The Work Trip
Working for a large company that has a London office really has its perks. Throw in my bffl (Matt) from work who loves London, mix in some cheap tickets, and you’ve got yourself a week’s trip to London without using a single day of vacation!
After meeting the London team at our London office, we headed down to the cafe to do what we do best. Sip free, fruit infused water and loiter.
Working NY hours in London wasn’t too bad. Sure, we had to stay until at least 10PM but being able arrive around noon evened it out. There was plenty of daylight on the weekends to explore.
Matt, our London lover & veteran, took us around and showed us the way.
Everywhere we went, he couldn’t hide his excitement.
I did my best to keep it real the whole time.
However, certain moments were tense. I had to be taken to the side and explained where I went wrong.
Being a man of solutions, I took everything I was told seriously, and set on several missions to amend each situation.
Solving the day’s problems set us up for our night. Once the sun set, our 4th world traveler (Emine) joined us for some night time fun.
Our nights usually started with a couple pints and plans to move to London.
They usually ended with the creation of the McNasty. Despite the name, it’s actually quite delicious. Combine the following after 1AM to get yours tonight:
- 1 Big Mac
- Some Fries
- Couple of Chicken Nuggets
- BBQ Sauce
- Sweet & Sour Sauce
Total Costs: $2,370 (SRB: $1,099 | YA: $1,271)
Ladies & Gents, we’ve breached again. Unfortunately, the cause of the breach was unavoidable. Getting her a U.K. visa was very costly. Given that the timing of trips between Pakistan, Peru, and England were so tight, I had to expedite her U.K. visa in order to get her passport back in time for our trip to Peru.
This is where my spoiled self of having not just dual citizenship, but having an American passport (so many visa free countries), felt the struggle of what so many people internationally have to go through just to travel.
Her Budget: 26.90% LTD
Another city, another breach in a city’s budget. The benefit from the inexpensive Washington D.C. trip has finally run dry pushing her total budget up by 8.47% to 26.90% LTD. Overall, we are only $34 above the total budget for all her trips. We’ll need to work harder on cutting costs in future trips where we can, in order to better absorb unavoidable/unforeseen costs.
For this trip, Yagmur’s visa costs totaled to $498. We were able to offset this immense cost by limiting our airfare cost to only $236.
The incredibly low airfare of $236 was made possible by taking advantage of: (1) Norwegian Air’s new flights from NFW (~2 hours north of NYC). NFW –> LON: $179 (2) Flying towards our next city instead of returning home. With a layover in Kiev, on our way to Tbilisi (then later Yerevan), our ticket leaving London to Kiev cost $57.
Large hit for the UK visa:
Our Progress: 28.57%
This was our first trip to Europe! Adding one more pin is always a great feeling 🙂
We loved London! Maybe we’ll move there???
Save travels everyone!
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