Category Archives: Moving

From One Extreme to Another

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Moving back to the United States, the one thing I’ve noticed are the extremes. Extreme fat people versus extreme skinnies. Extremely large cars versus Segways. Extreme hicks versus extreme snobs.

Then there’s the food portions. Two nights, two extremes.

Thursday night – Tapas night! This isn’t Spain, it’s Federal Hill in Baltimore, but oh how I craved some Spanish tapas. Mixed with having dinner with my best friend and her new English beau, the evening couldn’t go wrong. And it didn’t, with the company. I made the mistake of going to dinner starving and somewhat penniless after splurging $2,500 more than we originally intended to do on a car. But oh, the 1997 Toyota Camry in Champagne color is a beauty – a grandpa beauty, but with 115,000 miles and one mechanic in its lifetime, we are happy to have a reliable car (pictures soon) with a sun roof, oh, and did I mention it has leather seats? Who cares about the hail pellet indentations on the roof when you’ve got automatic leather seats!! Woohoo. (More importantly, we have something to drive to North Carolina next week).

Anywho, at an average of $9 a plate for half a bite of food that was mildly delicious, all four of us opted for some french fries at the local bar down the street afterwards. And I’m all for gourmet food, but Centro Tapas was good, but not amazing for the small portions they fed us.

Then I come to last night’s dinner at Carmine’s in Washington DC. It was the largest portions I’ve ever seen with tasty big morsels of seafood, veal, pasta, calamari, cannoli’s, caesar salad, lasagna – and that was just for the five of us. It brings me back to the beauty and the curse of American society – our love of extremes.

What do you guys think? What are your views of the extremities of American society?

Stag/Bachelor Weekend Done

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Weekend in Chicago is now over and we’re headed back to Baltimore.

Things accomplished these five days in Chicago:

1. No flight delays into Chicago

2. Six miles of walking around Chicago on hottest day of year. Burned those calories!

3. Figured out area we want to live – Old Town, here we come!

4. New black pumps and 2 purses bought. My wardrobe is coming back together after the 4 garbage bags we got rid of in England.

5. Jock gets lost for two hours on Stag Do/Bachelor Party. Or rather, the party loses him. He describes it as “the worst two hours of his life.” He eventually finds them and continues the drinking and partying. Oh, but before that, they get on TV at the Cubs game.

6. First Mexican meal in the states in Potter’s Bar in Naperville and some raw cookie dough with ice cream to finish it off – only in America.

7. American television – the amount of prescription drugs advertised baffles me. I forgot how much we over medicate and then brag about it on TV. Deal or No Deal, as much as I loved it in England, I will NOT be watching those annoying, loud, screaming people in America. Don’t we understand the joy of subtlety at all? Watched “Monster’s Ball” for the first time as well – Halle Berry clearly doesn’t in her over-the-top performance sex scene. She won the Oscar for that? Really?? Heath Ledger should have gotten it.

Back to Baltimore for a week to finally work on getting my book sold. Will let you know the progress of that! Finishing the query letter, finding the right agents and stepping towards the future for Jock and I.

Casual Meanderings of America

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I won’t mention the canceled flights, the overnight stay in Minneapolis or the 9 hour delay in Newark, NJ. I won’t discuss the high amount of obese people rolling around on their automatic wheelchairs through the casinos or the woman in her wedding dress getting a cosmo at the Ghost Bar at the Palms with no wedding party in sight. I won’t talk about the waiter on auto-pilot who was dead behind the eyes and didn’t even register that we were two live beings sat at a table or the man with platinum teeth falling off his chair, or for that matter, the clearly underaged girl puking behind the couch. No use in harping on fact that roads in Vegas are bigger than freeways in England or that the portions thus far have allowed Jock and I to share a couple of meals.

What I want to talk about is how amazing it was to hold my nephew, to hug my mama, to meet my sister’s boyfriend, laugh with my best friend, look into my sister’s eyes right in front of me and relish in my uncle’s company and incredible cooking. Hearing American accents around me still makes me turn my head – you can imagine how often that’s been happening. Oh and the use of a cell phone is miraculous. I can actually communicate and call my friends and family on a whim, for no reason whatsoever, just because I feel like it. That’s a great feeling.

CNN isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. It seems America has grown up a bit since I’ve been gone – I say that and then I hear about the USDA official being fired over a badly cut youtube video depicting her as a racist that in no way described what she actually meant.

Oh how I’ve missed the nonchalant chit chat that goes with being in America, follows you to the grocery store, into Terry Fator’s show at the Mirage (absolutely recommend), up the Las Vegas Eiffel Tower and into Yama Sushi. The southern woman who wants to talk about her bad vertigo, the young rocker who boasts about which sushi to order or the old man who laughs at the fact that the margarita he consumed fifteen minutes before is now making its way into his brain (he doesn’t drink much normally). The casual meanderings of the simplistic and genuine American citizen floats its way back into my heart and I can feel myself re-opening up that side of me – transforming back into my louder, more gregarious person (which may surprise some of my English friends that I can become more of that – I didn’t shy away too much). But now its more accepted.

I never thought I’d be so happy to be back. I truly didn’t. The tear I felt leaving France after a year of studies abroad and the yank of incredible reverse culture shock coming back here five years ago was one of the most painful things I’ve ever experienced. Perhaps the difference is that I wasn’t ready to leave France, I felt it wasn’t my choice and that the school system’s decision to make me leave by June 1st felt unjust (even though my visa had ended and I actually didn’t have a choice.). This time I decided when I would leave, how it would happen – it was on my terms.

And the difference also is that I know I’ll be back in no time. Back then, I was a student, unsure of where my next paycheck would come from, let alone how I would ever be able to go back to the way I lived in Paris. Now, I am more settled, with beau and money – how much comfort comes from that feeling alone – for, I am not alone.

More soon. Leaving Las Vegas for Chicago today. Then back to Baltimore. Will update as regularly as I can.

Thank you all for continuing to follow my journey.

VIEW FROM MY LAST MEAL OUT IN ENGLAND, The Ship, Portsmouth:

VIEW FROM MY FIRST MEAL OUT IN AMERICA:

Sharing the Repatriation Experience

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(For some reason, the entry below did not post on schedule. So, I’m back now! More soon on that. In the meantime, please read below!)

As you read this, I am on a plane back to Dulles International (I scheduled the entry to go live at 10:25AM, the time our plane takes off). Jock and I land in Newark, NJ for two hours layover before heading to DC for my mom to pick us up at the height of rush hour traffic at 5PM. She must really love me because anyone who knows DC traffic, knows that it is the worst!

To kick off the re-pat experience, Alisha wrote an entry for me. Finding Alisha’s blog, Seattleite Imagery, has been serendipitous – definitely for me. I’ll let her do most of the explaining, but I feel so lucky to have someone going through the same things I will be going through in the next couple of months. I especially like her entry, “Bird by Bird, Brick by Brick” – that sums up what I know from experience moving and repatriating can be like, but we often forget after it’s gone and done with.

Please welcome Alisha:

When I heard that the Lady who Lunches was coming back to the States I was delighted, partially for the selfish reason that I also just moved back after eight years abroad and will have someone to share the repatriate experience with.

My British husband Dan and I decided last June that four years in England was enough and began to embark on our year-long exit strategy. We took the unorthodox but luxurious route home to Seattle via 6 months in New Zealand (January in the Southern Hemisphere – highly recommend it) to visit his parents and just touched down in the Emerald City in June.

It’s hard to believe it’s only been a month; part of me feels like I’ve been back forever, which is only a good thing. I’d been warned about reverse culture shock, how difficult it can be for the expat to return and find they no longer fit in anywhere. I was concerned my rose-tinted glasses would be ripped from my face, people would be uninterested in my experiences and all the things I’d learned as a foreigner (and holy crap I’d learned a lot!) would be null and void, forcing me to squeeze back into the life I’d left as a high schooler. Yikes.

I am happy to report however that re-entry has been relatively painless. I feel bad saying this, but I’ll go so far as to say it’s been easy. I mean, easy is relative – moving across the world without a job never compares to a week in Bali. But with a track record of cold-moving to a new city or country every two years for almost the last decade, I’m embracing the smooth landing.

A huge reason the only reverse culture shock has been positive is that the US is engineered for comfort, convenience and consumerism (sorry for the alliteration), a reality I consider it’s best and worst feature. It’s something I took for granted growing up and always enjoy rediscovering. In the US I have the opposite challenge I had in the UK: not getting too comfortable. I have a love/ hate relationship with consumerism, but gotta tell you I LOVE walking into Trader Joes, grabbing my free coffee and samples, cheap food and being fawned over by the sales staff. This all helps.

I’ve met quite a few Seattle transplants (usually from the mid-West) who comment about the Seattle freeze. Apparently Seattleites just aren’t as friendly as the rest of the country. Walking into coffee shops and dodging smiles and invitations to casual conversation, I always think this supposed freeze is hilarious. Three times in a row while asking directions to coffee shops on Capitol Hill (Seattle, not D.C.), perfect strangers have said, “I’m not sure, but I can look it up for you,” and have preceded to bust out their iphones. So I tell those mid-Westerners, “Honey, you ain’t seen nothin’,” and that Seattle is perfectly tropical compared to the London tundra of inter-stranger interaction. Basking in smiles, if not sun, is a great way to transition.

Another reason this supposed reverse culture shock has been MIA is the generosity of friends and family. It makes a huge difference to move somewhere you know people, specifically people related to you. I’m so used to starting from complete scratch when I move that I feel kind of like I’m cheating. But instead of feeling guilty I’m just feeling fortunate to be able to housesit for friends with beautiful houses, borrow parents cars and be taken care of.

The most important reason why moving back to the US has been minimally traumatic is larger than good friends, coffee and smiles. The main reason is that we were ready. When I fled the US straight after snatching my degree I had to get out. Back then the thought of staying Stateside suffocated me. But now, after doing what I needed to do in Japan then England then New Zealand, I’m ready to come home. I appreciate my imperfect nation now and, focused on the pros I have more patience with the cons.

I’m all about blooming where I’m planted but right now I feel so fortunate to be redeployed to the familiar turf of the Evergreen state. People always ask us if we’re back for good, which is a difficult question for nomads. For us, being somewhere for good isn’t comforting but scary. But I will say being here is good and I have no plans to leave.

I’m really looking forward to hearing how our lunching lady gets on in America and hope everything goes as well for her and Jock as it’s gone for us. In the meantime I’ll be perched up here in the Pacific Northwest warming the country up for her and enjoying being home.