London settlement guide

Now that I have gotten myself a nice cozy flat, the only thing left to do is to get a job or bread? If anyone comes looking for a new living in London, let me give out a sequence of to-do's which I think could have been more appropriate.

1. Get a mobile: getting a cheap mobile phone which enables one to top up, that is pay as you go is fairly convenient, more than perhaps any other cities around the world. Just go to any of the mobile service providers(e.g. Vodafone, O2, Orange, T-mobile, 3, Tesco, et cetera), and ask for pay as you go. In fact, one could get one for as cheap as £20 pounds for a phone, sim card and enough calling credit, all inclusive.

2. Look for a flat. There are namely few popular sites for this purpose as the following:
* Find A Property: mostly listings by agencies, therefore more reliable in some sense
* Right Move: has nice feature to draw a boundary on the map, and it find you all available properties within the polygon user has drawn.
* Gumtree: a portal with most traffic, partly filled with spams and phising.
* Craigslist: not so popular in London, but good place to find private lettings.
* Others which I did not quite utilize, but popular: Homes and Property, Moveflat, Zoopla
* What I found most useful are the Bulletin boards for expatriate groups: Deutsche in London(German), ジャニ-(Japanese), 04UK
Simply need to call each one and continue looking til you find the one you want.

* And of course, if you are looking for short-term accommodation, I think there is nothing better than student housings. Luckily, many of them also take professionals, and you can pretty much find them everywhere in the city. Here are few which I had stayed in: International Students House(Regent's Park), Davies Court(Canary Wharf)

3. Opening a bank account. Let's see. Probably the ones with most branches around the city are Barclays, HSBC, Santander, Lloyds TSB, NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland, so on. If you just arrived and urgently need an account, my best recommendation would be bring the original copy of your bank statement from back home, must be written in English of course, and take your passport along with. From my own experience, Barclays has been most generous to expats amongst.

4. Obtain a National insurance number. Details are all listed. Either you can apply for yourself, or pay these guys  at 1st contact to ease the task

5. Getting a job. This, which I am still working on at the moment, I cannot conclude at the moment which worked best or ended up being useless. However, if I don't forget, I can always update my postings, so for now, I will provide a list of job sites, recruitment agencies, with brief notes.
* ITjobboard
* TNT jobs
* Quant finance jobs
* Morgan McKinley
* Elan IT

What after then? At this moment, I have no idea, but don't you worry, you will soon find out what I will be upto.