The Regal Rules for Girls Read Online Free PDF Page A

sorority rush days, it’s a “mutual selection process.” While on the phone, try to get as much information as possible about who lives there (guys? girls? nationalities? professions?), as you may decide it’s not worth your time to go there in person. Due to the doors that can open in your London social life, I must stress that the quality of the people in a flatshare is even more important than the quality of the flat itself.
    When out viewing flatshares, bring your
A–Z
with you. Many London streets have the same name (Kensington Place, Kensington Mews, Kensington Crescent, Kensington Gardens, Kensington Park Gardens), and it’s easy to get lost if you don’t have a map pinpointing the exact location.
    Keep in mind that you will need to lower your expectations. Big-time. You’re categorically not going to find American living standards at American prices, so push any thoughts along those lines out of your mind.
    Before you open the door to a potential flat, expect the worst. Envision seventeenth-century plumbing and eighteenth-century electricity. Picture a bedroom three times smaller than your college dorm room but with ten times less storage space. Any London flat that exceeds this expectation even slightly is worth considering.
    If your only problem with the flat is that the washing machine is in the kitchen, that the fridge is smaller than the TV, that there is no dryer for your clothes, that there is moldy carpet in the bathroom, that the bathtub has no shower attachment, or that the sinks have separate hot and cold water taps 5 —then put down an offer immediately. If the flat’s inhabitants also happen to be polite, charming, and English—offer to pay double.
Making Your Room Livable
    When I moved into my UK student dorm room and later into my first grown-up London flat, I had no idea how and where to go about making either of them vaguely livable spaces.
    The only way I can describe my London dorm is Orwellian mental institution meets abandoned crack house. (If you don’t believe me, I have photo proof.) With its eerie green lighting, long dirty hallways, and exposed wiring, the place could easily have passed as a film set for a 1950s horror movie. The crazy part is that at the time I thought I was just incredibly unlucky and had simply been allotted the worst dorm in the country. But the longer I’ve lived in England, the more I’ve come to realize that this standard of student living is considered
normal
. A rite of passage, even. (One of my English friends told me how her dorm room was heated with a radiator that only worked if you deposited 10 pence every fifteen minutes.)
    And although my dorm room had been furnished with an electric kettle and a heated towel rack (both of which I had lived more than two decades without needing or missing), I had not been provided with a desk of any kind. I was, after all, just a student living in a student residence hall—why would I need one?
    So I had to purchase, among many other things, a desk. I also needed to go shopping for things like clothes hangers, sheets, towels, and halogen lamps. And I needed a new radio and a curling iron because both of mine had short-circuited seconds after being exposed to the high-voltage UK electricity. If I had been in America, I would have just driven to Target. However, now that I was in London, I clearly didn’t have a car, and more critically, England has nothing even vaguely similar to Target (much less Bed Bath & Beyond).
    So here are the British alternatives:
    IKEA
    You’re probably already overly familiar with IKEA. They offer great quality, a great selection, and everything is very cheap and very stylish—but you pay for it in the end. You walk into IKEA and are tempted to buy everything in sight—until you get to the warehouse and realize you have to load the heavy items onto your cart by yourself, get them home (on the tube or via a very expensive taxi), and worst of all, put them all together piece by piece