City Living

In Modern Family Phil Dunphy calls his car, “The Cone of Trust,” which allows his children to tell him they don’t want to go to family camp anymore.  I find that having no car opens the kids up far more.

Maybe this isn’t a London thing but simply a city living thing that I’m experiencing after being cooped up in the suburbs.  Walking your child to school is a treat.  Why is a meaningful conversation more likely to happen walking side by side in the morning as opposed to sitting in a car trying to maneuver down River Road?  Is it because we are walking and not sitting, is it the lack of headphones, is it because it’s raining and we’re huddled together under an umbrella? 

We leave dinner and spend the 20 minute walk home playing a game with the sidewalk squares.

We ride the tube and the kids play games with the maps, the seats, the sleeping passengers’ faces.

We discuss what to do if someone gets separated from the rest of us on public transport.  An hour later we lost mommy at Leicester Square.

Experiences

"Never regret," Eleanor Hibbert said. "If it's good, it's wonderful. If it's bad, it's experience."

When you leave home you assume a new life, but not a new identity.  The truth is you don’t leave everything behind.  There are still Soccer tryouts.  There are friends to be made, un-friendly girls to overcome, bunk-mates to find for a week-long camping trip with your new sixth grade class. 

There are first dates with new friends, because everyone is new, even for Mom and Dad.  There is the barber shop down the street where you go because you figure it can’t be that bad and then you stand in front of the mirror like a 14 year-old wondering how long it will be before your hair grows even on both sides.  There is cold rain down your neck as you lug school supplies back home from the High Street and everyone clamors for a car. 

I tell the kids these are experiences.  This is life after all.

It's a Cultural Thing

“It’s a cultural thing,” I hear from my counterparts in the UK.  Whether it’s how we speak or when we speak.  How we respond, eat, drink, all the sense are covered.   While there is much broken here, as everywhere, the Brits have advanced the art of communicating well beyond Americans. 

One thing I’m seeing first hand and didn’t realize until I was here is that American business people don’t pick up their phones.  “You have a culture of voicemail,” the Brits tell me.  “Our contact rates in Europe are much higher.”

Every call I make in the UK, whether I reach the right person or not, someone picks up the phone, they are pleasant and attempt to be helpful.  Here in Europe they have far more vacation days and they view August as one big holiday, but when they work, they work really well. 

It is the infrastructure that more often fails them than the person.  So getting our office phone system, hooked up has been a process of colossal delay, months of wait, and once installed the pipes don’t work.

Recently a package from the US was caught up in customs and I had to call the local DHL office to find out where it was.  I call a number, a woman answers, she says she remembers my name from the paperwork.  She tells me what to do and then to call back a few days later and make sure it cleared.  I do what she asks and two days later I call the number on the envelope and again she picks up the phone and tells me they received my email and she will check on the status of my package.

“I’d love to help,” she says, “but my computer isn’t working at the moment.  Can you call back again, I’ll be here.”http://expat-blog.com/

Sunny Day

And today all the children got up and off to school, walking the older ones to school is turning into quite an education, although I’ve been relegated to standing at some distance as we approach school grounds.

The new house is still a little confusing, the light switches, the alarms, the various keys.  This morning I stood for minutes in a hallway looking for the light switch, I could swear it seemed brighter than usual, one of the kids must have left the light on.  And then I noticed it wasn’t my son, but in fact THE sun was shining in.  I hadn’t seen the Sun in the morning yet.

Getting jostled on the Tube and walking with the throngs across the bridge during rush hour, I do feel a connection to this new home.  But anyone paying attention could see I am still a stranger.  Maybe it’s the way my eyes linger at the Tube map a little too long, or that I am the only one carrying an umbrella on a sunny day. 

Barcelona: The Crisis

I didn’t have to go to Spain to know there was an economic crisis.  But you feel it there.  On the streets of Barcelona you hear it, how it affects their lives.  They know about the riots in Athens and the looting in London and then know they aren’t that far from it:

“There is no excuse for vandalism, but they need jobs,” says the tour guide shaking his head, speaking of 47% unemployment for recent college graduates.  “America doesn’t seem to realize they aren’t far behind. “

You see tourists in the stores, but that’s it. 

There used to be two time periods in Barcelona, before and after the 1992 Olympics.  Now they talk about before “the (economic) crisis” and after. 

“Because of the economy we have to change.  We used to be closed for all of August, now people are gone for maybe just 10 days.  We have Siesta from two to five.  This has to end.  This doesn’t work in the world economy anymore.”

Gaudi, his architectural imprint is all over the city, t-shirts calling Barcelona the city of Gaudi.  His signature house, Casa Battlo is now owned by candy-maker Chupa Chups.  They rent it out for high-end parties.

 

Earthquakes and Hurricanes: From Here

I am in the sun on the roof of a hotel in Barcelona, across the way I can see the cable cars that lead down to the Olympic village and back home the earth is shaking, the rain is pouring, the waves pounding and no doubt trees falling, and I wonder how I can be so disconnected from my world. 

It reminds me of a poem I read on the walls of the Tube when I lived here 24 years ago (yes they post poems in the London subway).  And it describes the way I feel living here while the rest of my world is shaken by earthquakes and overrun by hurricanes.  Although I can follow what happens, I am not there, I am here and the distance lengthens and although it's been only a week, it isn't my world.  How is my house, our dogs, our friends, the office, our life? (Not in that order friends, I worry about you before the dogs…)

In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,
Tribes on the march, planets in motion…

I imagine the earth when I am no more,
Nothing happens, no loss, it’s still a strange pageant, Women’s dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley." 

C. Milosz

Coffee and Nicotine

By 3:30 the pub crowd is spilling out onto the sidewalks.  Different faces than the ones I'd seen at noon grabbing a pint with lunch -- instead of lunch.  Cigarettes, alcohol and coffee fuel the populace.  There isn’t a building entrance without a gaggle of smokers from 7:30 AM til midnight, rain or shine:   “I’ve been swimming in a sea of anarchy, I’ve been living on Coffee and Nicotine…”  S. Crow. 

Yesterday a colleague suggested we have a pint after work.  "Are we celebrating?" I asked.  He paused, smiled broadly and replied, "It's not raining."

The Rain

I am unclear what the umbrella salesmen back home do on all those sunny days.  But even a whiff of rain brings them out from the sidewalk cracks with the world’s most unstable devices.  In London where rain is a when, not if, proposition, they are nowhere.  Exiting the Tube station in the midst of an evening downpour I seek help.  I receive none, only looks of disapproval.  They seem to be saying, “This is London, man, get with the program!”

Impressions

Walking to work in a misty London rain, through the tube, above ground to cross London Bridge, the image of St. Paul's dome blotted out by fog.  Sharing a lunch table with an elderly British gentleman whose eyebrows have escaped from an Eric Carle book.  It is an outdoor cafe in a perfect 73 degree day.  I am eating a chicken, avocado and lemon mayo sandwich on spelt and sipping an espresso.   I have no doubt that perhaps a year from now I will yearn for the sun, or my 15 minute commute in my factory sealed car.  And maybe I'll crave Hellmans, but for now these vignettes balance the child who can manage to say “I want to go home” in 12 syllables.

"Welcome to beauiful, broken Britain"

"Welcome to beautiful, broken Britain..."

It wasn’t the feral youths that elicited this comment from a British co-worker, it was the sales rep who walked away from us when her shift was over rather than complete the sale, it was the administrative roundabouts that stretched out our Visa application until the morning we were due to leave, it is the traffic and the "congestion" charges and regulations for getting cell (mobile) phones that require you to have an exhaustive UK financial history and the cost of doing nearly anything.  It is beautiful.  But they acknowledge the breaks with humor and acceptance.  As another Brit put it, "Welcome to the UK--the richest third world country in the world"

When do you stop...

When do you stop feeling and acting like a tourist? When do the kids stop pointing our every McDonalds, Pizza Hut and Starbucks?  When do you stop shopping at places you knew when you just visiting, like Harrods?  Harrods for dinner tonight?  Really?  When do you stop taking cabs everywhere, and finding yourself being pulled off a curb just before a car mows you down?  When do you stop converting prices to dollars and thinking, “Oh my G-d I can’t believe how expensive this is…”

Rookie Mistake

Running home from the Tesco in 55 degree July rain storm covering ourselves with a recently purchased 12 pack of toilet paper melting over my hands.  We arrive to our flat, soaked through.  I call this a Rookie Mistake.

A New Day

It already feels different the first morning after arriving.  It’s not “what am I doing here,” it’s “what do I have to get done.”  To paraphrase Tony Soprano who said, “every day is a gift. It's just.  Does it have to be a pair of socks?"  Even in London sometimes you have to go the Costco.

On Our Way

The Virgin Atlantic flight is delayed and we sit looking at the kids as they read their magazines and play their games and we ask, How the Hell Did We Get Here?

The road to international expansion is one you have to want, no desire, because it is made difficult, even by the friendly countries.  From school applications to the VISA process, you are confronted with a never ending list of documentation requirements that they seem to expect you to have on hand including such items as a Marriage Certificate, excess passport photos, teacher recommendations going back to Kindergarten and everything in triplicate.  And on a Sunday.  You feel like a contestant on “Let’s Make a Deal” where they’re trying to see what oddity you might be carrying.  “If only I had that extra hard-boiled egg in my inside jacket pocket.”

But after completing this endurance test you realize that everyone who told you this is the best thing for your family doesn’t know any better than you how it’s all gonna turn out.  But now you’re doing it and the kids are following their parents, but with a look of skepticism well beyond their years.  A look I didn’t think we’d see until well into high school.