as they have class connotations and would raise eyebrows. Jeans or cargo pants with a t-shirt, long-sleeved top or jumper should be fine but ask.
    17. I’ll pass that over to the Welsh contingent.
    18. I keep some cash on me but only really use it to split the bill in a restaurant and I could use card for that too but it can get fiddly if others are too but the staff are fine taking your money anyway you want to give it.
    19. No idea.
    20. Good, it’s muck.
    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      4 days ago

      Thanks. We’ve been to some cons in the U.S. and she does like them, mostly for the cosplay, but it hasn’t been a way she’s found anyone to befriend, but maybe it will be different over there.