by Rishika Rastogi
When moving to the UK, you can prepare for the big things. The visa, the flights, the reading list, the packing spreadsheet colour-coded within an inch of its life. I did all of that.
What nobody sat me down and explained were the small things. Things that don’t fit on a checklist but end up shaping your first few months more than anything planned. So here’s the blog I wish someone had sent me before I got on the plane.
Consider this the unofficial induction.
UK weather is a personality, not a forecast
Everyone tells you it rains in England. That part you’re ready for.
What they don’t tell you is that the weather here isn’t a forecast so much as a mood, and it changes its mind constantly. You can leave the house in bright sunshine, get rained on, get sunburnt, and need a coat, all before lunch.
“Bright spells with scattered showers” is not a weather report, it’s a warning to keep a jacket on you at all times, even in July when the sky is a flawless blue and lying to your face.
The rain itself is rarely dramatic. It’s a fine, persistent drizzle that somehow gets you wetter than a proper downpour and comes at you sideways, which is why half the umbrellas in London are turned inside out and abandoned in bins. You’ll stop bothering with one eventually. You’ll also, at some point in your first winter, be genuinely rattled to discover that in December the sun clocks off by four in the afternoon and you’re walking home in the dark before you’ve had dinner.
But here’s the thing nobody mentions in exchange for all the grey: the first properly warm day of the year is glorious. The whole city loses its mind about the sun’s arrival to the UK in the best way. The moment the sun comes out, every park fills up. Regent’s Park, a ten minutes walk from ISH, becomes a sea of people lying on the grass in shorts at fifteen degrees, blissfully happy, as if collectively deciding that summer has arrived and no one can prove otherwise. You start to understand the city and become a part of it too.
Small talk, queues, and other British mysteries
British people communicate in a code, and no one hands you the key. “You alright?” is the most common one. As a foreigner it comes off as a question about your wellbeing, but it is in fact just “hello,” and answering it with an honest account of your day will confuse everyone involved. The correct response is to say “you alright?” back. That’s the whole exchange. It took me weeks.
Then there’s the understatement. When a British person says something was “not bad,” they mean it was excellent. “A bit of a nightmare” means it was a genuine catastrophe. “I might be a little late” means don’t expect them for an hour. And “sorry” is not really an apology; it’s a general-purpose social lubricant applied to everything, including situations where someone else has stepped on your foot and you both apologise to each other.
Queuing, though, is where they get serious. The queue is sacred. There is an invisible, perfectly ordered line forming at all times, at the bus stop, the bar, the shop, and to jump it is close to a criminal act. No one will say anything, because saying something would be a fuss, but you will feel the disapproval radiate through the entire queue like a cold front. Learn the queue. Respect the queue.
And a genuinely baffling household one, while we’re here: many UK bathrooms have two separate taps, one scalding and one freezing, with no in-between. You will simply have to make peace with it.
Food from home: where to find it in London
The homesickness that ambushes you is very often food-shaped. You’ll be fine for weeks and then be floored by the specific craving for a dish your mum makes, or a snack from a shop back home that you never even thought about until it was ten thousand kilometres away. The good news, and I mean this sincerely, is that London almost certainly has it.
This city is a patchwork of neighbourhoods that are basically portals home for whole communities. Craving Korean? New Malden has you. South Asian groceries and good spices? Southall, Tooting, Wembley. Turkish and Middle Eastern everything, at any hour? Head up to Green Lanes. West African and Caribbean food is all over Peckham’s Rye Lane. Chinatown right in the city centre. Brick Lane for Bangladeshi. Even the big ordinary supermarkets have a “world food” aisle that will save you at 11pm. Half the fun is the pilgrimage: getting on a train across the city with a couple of housemates to hunt down one specific ingredient and coming home with three bags of groceries you didn’t plan to buy.
And then you cook it. This is the part I didn’t see coming. The shared kitchen turns into a swap-shop of recipes and half-remembered instructions from parents over video call. The fastest way to make friends in this building is to cook something from your country and leave the door open. Nobody stays a stranger for long once food is involved.
Homesickness is normal, and it passes
Let me be honest about this one, because the cheerful blogs skip it. You will get homesick, and it usually doesn’t hit on day one, when everything in the UK is new and exciting. It sneaks up on you a few weeks in, on an ordinary Tuesday, when the novelty has worn off and the family group chat is going off at 3am your time and you’re on the outside of it. A smell, a song, a photo and suddenly you miss home so hard, it’s physical.
Here’s what I want you to know: it does not mean you’ve made a mistake. It means you love where you came from, which is a good thing to be sure of. And it passes. Not by ignoring it, but by slowly building a life here, starting with a routine, a couple of regular faces, a place you like to sit. What helped me most was realising that almost everyone in this building was feeling some version of the exact same thing at the exact same time. You are surrounded by people who get it, because they left home too. Talk to them. And if it gets heavy, ISH has proper support for this. The wellbeing team and the Dean of Students exist precisely because homesickness is a normal part of the deal, not a weakness. Use them. That’s the whole point of living somewhere that calls itself a home away from home.
UK things you’ll end up loving
Nobody warns you about this bit either: how much you’ll come to love your experience in London. Not the big postcard icons, though those are nice too, but the small ordinary everyday sights. World-class museums that cost nothing to walk into. Parks you can lie in all afternoon. The walk past the local cafes, pubs, and shops you’re starting to frequent more and more until you know the workers by name or face. A proper cup of tea as the answer to every possible problem. Charity shops full of other people’s treasures. The specific joy of a Sunday roast on a grey day.
Mostly, though, you’ll love the people, and the fact that no one here is from just one place. On a single bus you’ll hear five languages. In a single kitchen you’ll eat food from four continents in a week. You arrive to the UK worried about being the foreigner, and then you realise everyone is a little bit foreign here, and that’s exactly what makes room for you. You came for a degree. You’ll leave with a second home, a group chat that spans a dozen time zones, and a genuinely unshakeable opinion about the correct way to make tea.
Nobody tells you any of this. But now someone has.
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