On crackers

The word ‘crackers’ means different things in the US and the UK. In the US, it’s my favorite snack food, much better than potato chips (crisps) and often either cheese flavored or used as vehicles for cheese or other nice savory foods. Here in the UK this meaning is mostly the word I find confusing, ‘biscuits’ which can can be either like crackers or can be sweet and essentially like cookies. I am well-known on this blog for being obsessed with the American crackers called Cheez-its, which are my favorite snack food ever. They are amazing on their own, or are even better in a double-cheese configuration when dipped in cream cheese. This was the subject of my recent shock contest win from another blogger in the US, where I won a box of boxes of crackers mailed to me. The resulting bounty of snack foods are pictured here:

Yum. I’ll be busy for a few weeks with these, although as they arrived more than a week ago, I am already down one box of Wheat Thins and one of Cheez-its. Crackers don’t last long in my carb-craving household.

But as I was walking home from work today, I saw the seasonal British crackers in a shop window. I actually experienced this for the first time in Australia last Christmas, and there are pictures of me wearing a paper crown hat. Thank goodness for semi-anonymous blogs, as I have the perfect excuse not to post the image. But you can get the idea at the ‘Christmas Cracker Shop’ website. I looked downright silly. I can see how this is one of those holiday traditions that one retains from childhood, and I thank my Aussie friends for sharing their tradition with me last holiday season. Maybe I’ll even buy some this year to acknowledge my increasing adaptation to my adopted country. But on the balance, I think I prefer Cheez-its. And thank goodness I have another box yet to go.

Midwestern Mash-up

It was always going to be a good idea. I had a massive deadline for 4 pm today, probably the most serious deadline I’ve faced in my professional career. Coincidentally, I had been trying to schedule with one of my Minnesotan-in-England friends a pub meet-up with a couple of other midwestern girls. The only trouble for me was going to be staying awake, after the 4 pm deadline and a 4-5 pm meeting, I was dragging at 5:30 and unclear how I would make it to the pub for 8:30. Fortunately I persisted with wakefulness and managed to go. And oh what I would have been missing had I not stayed awake.

The round up is this: I’m native Minnesotan but went to college in Michigan. My Minnesota friend is actually a transplanted southerner. The two new acquaintances were a Michigander who went to college in Wisconsin and a Wisconsinite who moved to Minnesota around age 10. And here we all were doing girls’ night in a British pub. Can you see all the conversation possibilities? Yes, it worked. Awesome. Throw into the mix that I’m having dinner tomorrow with another friend who’s actually from Illinois, and I’ve managed to cover a pretty large proportion of the midwest in a short period of time.

It’s a good question, though, why it’s such fun to hang with fellow midwesterners (I mean, not just other American women but specifically American women from the heartland) in England. Perhaps an even better question is why are so many midwestern American women in my local town? And how is it that they are all such interesting women, with interesting careers, opinions and experiences such that in all cases I’ve definitely wanted to see them again? Soon! Does this reveal something intrinsic about midwesterners, or just about the midwesterners who happen to move to England? And where are the British girls with equivalently interesting careers, opinions and experiences? How have I been here for three years and not met them, but I’ve met a whole gaggle (technical term) of midwesterners in the past few months?

Time/Fall Back

UK daylight savings time (a.k.a. British Summer Time) ends this weekend, and I’m delighted. Why? Well, I love an extra hour. I could use one more often. “Fall Back” time has always been a happy time for me. But never so much as when I moved abroad. The first thing that is immediately noticeable is that the US does not switch at the same time, so there is a magical week of decreased time differences: 4 hours to the east coast instead of 5. Five to Minneapolis instead of 6. I love this. We get a few magical weeks each year in the spring and in the fall when this happens. I wish we could maintain the shorter time difference always, and I panic at the thought of the proposals to equalize the UK with European time and permanently move forward an hour, thus increasing the difference to 6 hours UK-east coast. Hopefully the UK-France animosity will prevent such an equalization and the Eurosceptics will prevail in this one small thing.

But this line of argument reflects the overall expat existence in some ways. I don’t live in British time. I live in some strange mid-Atlantic time-zone between here and there. The east coast is normally 5 hours, from me, the midwest 6, my colleagues in Colorado 7. I don’t seem to have many working relationships at 8 hours away in California, but I know it’s there. In general, these time differences are an automatic subtraction when I look at my watch and think about who I need to talk to and what I need to say. Fortunately I have a relatively flexible job in terms of the timing, and as a result I don’t normally book appointments before 10 am. And I often don’t “down tools” until 8 or 10 pm. I don’t religiously work a New York day, but I’m definitely closer to that than to a typical working day for those around me in the UK (although thank goodness 8 am starts are not the norm here, in that I do NOT miss Minnesota!)

That said, I have the intrinsic tendency to be slightly nocturnal, and sometimes this does not help. The time zone shift provides me an excuse for not integrating into UK time as well as I should. When I have to do something at 8:30 am (as early as I’ve been asked to do when not travelling) I’m pissy and resentful, because you can bet I was not in bed before 1 am (8 pm on the east coast!) It’s a delicate balance. And I’m eager to hear from readers–on both sides of the pond–how they accommodate this moderate but not insignificant time difference. Is it a help or a hindrance? Is it better to be in China (as my sister is) and be completely shifted in the US, or is it good to have this evening window both in the US and UK where people can overlap in timing, as long as the US person gets home from work early and the UK person manages to stay awake late?

There are no bumper stickers here and I just noticed

I have now passed my expativersary and thus have lived here more than three years. I do not own a car and I walk to work, to the gym, to the store, anyplace I need to go within my town. But somehow it had completely escaped my notice that the cars in England aren’t likely to have bumper stickers whereas many cars in America do. I certainly noticed lots of bumper stickers on my drive down towards the beach and back in August. And many of them were political, religious, or both. It was interesting at the time because I had forgotten that aspect of American culture–the proudly displaying one’s views on abortion on the back of one’s vehicle. And it took several weeks back in the UK for it to dawn on me that I don’t remember ever having seen a bumper sticker here. Or car art of any sort. No University stickers in the rear window, none of those silhouettes of barbie-figured girls on the back of trucks. Certainly no “OBX” stickers, which were on most cars heading in that direction. So clearly this is just something that has not caught on in the UK, the sticky things must not be available for sale the way they are in the US, with the end result that I spend very little time in the UK reading someone’s unsolicited views about abortion while stuck in traffic. And I have absolutely no clue if your kid made the junior high honor roll.

Flashback

I just returned from my local grocery store on one of those glamorous Tuesday night missions. The person in front of me in line at the grocery store had an assembly of items that looked remarkably familiar: a single white plate, a single white bowl, some pasta, some pre-made heat-and-eat pasta sauce. It was like looking at myself… three years ago this week. On the 8th of October, 2006, I got on the plane from Minnesota to (horror of horrors) Gatwick airport with two suitcases and a small carry-on bag. I arrived in the UK on the 9th of October. I struggled to get from Gatwick to my town, unaware at the time of the beauty of the car service that now lugs me back and forth to Heathrow whenever I need to travel. I stopped into my new workplace briefly, then went (with suitcases) out to my temporary furnished flat to pick up the keys. By this point it was nearing dinner time, and my suitcases contained things like bedding and clothes but no food or cooking items, and although my flat was furnished with furniture, it was not in possession of a fully-equipped kitchen. So back to the town center, to my (now) local grocery store, for some rudimentary food and the exact same single plate and bowl, along with some cheap cutlery and a coffee mug. I’m guessing I bought instant coffee at that time, since I had no other choice, and a cheap electric kettle (that I still have to this day). It was about four months before I was in my current flat, surrounded by boxes and furniture that was shipped over from the US.

In some ways, those were halcyon days. I had a shower. I had very little in the way of “stuff”. In the months after arriving, but before the arrival of my American stuff, I accumulated more things: a single non-stick pot, a square baking dish, a loaf pan for bread, a plastic bowl and some measuring cups. I started to discover the local clothes shoppes and equipped myself with work clothes to supplement the few things that had accompanied me on my journey over. My flat was not exactly right by the grocery store, so I learned to shop nearly daily–a practice that I have maintained, thanks to life with a tiny dorm fridge. Perhaps that is not so bad.

I had not thought in a while about my early days here, not until I saw the woman–who could have been me three years ago–with her single plate and bowl. For four months, that was all I had–there were no dishes to accumulate and things had to be cleaned every day in order to eat again. And yes, it does make me look around at my small but stocked kitchen–the kitchen with a potato ricer that allows me to make gnocchi, the new flatware from last year’s “expat-iversary”, the Nespresso machine that makes coffee much better than the instant I suffered on early arrival. Suddenly it all starts to look like a pretty good life–albeit a little cluttered. So this weekend, for my expat-iversary round three, I will be purging. I will be trying to get back to my early, halcyon days in England when there was just not as much stuff in my local environment.

Social Media and the Expat Life

I had a visitor over the summer, right before I left for America, with whom I had a lovely walk in the sunshine and a nice dinner before he succumbed to jetlag and went to bed early, leaving me to pack for my trip. We had an interesting discussion about expat life and the role of social media. I should preface this by saying that he’s an expat several times over, living now in a third country (and continent) from the one in which he was born and another in which he has lived. When it comes to social media and friends “in the computer” I’m a fan, he was not. I rely on my facebook and twitter peeps and bloggy friends to provide me with some structure. Although, as he noted, if the people are all in the computer, are they real people? Do you end up feeling MORE lonely instead of LESS since you don’t have the human connection that comes with “real” people in your life?

It was an interesting question, and one that I have pondered on more than one occasion since that discussion. Do I think of myself as lonely? I obviously have plenty of time to myself, and spend a great deal of that time sitting in front of the computer communicating with strangers. But I’m ready with my rebuttal now, a few months after the fact. Because the people stuck in my computer have, on more than one occasion, transmogrified into real people. In the last six months or so, I have met up with Kat from 3bedroombungalow, Mike from Postcards from Across the Pond (and Pond Parleys) and, most recently, Michelloui from Mid-Atlantic English. All American expats, all living here in the UK, all blogging about our collective experiences. And people who I can now consider friends “in real life” because they have crawled out of the computer and into the restaurants in my neighborhood. Pretty cool, that. So I will keep justifying my hours spent on social media, and thank my lucky stars for the fantastic friends I’ve met through this computer screen.

Shock contest win

I am almost infamous for entering contests and never winning, but much to my surprise today, my fortunes appear to be turning. I have won a contest over at “Smitten by Britain,” a blog written by an American Anglophile with a history (and child!) from her time here in Blighty. (Note, I know that I need to add a category to my popular “Expat blogs” page with anglophiles in the US and vice versa… will do soon, work permitting, I promise!) Visit Smitten’s blog or follow her on twitter at @smittnbybritain–she has the same affliction as I do, as “on twitter notfrmroundhere” instead of NotFromAroundHere”– in that we are not allowed our full names due to character restrictions and thus have to delete vowels. Regardless, I now have to provide a list of crackers (savory snack biscuits, not anything else) that I want to have shipped over from the states as part of the winning entry for this contest. My obvious choices are anything in the Cheez-it family and Wheat Thins and Triscuits. Better Cheddars would do, as would just about anything in the cracker family. But I will think long and hard before I compile the final list since it’s such a blessing to get food from home. Bisquick, anyone?

Ordinary world?

Came in from a rainy Thursday
On the avenue
Thought I heard you talking softly

I turned on the lights, the TV
And the radio
Still I can’t escape the ghost of you

What has happened to it all?
Crazy, some are saying
Where is the life that I recognize?
Gone away

But I won’t cry for yesterday
There’s an ordinary world
Somehow I have to find
And as I try to make my way
To the ordinary world
I will learn to survive

We all have them, ghosts in our past.  And no matter how things have changed, how we all move on, it’s hard not to stop and have a good cry for the past when big things change, even if you’re not really actually sad about the end result and you definitely don’t wish for any other outcome.  So tonight, conveniently Friday night, I will raise a glass to my ex-husband and his new wife.  Cheers.

Robert Frost

When I was on my extended trip to the US, I got to go to New Hampshire for the first time. On driving back towards Boston after the conference, I saw a sign for the Robert Frost farm, and I exclaimed, “Ah, Robert Frost” at which point my young colleague asked, “Who is that?” Frost is, in fact, my very favorite poet, mostly because I’m one of those old-school people who think poems should rhyme and Frost write beautifully lyrical poetry where the rhyming schemes are often quite complicated and interesting. While many people love and admire “The Road Not Taken” or “Acquainted with the Night” (which appears in the Amanda Palmer song Astronaut, making her even more my hero than she already was) my personal favorite has always been “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I can recite it by heart, in part because the cleverness of the rhyme helps one to remember which section comes next. So imagine my amusement when I was reading a “Get Fuzzy” anthology later in this same American trip and I came across Darby Conley’s take on it, as narrated by Bucky Katt. (Apologies for the random spam comments after the poem in that link; I simply cannot figure out a way to search for the original comic on the official Get Fuzzy archives website so this is taken from a blog!) Rhyming scheme maintained, but an, ahem, slightly different flavor to the whole thing. Regardless, it remains true, I must leave this blog and get back to work, there are plenty of “reptiles to throw before I sleep”…

Bits and bobs revisited

I’ve done this before when I had a bunch of random US-UK tabs open in my browser window. In the spirit of the game, I will leave them in the random order they’re in, and not edit the order to group things on common topics, hopefully creating an interesting non-pattern.

• MIT student pranksters “rickrolled” the institution itself. I wonder if the Cambridge, US police were as health-and-safety conscious as the Cambridge, UK police?
• A British film about Charles Darwin has failed to find a US distributor because his theory of evolution is too controversial for American audiences, according to its producer. Ugh, the really ugly side of the American tendency to blend religion and politics even though they are supposed to have separation of church and state. (Ahem. Try that again, even though WE are supposed to have… what, have I forgotten the color of my passport? Sheesh.)
• Former president Jimmy Carter dares utter the word “racism” in the context of the vitriolic partisan politics eating at America right now. I’m not sure what I think, but it’s gotta be a possibility with some of the ahem more senior members of congress. My grandparents would say the most shocking things in a most innocent way at times, they really grew up in a different era. Although, come to think of it, Jimmy must be the same vintage as my grandparents, has he become enlightened?
• Fantastic commentary on hidden socialism in America… loved it, loved it. It exposed yet another one of the US/UK differences that I had not thought about before but find fascinatingly and utterly reversed: America has ’socialist’ education, it is state supported by taxes and open to all, and University entry uses affirmative action to balance the scales. In the UK your performance in school (and likely your performance in and after University) is highly tied to your parents’ ability to send you to a posh private school to prepare you for your Oxbridge entrance exam. Yet Americans are against universal access to health care and constantly complaining about the NHS???
• People may criticize American sports stars for their behavior both on and off the field, but this was truly deplorable: a British rugby star first used a fake blood capsule to get off the pitch and then asked the doctor to cut his lip so it would really bleed… and the doctor did it! Cheating, anyone? Think the stakes are lower in British sport than in American?
• A jerk (congressman) yelled at the president during a televised speech on healthcare and then tried to argue he should not be rebuked for his disruption. Note: if you are a Maureen Dowd hater I’d encourage you to read this regardless, it’s quite even and not so shrill compared with some of what she’s written, and there are some interesting tidbits in there that I had not seen elsewhere. Of course, what he actually said was child’s play compared with a British politicians and their, ahem, vocal tendencies in the parliament (like the whole “living proof that a pig’s bladder on a stick can get elected to Parliament” comment, which apparently is now equally applicable in Congress in the US as well.)
• Finally, Thomas Friedman on how the US is the leading supplier of equipment for producing solar panels… but the equipment is all installed overseas, although not in Britain (for obvious reasons to do with the lack of sunshine, I’m sure!) Again, not a big Friedman fan but I am a HUGE fan of Advanced Materials, probably have an old grad school friend or two working there, and thus I’m not one of the people he addresses in the first sentence who have “probably” not heard of AM.

There we have it, bits and bobs for a crazy Thursday. I took my team to the pub tonight to introduce a few new recruits, and it turns out that if you count passports, birthplaces, long-time residence locations and birthplaces of parents, we are a mini-United Nations with all 6 inhabited continents represented, most more than once, and a remarkably complicated set of allegiances. This I love about my line of work. Although it just reinforces my relatively new prejudice that I get along best with people who have also been expats or closely allied with expats…