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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.
May 27, 2011
Welcome to Crazy Town
Motherhood

How to Draw Animals

Yesterday evening after the Little Monkey had eaten dinner, he was in the Big Monkey’s office playing with the printer. My first thought was that he was trying, in the normally destructive manner of a child his age, to simply take the printer apart and then slather it in snot and drool. In trying to distract him from this as we do like to use the printer now and again, I asked him “Do you want a piece of paper?” To which he sort of agreed. He has not yet learned the word yes, but I took the fact that he became more interested in following me out of the office with the piece of paper than in continuing to take apart the printer as an implied “Yes.”

So the Little Monkey and I sat down at his little table and chairs with the piece of paper and a couple of crayons. He joyfully scribbled and stabbed at the paper with his red crayon and then handed the blue one to me and said “Mummy.” What? You want me to draw? I can’t draw. Pictionary was not one of my stronger party games. Ok, I’ll give it a go. Out came a cat, a bee, a flower, a dinosaur, a butterfly, a tree, and a house. They must have resembled my intended subject as they were all correctly identified by my child. I attempted to draw a dog but Little Monkey said it was a horse so I put a mane on it and went with it.

Later that evening while cleaning up, the Big Monkey was examining my handiwork.  A closet artist, he was horrified at the sight of the distorted creatures I had drawn and the prospect of our son a) learning to draw from me and b) learning what animals look like from my drawings.  So he picked up a pen and proceeded to instruct me on the fundamentals of how you can start with the same basic elements and create any number of animals.  Five minutes later, he had this (minus the caption which I added from my iPhone with Halftone).

It’s a shame I didn’t save my drawings to compare but, without a doubt, Big Monkey is in charge of the coloring from this point forward. Although I do think his cat looks like a beaver.

May 25, 2011
Running

Oxford Town and Gown 10K Update

A few weeks ago I posted about how I was using the miCoach app on my iPhone to help me train for the Oxford Town and Gown 10K this past weekend. And it was working great. But, the reality is that sometimes life gets in the way and the miCoach can’t shout at me to go out and run when my headphones aren’t in my ears. So, I’ll admit that I lost a little motivation over the past month and my training regimen was well, a little less regimented.

But, I did it.  I have finally run a 10K race. Throughout my life, I’ve actually registered for a number of 10K races only to pull out at the last-minute due to injury or frankly something better coming up like a nice trip somewhere. But, this time, I’ve followed through and actually done it.  And, it felt really good.  Well, that last couple of km didn’t really feel good as I was breathing heavily and struggling to run over uneven terrain.  But, crossing the finish line was a great feeling.  Despite my lack of training over the past few weeks, I managed to finish just shy of my goal of 60 minutes finishing in 61:23.  Certainly, if I’d kept up with my training better I could have done sub 60 min.

Next up is the challenge of running a half marathon and I’m registered for one in October.  Plenty of time to get back on the training wagon and buddy up with miCoach again.  This time though, I think I’ll just be happy to finish as I’ve never run that far in my life.  Although I think I’d also like to not finish behind a man dressed as a monkey.  Yes, really.  Despite running flat-out at the end of the 10K, I could not catch the monkey man in front of me.  Oh, the shame.

May 19, 2011
Motherhood

Do we really need another Cinderella?

Unless you’ve been living on Mars, you’re aware that we’ve got a big party here in the UK tomorrow as Kate Middleton is finally getting married to her prince.  It’s all very exciting (well not really) and I admit that I’ll end up watching it on the tele just like a billion or so other people around the world.  I’m sure it will be glorious and lavish, she’ll be beautiful, William will be handsome, just what the fairy godmother ordered.  In all seriousness, they actually come across as two genuinely decent people and I hope they enjoy another one of our lovely spring days and live happily every after.

But in the madness surrounding the wedding, I can’t help but wonder if we’re glorifying this whole thing a bit much and reinforcing the idea that becoming a princess could be a girl’s crowning achievement.  As I rode the tube home a few weeks ago and flipped through my copy of the Evening Standard, I came across an article about a Princess Prep school, a summer camp designed to teach young girls etiquette and horse riding, among other things.  You’re kidding me, right?  Nope.

According to an article in the Express, it’s targeted for the American market and will set you back £2500 to have your little girl immersed in everything royal for a week.  Their website even says that little girls will be cared for “in the regal manner to which they plan to become accustomed.”  It’s no surprise to me that this comes from America where more and more parents are sadly happy to exploit their own children and allow their 5 year olds to wear more makeup than I do at 40.

Jerramy Fine, the founder of Princess Prep, said in the Express article:

“I got a lot of backlash asking why I didn’t set up something like a Nobel Prize winners camp instead but I think princess qualities such as generosity, gratitude and good manners, are all very important in life.”

I actually couldn’t agree more.  But I don’t think we should label generosity, gratitude, and good manners as something you need to be a princess to display.  I’m all about teaching children of both sexes about manners and politeness.  But, isn’t that what parents are for?  Surely I don’t need to send my child to summer camp for him to learn to say please and thank you.

Couple this with an article I read in PC Magazine about the continually widening gender gap in technology.  Jobs in the technology sector are growing yet women continue to be underrepresented.  From my own personal experience, I know this is true.  I’ve worked in the technology sector for the past 15 years in small startups, dot coms, and Fortune 500 companies in both the US and UK.  And, universally, I have typically been the only women in the room.

There are of course exceptions to every rule and I’ve worked with many other talented tech savvy women.  What I find interesting though is that, usually, none of these women are American.  They are Indian, Asian, and European.  One of the most talented women I worked with in the US was Russian.  American technology companies are out there paying for work permits and visas to bring in skilled women (and men) from overseas.  I agree with President Obama when he says there are more pressing issues that need his attention than the silliness of his birth certificate.  Like what’s happening to the American education system.  If I had to hazard a guess, little girls in China aren’t going to princess camp.  They are learning about math, science, and technology.

My “summer camp” consisted of hanging out on dad’s college campus playing in the physics lab, the biology lab, the planetarium, the darkroom, typing silly messages on punch cards and making holograms of little dice.  Lest you think that makes me too much of a geek, I also had a Barbie and she lived in a smashing townhouse.  Now, not every little girl has a dad with a PhD in physics and access to a college campus.  But, surely there are better choices for the parents of little girls than a camp that reinforces gender stereotypes as recent research shows that these start at an early age.

Maybe Professor Brian Cox, who is a shining example of making science interesting and accessible, should startup a summer camp for girls.  We don’t need to encourage girls to learn about the wonders of becoming Cinderella.  What we need is to encourage more girls to learn about the wonders of the universe around them.

April 28, 2011
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.

 

April 19, 2011