How to be a happy Londoner

So apparently the lovely Blog of Sunshine has become quite popular. I’m happy to share with you another guest-post from one of my close friends, Alex. She the odd one out happy ‘Hammersmithian’ and she’s sharing some tips&tricks of living a happy Londoner (and not only) life. I absolutely loved reading it, the English humour just cracks me up. Enjoy!

PS: Alex has her own blog about languages, translation and other cool stuff if you want to check it out: http://robinandthemachine.wordpress.com.

According to this latest piece of research, happiness and life satisfaction levels vary quite a bit across London. Whilst I wasn’t too surprised to see that people living in the super-wealthy borough of Kensington and Chelsea seem pretty happy with their lives, I was a bit surprised that people in my area, Hammersmith and Fulham, seem like a pretty dissatisfied bunch. Obviously there could be 100s of different reasons why people are unhappy with their life, but I thought I’d share a few of my ‘secrets’ to being one of the happy people in Hammersmith!

What’s all this sunshine nonsense?

I’ve been struggling for more than 2 weeks now to get my first post out. This describes me very well because I am that person that wants everything to be perfect and there is no middle way for me – if it’s not perfect (or at least the way I want it) I’d rather not have it at all. So this is me pulling my act together to write my first post.

My name is Ioana (from time to time I tell people it’s Joana to save myself for endless spelling and questions, but I kind of like you so I’ll even tell you how it is pronounced in English: Eewana), I am a 25 year old Romanian girl who lives in London.

I work for a small company that makes programs and apps for learning languages, at our cozy and homey office in Fulham, where I am responsible for dealing with our lovely customers (seriously, most of them are very nice and tell us how much they enjoy our products) and also for keeping things under control in the office, as an Office Assistant.

Soon I will have my One Year in UK Anniversary and I have to say this has been a life changing experience. I am not going to bore you in this moment with all that has happened during this year, maybe in a later post but I do have to say that there have been a lot of changes to my lifestyle and routine (I am drinking tea with milk at this point, I thought this was gross a year ago) and so I want to share all my discoveries with you.

Since I couldn’t decide for a single theme of the blog, I just figured it’ll be about me and my interests: photography, fashion and beauty, psychology and human interactions, languages and cultures around the world, basic cooking, design and architecture and last but not least, lovely London. All of these sprinkled with a bit of sunshine because I am a big fan of optimism and seeing the bright side of life. I also stand for being yourself, honesty at all costs, and constant curiosity towards new experiences, people and places – if you feel the same way about yourself, you’ve come to the right blog.

Also, as a disclaimer, English is not my native language and I am kind of a Grammar Nazi in my native language, Romanian, so if you find any spelling mistakes or any kind of mistakes in my posts, please help me improve and let me know what they are 🙂 And if we’re on this subject, I also speak fluent German and a couple of Spanish words I learned from some of my colleagues.

Finally, I wrote my first post! This wasn’t so hard 🙂
Alright so that’s that, feedback is always welcome and I hope we have a long, lasting friendship 🙂

See ya!
Little Miss Sunshine