Kimberly Cole lives in Histon, England with her husband Jon, golden retriever Dusty and Ruddles the cat. She works at the University of Cambridge as an administrative assistant and blogs about cultural differences, places to travel and much more at American to Britain, her guide to making the most of living in the United Kingdom.
I joined the United States Air Force after a year at Metropolitan State University in Denver, Colorado partly to see the world and partly to fund my education. Unfortunately, my first assignment, working on B-52s, landed me at Minot Air Force Base in the middle of nowhere 40 miles from the Canadian border. Luckily, we were deployed to RAF Fairford, England during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. I really loved that place and the people and I did my best to get back there as soon as I could.
The USAF, however, sends you where it wants to send you, not where you want to go. But I found a way to get back to England, which meant doing a short tour at Osan Air Base in South Korea. Anything was better than Minot. After a year at Osan I finally made it back to England. I knew this time around that I wanted to make the most of living there, so I got involved in activities off-base as much as I could. One of those activities, the weekly pub-crawl, led me to my English husband, Jon.
I often feel like I didn’t really start to live in England until I got out of the military. No matter how hard I tried, despite being married to an Englishman, I never really felt the full experience of living there, mainly because when you are in the military you can choose how much you really want to be involved with the locals. After all, a military base is really just a “little America.”
At first, Jon and I lived in a beautiful flat that was once the Newmarket Hospital’s boardroom. We were able to afford a place that only older locals could afford because the U.S. government provides a generous rental allowance. Unfortunately, though, we never had neighbors that were the same age as us.
When I left the military, we had to move to a less expensive place. We lived in what the English call a “two-up, two-down.” That’s a house that has two rooms on top of two rooms. It was small and cozy and we had a tiny garden where we could sit in the summer evenings listening to the bands play at the Newmarket Racecourse.
Once we settled in our new place, I started looking for a job, which was not as easy as I had hoped because my military work experience was not really transferable to a civilian job. I signed up with a recruitment agency, which got me my first job at the National Health Service (NHS) Swine Flu room. The computer skills I learned in the military were very helpful in getting that job.
One thing I did not know when I started looking for a job was the degree of difficulty in finding work in the U.K. until you get your Permanent Residence Visa, which is called an Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR). Employers have to hire U.K./E.U. or settled workers ahead of anyone else if they can do the job. Once you have an ILR, it is much easier to find work because you are on equal par with the locals.
