I need a costume for Hallowe’en

I have the most random of Hallowe’en plans, which is that I’m going to a party at the Australian embassy in Paris. Yep. That’s me; Ms. International. But it’s going to be hard to top the costumed performance of my sister last weekend. She lives in China, as some of you may know, and she has a bit of a ‘Mando-pop’ obsession. As do I, now that she’s been feeding me things to listen to. I love music that’s good no matter what the genre, and some Mando-pop certainly qualifies (Leehom anyone?)

Over the weekend, my dear sis went to a concert for the band ‘Sodagreen’ in Shanghai and apparently managed to attract more than just a bit of attention.

Sodagreen:

Now I can highly recommend Sodagreen as a band, as silly as the name sounds, it’s some of the most innovative music I’ve heard in a while–combining pop music with classical themes, and I’m hooked. Yes, I’m hooked on Chinese pop music. Welcome to expat life. It’s a bit random and global. But you can see the whole lime green hair thing. So then we have my sister at the concert:

These images were taken from a Chinese chat website or similar, where apparently my sister had become famous for wandering around Shanghai as an Anglo wearing a lime green wig. She tells me the comments are on the order of, “I spotted her on the subway” and she also appeared on the jumbo-tron during the bid for an encore, so clearly she became a ‘15 minutes of fame’ local celebrity in Shanghai. The full concert story is archived on a blog from her friend here, along with this photo:

Now two things are true. I have never been as creative as my sis, and I absolutely adore that she was wandering around Shanghai in this wig. And using it as part of a greater plan to be the lead singer of Sodagreen for Halloween. Second thing, I still don’t have a costume for Hallowe’en and I need help, being not as creative as my sis I’m a bit baffled at the moment.

Oh and maybe a third thing, I can’t wait until spring break when I’m going to China to see my sister’s life in person! Planning must commence immediately…

Expat Blog links

One of the more visited links on this site is the “Expat Blogs” list, probably because a mini-community has formed whereas some of us in the US-UK group especially tend to “see” each other commenting on the same blogs, commenting on each others’ blogs, and even meeting up in real life (I’ve met three of the “Americans in the UK” on my list.

I’ve just updated the list with a few that I realized were staples in my blog-reader but absent due to my only updating the list every 6 months or so; but here is where I admit that I am not perfect (!) and cannot keep up with the chatter. If you know of a good expat blog, US-UK or otherwise, and particularly if it is something that you comment on and read regularly and think this little community would like, could you please post a link here in the comments section so I can add them accordingly? Thanks!!!

Videos (with apologies to those who have seen them already)

There are several, dare we say “viral videos,” that have given me a good laugh this week and although I thought everyone in the world must have seen them, thanks to multiple facebook appearances, I ended up showing one of these to people twice today so I thought I’d add them here… if nothing else, to make it easier for me to find them to keep showing people!

Everything is amazing right now and nobody’s happy

This one was particularly good for an engineer. One of my team was complaining this week about a piece of equipment not working reliably, and I had to shake her and say “this thing makes measurements with nanometer-scale accuracy… this is amazing!”

Sell the Vatican, Feed the World (NSFW since it’s Sarah Silverman, duh!)

I love Sarah Silverman. Love her. And I’m not a huge fan of the Vatican (just a mention of Catholics and contraception in Africa in the same sentence gets my blood boiling…)

Rachel Maddow on the Obama Nobel Peace Prize

I was originally not so keen on this award but I find Rachel Maddow’s analysis quite compelling. I particularly liked the clips of the Republican media types saying outrageous things near the beginning of the clip. Oh Rush Limbaugh, you manage to make a complete arse of yourself every time you open your mouth!

Tiny children who must come from a circus family, on Ukraine’s Got Talent

I wish my Russian was better so I could catch more then the little performers saying hello and what their names were. But they’ve either been in ballet school or gymnastics school from a tender age with the level of skill (and balance!) that they’ve got. Thanks for this one to my favorite professional friend blogger.

Update: Commercial. Too good to miss.

Thanks to a relatively random facebook friend.

Wordle

I stumbled on this fantastic website, wordle that makes up to the minute text clouds based on the words you are using most often. I tried it for this blog and was delighted and not surprised to see the huge word “coffee” along with all the others… try it yourself. It’s fun

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.

One of THOSE people

I am about to embark on a two week trip to Singapore and several places in Australia, all from my London base. And I realize as I do so that I am one of THOSE people. The business travelers that seem to fly in a world quite distinct from the norm. And I feel somewhat apologetic about the path that led me to this life.

Yes, I am one of THOSE people, the people that get off an airplane and look for a person holding a sign with their name written on it. I can’t imagine how I got here. I was raised to be a Super Shuttle girl, a girl who always spent an extra hour trying to get to her hotel after a long flight. A girl who almost missed her flight “home” to the midwest from SF when the driver was running around the town picking up others before going to the airport. I never took a taxi when a shared van would do. And now I look for a person booked by my car service. It’s somewhat discombobulating to realize how far I’ve come from the traveller of my early days.

Now I’m one of THOSE people. I try as best as I can to take a direct flight to my final destination. Of course, I never took a direct flight in my past life. In the US, the cheapest flights are often those that involved a lay-over in some place like Detroit or Atlanta. I certainly never prioritized a flight directly to the place I was going. I spent lots of time in St. Louis or wherever I had landed, but carried around a certain pride about the low plane fare I had won by booking this itinerary. But years of travel have taught me that the best plan is to fly direct into the closest major port: with a driver’s license, you can make up more time by giving up and driving to a connection a few hours away rather than waiting for the (near-bankrupt) airlines to provide you with a shuttle prop-plane with a potentially missed connection.

Now I’m one of THOSE people. I was always a member of a frequent flier club but it never mattered too much. Now I fly almost exclusively across major oceans. The miles add up faster than I could have dreamed as a young girl living in Minnesota, and thinking that San Francisco was the height of travel exoticism. This is the blessing and the curse that comes with living on an island in the eastern Atlantic. I have not graduated to the true life of luxury, in traveling business-class in any of my flights. But I have been upgraded to business-class twice in the past year, because I spend so much time on the road, I suppose, and because I have also been lucky.

So I prep for my trip in the knowledge that I am one of THOSE people. I have a card that gets me into the “club” lounges of the major airlines even when I am flying economy. I have changed from the days when I was living in America, when I thought that traveling 500 miles for work was a long distance (and perhaps involved a stop-over). I have changed from the person I was when I never had to carry my passport whenever I packed my bags. I am no longer the girl who thinks of travel for work as fun, but merely as a necessity of the job I have.

One never expects to be changed, to become one of THOSE people. I can see how it has happened without fully comprehending the transition. And yet, I prepare for my next trip, safe in the knowledge that I will be gathered by a car service on Friday afternoon, to start my latest adventure in Asia.

I hope, selfishly and as one of THOSE people, that the flights will be comfortable and the trip overall will not be too distracting, such that I will be able to see some sights on my visit. And that, on my return, I will be gathered into the back seat of a car to take me straight home, if only for a short visit before the next trip.

Dear So-and-so

As I have been goading Kat into keeping her “Dear So-and-so” letters a regular feature on her blog, I somehow volunteered to take a stab at it myself.

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Dear British Boys,

Seriously, cropped/capri linen trousers? Not a good look on boys. Fine on girls. Sorry, I think it has something to do with the footwear. Stick to shorts.

Yours helpfully, NFAH

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Dear Mean Blog Commenter,

Why bother to go to the effort of posting mean comments on a blog, when you know they are unlikely to be approved and ever show up on the post? And seriously, you might want to get some help for the anger problem. It’s a lot of effort wasted to hate someone you don’t know.

Happy trails! NFAH

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Dear Clueless people wandering the streets of England,

Has it never occurred to you that if you stop abruptly in the middle of the sidewalk/pavement it just might have consequences for those walking (quickly) behind you? I hope you don’t do that while you’re driving.

Bruised, NFAH

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Dear British flies,

You are no longer welcome in my home. I will not wake up to your buzzing again. I have conquered this situation with my new adjustable fly screens.

Peacefully yours, NFAH

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Dear people having alcoholic drinks sitting outside in the sunshine on a Friday afternoon,

Seriously, who is your employer? Are you hiring?

Jealous, NFAH

Pond Parleys

If you have not been over to Pond Parleys this week, I am the guest blogger discussing differences between the educational systems in the US and the UK with Expatmum. It was a really fun thing to do, and a subject dear to my heart. Make sure you stop by and have a read!

Lazy blogging (but fun)

Yes, it’s lazy blogging to just post the top ten search engine terms that people have used to find you in the existence of the blog, but I have to admit, I find it quite funny. The last update on this was nearly a year ago, and although the “superstars” have not changed, the overall picture is not quite the same. Provided here with explanations for the more obscure search terms.

1. cockney girl A song by Lee Hom Wang, an American turned Taiwanese/Chinese popstar who I love thanks to my sister, and I discussed the lyrics in a strange mash-up post after my sister and I saw Vince Gill in concert.
2. cleavage women I blogged about cleavage and women in politics when my hero, Secretary of State H. Clinton, was still in the strong running for president of the USA.
3. not from around here wordpress Hoorah! Someone is trying to find me!
4. good things about england For anyone who wants to complain about my negativity, I note that “bad things about England” appears much lower in the search list, and not even close to the top 10!
5. not from around here A general expression, surely, not related to this blog.
6. English reserve My blogging about the apparent contradiction between this stereotype and the half-naked girls roaming the streets of my town.
7. cell phone ads Another Lee Hom link, he is the spokesperson for my American cell phone/mobile. I swear I did not realize it when I bought it. But as this is the phone that has recently survived an accidental bath in a glass of water, I’m a fan.
8. not from around here blog See above
9. gusset plates These are related to the post that was top for many months, my engineering geek girl take about the collapse of a major highway bridge in Minneapolis, less than a mile from where I used to live; later I posted my photos of the gusset plates of the bridge that I finally located in my digital archives.
10. women cleavage See above–interesting theme.

So the lessons? Porn always wins–use the word “cleavage” near “women” and good things will result. Compared with a year ago, the picture has changed in that the very “local” things have disappeared, such as the “Italian word of the day” which referred to a trip there in 2007. Fans of obscure Chinese-speaking pop-stars still do well even after a year of my posting little on the subject. Thank goodness my engineering prowess still shows in the “gusset plates” post although I try to not post much boring science-girl geek talk on this site. And at the end of the day, stats show that I’m still winning on “good things” rather than “bad things” about England. Score!

Language and place

I saw this amusing anecdote on American Bedu, and it reminded me of my own adventure with my sister. We were in Washington DC, headed from her apartment in Georgetown to the more tourist-friendly region in the center of town (probably going to a museum, I don’t quite remember). A Chinese man came up to us and asked a question in Chinese; my sister, of course fluent, answered him in Chinese (I believe he was just lost and looking for directions) and he walked off. We cracked up, Mer noting that he’s going to walk a few blocks before he stops in wonder and thinks, wait a minute, that shouldn’t have happened, why was that American girl able to answer me in Chinese? (Although knowing my sis, she probably said something much more funny, you get the drift.) Some days I’m really happy that my expat experience does not involve more than trying to work out bizarre (to my ears) euphemistic turns of phrase like “wedding tackle” or the near constant fights with spelling centre vs center, colour vs color, etc. Other days I’m really annoyed that my greatest linguistic achievements are in British versus American English, and I dream of taking a job in Paris or Barcelona and thus abandoning my status as a hopeless monoglot. My sister definitely kicks my ass/arse on this one!