Why England? Why not?!

Since arriving in England people have been asking us "why would you move to England?"; Even people we meet that are from England ask us this.

Here's why:

In August 2014, we woke up and realised we weren't as happy as we could be. We're not saying we weren't happy with our lives overall, but we felt like we were in a bit of a rut.

We looked back at our life together so far to see what we loved the most about it; we kept thinking about our vacations. We came across a quote, "build a life you don't need to vacation from" and realised that we wanted to do that.


While it would be impossible for us to retire at this point in our lives, we've gotta pay the bills somehow, we knew there could be a way to live the life we wanted and not go bankrupt.

We looked into going on a holiday for a month. We had our decision down to England or Australia. While this is a great way to experience a place, we still wanted more.

Our friends who were moving back to England had told us we should come visit them. We agreed that we would visit. Someone jokingly said we should just get a working visa and move in together. (I can't remember whose suggestion that was.  Maybe it was a bluff?).
Over the next couple of days we thought long and hard about applying for a visa. When would the appropriate time be? We met up with our friends one last time before they moved and they said, "If you move to England, we could move in together." This ended up working out for all of us by sharing living costs.

We researched the YMS visa to move to the United Kingdom. The YMS visa is for people between the ages 18-30 and is valid for two years. This meant we had to do it now, or we'll never get this opportunity again. It was easiest to move to the United Kingdom as we had friends there already and it isn't much of a change in climate from British Columbia. Another reason we picked the United Kingdom is because there is other countries that allow temporary workers to be between the ages of 18-35. Meaning we could go on another visa somewhere else if we wanted. A list of Countries and their age requirements for Canada is listed here.

What else we like about living in the United Kingdom is the close proximity to the rest of Europe. You can live and work and go on fairly cheap holidays to other places in Europe compared with the cost of having to fly from Canada. Plus the culture is interesting here. Experiencing the similarities and differences is fun and quite the learning experience.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this post you may like "What We Learned in Our First Year Living Abroad."