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Fire
Expat Life

Heat, It’s a Matter of Perspective

While waiting to collect my quad grande vanilla latte at Starbucks today (yes, I drink that much coffee), the barista looked at me and asked “How do you like the heat?”  He was referring to the glorious Indian summer we’ve enjoyed here for the past week in southern England.  We’ve had exactly the kind of whether that people plan their holidays around, sunny with barely a cloud in the sky and temperatures hovering just above 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

It’s moments like this when it’s obvious to me that I’m not English.  Heat?  What heat?  It’s not hot man, it’s perfect.  I grew up in southern Virginia where the summer would regularly see weeks of 100 degrees and air so thick with humidity you could cut it with a knife.  It would be so hot and miserable you couldn’t stand outside in the middle of the day for more than a few minutes without having to go back in and rinse off all your sweat.  This is probably why I don’t fully appreciate tea the way the English do.  For good reason, the southern United States is a region of iced tea drinkers, and that’s what I know.  To me, tea is an icy beverage for quenching your thirst on a hot day, not something warm to shake off the damp chill.

I’m sure we’ll have typical English weather again soon enough.  But for now I am going to enjoy this glorious weather while it lasts.  This is the kind of whether that begs me to drive with the windows down, the radio up, and the wind blowing my hair into a ball of tangles.  I don’t care that I’m tying to get into the office and am stuck behind a tractor.  It just means I can enjoy the sun and a little more DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince singing Summertime.

So I said “no, I don’t mind the heat at all.  I love it!”

Reeses Peanut Butter Cup
Expat Life

This Is Not Going to Help My Diet

I admit that I have a weakness for chocolate, anything sweet really.  But, in particular I have a weakness for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, which I consider the world’s most perfect food.  I’m not saying they’re good for you, they’re just really darn good.  Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are the candy I would never buy to give out as treats at Halloween because frankly I’d eat the whole bag and there’d be none left for the trick or treaters.  I have no will power when faced with this temptation.

However, since moving to the UK I have been able to resist the temptation of Reese’s simply because you just can’t find them.  They’re not in the supermarket checkout, not at the petrol / gas station, no where I would regularly find myself inclined to pick up a candy bar on a whim.  Hershey’s products in general are scarce here as Cadbury and other brands I don’t recognize fill the candy isles.  No Hershey bars, no Hershey Kisses, nada.

That is until now.  In recent weeks I’ve seen the glorious orange packages staring at me by the checkout at Sainsbury’s.  And I’ve bought them like I’m afraid I’ll never see them again.  I’m sure some market researcher in their back office is amazed at the success they’ve had stocking these on the shelves.  But, it’s really just the one person buying them all, me.  What I didn’t know was that back in December, Hershey’s struck a deal to start distributing their products in two of the mainstream grocery stores, Sainsbury’s and Asda (subsidiary of Walmart).  I’m not sure yet whether this is a blessing or a curse.

An aside to the UK Hershey’s revolution that my American friends should take note of is the fact that Hershey’s and Walmart are specifically making a point that the products they sell in the European market will not include any genetically modified (GM) ingredients.  However, the products they distribute in the US have and will continue to have GM ingredients.  Any argument from these companies that it’s not cost-effective to eliminate GM ingredients is surely a hollow one as they found a way to make it cost-effective when an international distribution agreement potentially worth billions was at stake.  Do they take for granted that Americans care so little about the quality of their food supply?  Granted, Hershey’s is junk food and people can choose not to eat it.  But I’m just sayin’.

Tesco Open 24 Hours
Expat Life

Five Things I Miss About America

I‘ve lived in the UK now for about three years and it’s been such a great experience to get the learn the ins and outs of another culture.  I recognize it’s not realistic but wouldn’t it be interesting if everyone had to live a portion of their life in another country?  It gives you such a different perspective on this great big world we live in and share.

But, as much as I love living in England, there are times when I miss America.  I miss my friends and family every day but some days I encounter something and think jeez, they sure do that better in America.  Take customer service and what I would call general convenience.  The UK has a reputation for bad customer service and the television is full of shows like Watchdog, Rogue Traders, and Secret Shopper that exploit this.  From my own personal experience, I find service is hit or miss.  Sometimes it’s good but then sometimes you get a waitress like I had at dinner the other night.  She was so abrupt and rude that my friends and I were actually afraid of her by the end of the meal.  And, we left her a tip that reflected this and then ran for our lives.  Certainly the tipping culture in the US vs the UK is one of the fundamental differences in wait staff’s motivation to be cheery and helpful.

Now that I have a child, there also are certain American conveniences that I miss more than ever.  Everything seems just a bit harder when you have a toddler in tow and it frustrates me when I reflect on things from American life that I took for granted.  Such as:

  1. Grocery baggers

    How I long for the days when some lovely retired gentleman or teenager working after school would pack my groceries in bags almost as fast as the checkout clerk would scan them.  This is a seemingly foreign concept here so I bag my own groceries.  And, trying to get out of the grocery store with a toddler is not made more enjoyable when the checkout clerk just stares at you struggle to open the bags.  Mate, if you would just stop staring at me and help we could all get this over with a lot faster!

  2. Pay at the pump

    Pay at the pump has been ubiquitous in the US for so many years, I can’t even recall the last time I paid for fuel by interacting with a human.  But here in the UK most fuel stations still make you to go inside and wait in line to pay a real human being.  Why?  There is proven technology that could get more customers in and out faster.  I see more stations implementing pay at the pump but it seems to be merely an after thought.  In a petrol station of 10 pumps only 2 will have pay at the pump. Why even bother?  I feel the need to plan my trips to the fuel station around times when I don’t have the Little Monkey with me.  Call me crazy, but I’m not going to leave him in the car by himself while I walk into the shop and pay.  And, it’s just a plain hassle to get him out of the car only to put him right back in.

  3. Drive through ATM/Cashpoint

    Maybe this is a side effect of the compactness of the UK and the fact that most ATMs you come across will be on the high street in a city or town center and not in a suburb.  For me this is just another excuse not to carry cash around.

  4. Shopping late on Sunday

    In a country generally less religious than my southern American roots, I struggle to understand the rationale behind major grocery stores closing at 4:00 on Sundays.  Apparently opening on Sunday at all has only even been allowed since 1994. I realize we can plan around this but frankly we’re just not very good at that.  More often than not we find ourselves at 3:30 on Sunday afternoon saying “crap, what’s for dinner” and rushing off to the store.  What irks me the most however is the fact that some large chains have big brightly lit signs announcing “Open 24 hrs.”  Clearly their understanding of the number of hours required to make up 24 in a day is different from mine.

  5. Drive through Starbucks

    Enough said. The ultimate convenience.

Now, there are things I don’t miss about America and things I like better in the UK so just to be fair and balanced maybe I’ll get around to post about that.  But, for now I’ll just continue to miss these little conveniences that made simple tasks just a bit easier.
Oxfordshire Fields of Yellow
Expat Life

See? It doesn’t always rain.

Even though I whinge about the crap weather plenty in the winter time, I have to say the past few weeks it’s been bloody lovely.  Warm and sunny just like Spring should be.  And, much to the delight of my sinuses, minus all the pine pollen in southern Virginia that would drive my upper respiratory system haywire.  But even though every surface isn’t covered with a dusting of that dreaded yellow pollen, there is plenty of yellow to see in the Spring here.

The yellow fields that bloom all over southern England in the Spring are one of my favorite sights. On sunny days, I think the contrast between the landscape of yellow and the blue sky is stunning. Especially when there are miles and miles of yellow. I’ve found this difficult to capture though as I always seem to come across the perfect shot when I’m speeding down the road. So this morning I managed to find a spot to pull over and take a few shots in some random farmer’s field.

 

The Pox Day One
Expat Life

A Pox on You NHS

February 2011 will now be remembered as the month Little Monkey got chickenpox.  Suspicious spots were evident in Tuesday night’s bath and had multiplied by morning.  A quick trip to the GP confirmed my diagnosis.  This of course made Little Monkey persona non grata at nursery until he’s no longer contagious, an undetermined amount of time.  The GP went on to tell me it could take about a month for everything to clear up completely [imagine horrified look on my face].

And as Little Monkey’s spots and irritability have multiplied over the last two days, I found myself asking why are we actually suffering through the chickenpox?  There is in fact a widely used and tested vaccine for chickenpox that is already part of the routine set of childhood immunizations in countries such as Japan, Canada, Australia, Germany, and the US.  The US has licensed this safe and effective vaccine since 1995.  If we had followed the recommended schedule, Little Monkey would have received his first chickenpox jab 5 months ago.  And, according to the Immunization Action Coalition, almost 97% of children develop immunity after just one dose.

So why is the chickenpox vaccine not routine in the UK?  A brilliant article by BBC News has a more thoroughly researched answer than I could ever hope to give but the net is money and fear.  With UK society struggling to recover from recession and the NHS facing large cutbacks, it’s easy to choose not to spend public money on preventing what some perceive is just a minor inconvenience.  But as a UK taxpayer who sees my paycheck reduced by about 40% every month to pay for social programs like the NHS, I wonder if this isn’t short-sighted.  It’s easy to quantify the costs to pay for the vaccine.  What’s harder to quantify is the true cost to society of not providing the vaccine.  In my own personal situation, it means lost time from work and lost productivity to my employer.  And, in this, I am not alone.

Now I and everyone I know had chickenpox as a kid.  But, then I was about 5, it was the 1970s, and there was no vaccine.  Is there a lackadaisical view by the NHS that chickenpox is just a necessary unpleasantness?  Surely contracting chickenpox shouldn’t be a childhood right of passage when there is an effective way of preventing it?  There is plenty of controversy around this point and whether it’s better to get the disease naturally or get the vaccine.  An article in the Washington Post describes the well-known practice of “chickenpox parties” where parents intentionally try to expose their children.  [Disclosure:  No one has accepted my invitation.]  But the consensus among experts is that the vaccine is best.  And, most schools in the US now require all children entering school to have either had the vaccine or had the pox.

The debate was best summarized for me by the Immunization Action Coalition:

Some parents purposely seek to get their children infected with varicella virus, even promoting “chickenpox parties” for this purpose. The belief is that it’s better to be infected when young, a time when the infection is ordinarily less severe. Some parents also believe that something “natural” (the disease) is better than something “artificial” (the vaccine), or that immunity derived from the disease will be more permanent than that from the vaccine.

However, when a safe vaccine is available, parents need to weigh the supposed benefits of infection against its potential risks, including severe disease with complications such as infection with flesh-eating bacteria. No one can predict which child will develop a life-threatening case of chickenpox; in fact, most serious cases occur in previously healthy children. In addition, in a recent study, 7 out of 10 children said given the choice, they’d rather have the shot than have the natural disease.

In America, I’d be accustomed to paying a nominal fee for immunizations.  And paying about 15% less tax.  It’s the fundamental trade-off for having (or not having) publicly funded health care.  But I think the NHS is trying to have their cake and eat it too.  By not making the vaccine routine, they avoid paying for it directly.  But the NHS is happy for me get the vaccine privately if I’m happy to shell out about £120.  Evidence they do believe it’s safe and effective. And, they’re happy for employers (public and private) to fund extended time off for parents.