Zen blog post in Russian
https://dzen.ru/a/aarQOAvDYXMMpYJl
My immigration to England. All sorts of different thoughts.
- Oxford is a small and compact city by Moscow standards.
It's only 1 hour by train to London (to Paddington station).
Somewhere there, the Russian embassy is very close (Russians in England will understand me now). I've often had to look here in recent years.
In general, the road from Oxford to London is my favorite. It's very atmospheric here.
Recently, for example, I saw a guy opening his suitcase on a train with a key and taking out books from there.
And what accents are heard here!
When you approach Oxford, you immediately feel that this place is different from other parts of England.
- The peculiarity of Oxford and Cambridge is that there is no railway connection between the two cities.
That is, you can get by train from Oxford to Cambridge via London.
I would really like the situation to change in the future.
- The price for renting a place in Oxford (it can be a college or just a rented house) is about 1,200 pounds per month (and more). London is even more expensive.
- Despite all the difficulties of living in a new country, I managed to create a sense of home here.
I was lucky enough to meet cool and interesting people (mostly, plus or minus, Oxford and Cambridge students of the same age) from a wide variety of countries.
The student community here is very supportive, and I am particularly impressed by how much women's solidarity is developed in England.
The concentration of smart, beautiful, and strong women per square meter in Oxbridge is simply off the charts: startup founders, academics, and just ambitious people.
Many people blog with tips on how to study more effectively, overcome impostor syndrome, encourage you, inspire you with their example, and are generous with kind comments.
- There is only a year left before obtaining residency (what a blessing!). I want to get a passport and forget about bureaucracy, like a bad dream.
So far, I have never regretted moving to England, but if I could rewind time, I would be better prepared psychologically for the difficulties of immigration, I would be more interested in the experiences of other people who have already gone this way, and of course, I would devote more time to learning English.
"Rome wasn't built in a day" is a statement that perfectly describes the process of adapting to a new country.
I recommend a selection of Oxford Notes in the blog for those who are interested in England.
I've been thoroughly hooked on books and materials on evolutionary biology and psychology, ethology, and neurophysiology, and I don't know how to stop.
Dawkins, Sapolsky, Lorenz, Chopra, Harari, Pinker, Peterson... I listen to lectures by Dubynin (I went to his special course at the Moscow State University Faculty of Biology) and Drobyshevsky.
To be honest, I haven't read fiction for 5 years (but I don't feel like it either), only popular science: biology, genetics, neurology, all kinds of naturalistic topics…
All this intellectual vinaigrette in my head is also accompanied by reading historical blogs about comparing the crisis of the Roman Republic and the transition to empire and the United States now, the Civil War in the States, as well as books about feminism.
Something like that…
Ekaterina Sveshnikova, England, London, Oxford University
And some more facts about England:
How not to worry about age:
To come into contact with 140 million ammonite.
Ammonites are an extinct subclass of ancient cephalopods that lived in the Mesozoic seas.
