Living in London has been a blast and I really lucked out with my living arrangements! I was fortunate enough to get the roommate that I applied to have and was even luckier to only have that one roommate!
We live in a studio apartment, which is basically just one huge room with a separate bathroom. When the CAPA employee, Martin, took us to our apartment, he told us that it was nicer than his flat, so I was excited to have such a nice place. It’s pretty spacious for just two people but the lack of privacy is sometimes a struggle that we face because we always have to be close to one another no matter where we’re sitting… because each “room” is only a few feet away.
This usually only poses issues when one of us has a phone call or when one of us has to get up earlier than the other. When one of us gets a call, we either go to the bathroom or into the hallway so the other person doesn’t have to listen. I personally have to get up for work between 7 and 7:30, while she doesn’t have to get up until around 8:30 and being quiet is actually pretty difficult! If I want to get food from the kitchen, I have to tip toe and I’ve ended up just packing the night before and eating at work, so I don’t have to wake her or eat in the dark. I try my best not to wake her, but you can hear everything in this place!
Something nice about living here is that we get a cleaning service every Wednesday. They dust, clean the bathroom, clean our sheets and even do the dishes! This is a great service and encourages us to keep the apartment relatively clean so it’s easy for them to get around. One negative about this though was that they’ve pushed the microwave into the refrigerator switch (every outlet has a switch here) twice and the second time happened over my Spring Break so Monday morning when I went to get food out of the refrigerator, I was unhappily surprised to find the fridge turned off and all of our food spoiled.
Back to the positives of this apartment though is the location itself! My flat is right in between two different tube stations, Barons Court and West Kensington. I take Barons Court for the Piccadilly line, which I usually use to get to the airport and West Kensington for the District line, which I take to work every day and virtually everywhere else I need to go. Not only am I close to the tube station, but I’m also only a 20-minute walk from the CAPA building, with 2 different routes I can take which makes it easy and scenic if I want to switch it up sometimes.
Another perk of my location is that I’m right next to a Tesco mini grocery store and down the street from a mini Sainsbury, so if I need something quickly I can run down and be back in my apartment in less than 10 minutes. And if I need more than just a few small things, there’s a big Tesco and Sainsbury along one of the routes that I can take home from CAPA!