Somewhere Over The Pond

Epilogue

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:26:00 +0000

The driver's seat in my new Mommy Mobile has begun to mold satisfactorily to the shape of my ass.

What, not the update you were looking for from me after 9 weeks of silence? Because really, I think that one sentence tells you everything you need to know about my new life in the States. I am once again a suburban mom, hopping in and out of my SUV more times a day than I can count as I race from soccer practice to Target, from school drop off to coffee with a friend. Perhaps the fact that I'm still giving my daily routine this level of contemplation gives me away as not entirely comfortable here just yet. But I'm starting to get a little more settled, finding my groove simply by virtue of the fact of my presence here. The fit is coming -- in my life as well as in my car.

"How was London?" people ask me when they see me for the first time and I smile wistfully. "It was wonderful," I reply wholeheartedly. And then I sort of stop. Not just because I suspect that most people don't really want or need to hear anything more than that, but also because I'm not even sure quite what so say. It was wonderful, this I know. But I've lost the words (and perhaps even some of the memories already) to articulate how or why. When I think of London right now, the mental image is hazy, abstract, far away. It almost feels as if I had a wonderfully rich and detailed 2 year dream about living there. And now I've woken up, with that entire dream world just tantalizingly out of reach.

I'm apparently not the only one who feels that distance. Evan's English accent is very nearly gone. After a rough few weeks of transition, he tells me that school here is more fun than it was in England and he loves his new teachers the best of all. Yesterday, while building a block tower with him, I mentioned that our creation looked a lot like a castle that we'd seen in Spain. He paused. Squinted. Then shook his head. That memory has apparently evaporated already. My anglophile has fallen prey to the siren song of neighborhood bike riding and a dedicated play room in the basement. I have an American son again.

I have an American daughter, too. Julia speaks longingly about London with a frquency that surprises me a bit, reminiscing about her friends and the things they enjoyed doing together. But she seems willing enough to leave those happy memories in the past and is forging forward in her new life with gusto. I may be struggling with the educational gap that she's encountering here, but she's not struggling at all, in any way shape or form. Happy and confident and social and mature, she's as much at home in here as if we had never left.

For the 23 months that we lived in London, I felt like we were in the midst of a life altering experience. Yet here we are back in my New Jersey hometown, and our lives don't look all that different than they did before we left. That's both scary and soothing -- scary to have the most meaningful experience of our lives slip away so quickly and yet soothing to find that our transition back to American life has been easier than I'd envisioned. Some days I am filled with longing for all that I have left behind. But most days, it's frankly easier to leave it in the past. London bubbles up, to be sure. But as often as not these days, it's below the surface for all of us.

Will there be a lasting legacy of our London years, then, or will they just evaporate as our old life swallows us up again? I'm not really sure. I want to say that we're all enriched by the things that we saw and did and experienced, that the lessons of our time abroad will continue to impact the way we think and conduct ourselves for years to come. But it's kind of hard to believe that when I see how easily we've let ourselves get sucked back into our old world. I'm hoping that as time goes on and the day to day of our life here requires less immediate energy, we'll notice more and more of the subtle ways that London has influenced and changed us all. How and when that may happen remains to be seen.

Once upon a time, my family set out on an adventure. And then we came home. We were forever changed by our adventures and yet we were not changed at all. If we found ourselves while in London, it was only as the new improved people who we always were to begin with. And so life goes on seamlessly here on the other side of the pond. We giggle together and we argue at mealtimes and we run late to school and we snuggle close to read when the day is through, just as we did in England. We love London and we love our New Jersey hometown but more than anything, we love each other. Paul and I spent the past two years telling my children that wherever we are together as a family, that's home. At times I doubted this pat reassurance even as I spouted it. But now I know with absolute certainty that we were right all along. Perhaps that lesson is enough to have made the journey worthwhile in and of itself.

The End.

This will be my last blog post on Somewhere Over The Pond. My heartfelt thanks to all of you who have shared in my family's adventures here over the past 2 years -- your comments and emails and support got me through many lonely days and made the happy days far more fun. I've been doing some writing as a contributing editor at Travel Savvy Mom and would welcome you to follow me there, both for my own posts and for those of the hysterical team of Mom travelers I'm lucky enough to work with there. I'm also hoping to pursue additional writing opportunities in the coming months, and will update with links here if and when I've got more to share (leads welcome!). In addition, my sotprebecca@gmail.com email address continues to work and I'm always happy to receive correspondence there. Please keep in touch!

An unintentional ode to my Ikea couch (that's one I never saw coming)

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 09:46:00 +0000

I am curled up on the Ikea couch in my living room, drafting a blog post. There is nothing unusual about that; this couch (which turned out to be far more comfortable than I expected when we purchased it in our flurry of frenzied furnishing) has always been my favorite place to sit and write in this flat. At this point, it's also my only option. The removals team is here today packing up the contents of our flat and virtually everything we own here is boxed or wrapped already. It is only the fact that we have sold this couch to the next tenants of this flat which has kept it from the bubble-wrap-and-packing-tape fate of the items which surround it on all sides. This is moving day, the first of two on this end. (I don't care to contemplate the number of moving days we face on the other side of the pond just now.) There are, as Julia reminded me gleefully this morning just before she left for camp, only two more days before we board our plane for America.

If ever there was a moment for a reflective wrap-up post, I suppose this would be it. Watching our London life fit easily into a surprisingly small number of boxes and containers should be the kind of thing that would make me nostalgic and maudlin. Instead, I find myself a little numb, spent from the sorting and organizing and purging and pre-packing which has consumed the last week of my life and exhausted from the sleepless nights I've spent trying not to dwell on the ways our life will change in the coming months. I've done enough looking back. I'm not quite ready to look forward just yet. And so I'm just sitting here, grateful for the opportunity to rest for a bit, trying to write a blog post on the couch as if it were any other day of my life.

I think my real issue here is that writing a conclusion-type post about our London adventure feels like drawing a line in the sand, saying that it is over. In some ways, there is no avoiding the reality that it is over. Our things are gone and soon we will be, too. But the drive to see and explore and understand that which is foreign from our own experiences is not something that we can pack in a box or leave behind when we board a plane. The things that we've learned and seen and done here are a part of who we are now and the interests and habits we've developed here aren't going away just because we are. The friendships that we made in London can withstand the distance just as well as our American friendships have over the past several years. The travel bug can certainly come with us, too; planes fly in and out of the US every bit as frequently as they arrive and depart from Heathrow and Gatwick. Hopefully, the kids' accents will last, at least for a little while. We will still talk about and think about and write about London and the people and places we love here. "Leaving" does not need to mean "leaving behind." At least that's what I keep telling myself at 2am when I can't sleep for the enormity of our impending loss. London will be in us, long after we are not in London any more.

If it's not really over then, well, then there's not much to say, is there? Except that as I sit here typing so contentedly, I do feel the need to mention that I'm kind of going to miss this Ikea couch. This "oh, what the hell, just give me whatever you've actually got in stock, then" couch, bought on what might have been the most exhausting, stressful, overwhelming, "what the hell have we done here" day of this entire London experience, is pretty damn great. In fact, it might just be the only thing standing between me and a clean break here. I'm just now realizing how much I love this "oh, if we must" purchase. I can't believe I have to leave it behind. I'm really, really going to miss this couch.

You just never know what's going to resonate, do you? If ever there were a reason to keep on moving forward, spreading our wings and taking on whichever adventures and obstacles come our way, I think I just found it in the nice, comfy cushions of my (now) beloved Ikea couch. Closure is a beautiful thing, even when you still plan to leave the door ever so slightly ajar.

Folks in a town that was quite remote (heard)

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:31:00 +0000

I spent much of our week in Austria singing the Lonely Goatherd song from The Sound of Music. This earworm might easily be explained by the fact that we began our Austrian adventure in Salzburg, a city which bears the dubious distinction of being the home of The Sound of Music. It might further be explained by the fact that this song was the encore for a fantastic Sound of Music marionette performance which we caught at one of the world's oldest marionette theatres while we were in town. Regardless of how the song got into my brain in the first place, once we left Salzburg and ventured into gorgeous Zell Am See, I kept gazing up at the unbelievable sights of the Austrian Alps and the only words that came to mind were "lay ee odl lay ee odl lay hee hoo." Oh, how my family must have loved having me around last week. (Oh, how much you must all be loving me right now.)

Don't you just see him there, the lonely goatherd, a little off to the left?

The Alps may have inspired me to yodel (What can I say? There were lots of things high on hills. One could easily have been a lonely goatherd...), but they also took my breath away. The resort town of Zell Am See, where we spent the majority of our Austrian holiday, was stunning; tremendous mountains, a crystal clear lake, and even -- due the the well-placed, though completely accidental timing of a summer festival one of the days that we were there -- folks in lederhosen and Bavarian dresses drinking copious amounts of beer long before the pretty bell tower had even struck noon. This was our kind of town.

We've been champions of the city break up until this point, pushing our children ahead through one urban landscape after another. This trip, our "interlude between lives" holiday, was nothing like our previous travels. After a quick visit to Salzburg, we spent the majority of our time at an all-inclusive "kinderhotel" in Zell Am See. We climbed a few mountains. We forded a few streams. But quite frankly, we spent the majority of our time with our asses plonked down on lounge chairs while our children ran and played with the other kids in the resort. It took us a few days to relax and unwind, but by the end of the week, I was starting to remember what a "vacation" truly feels like. We have traveled a lot in the past 2 years. But we haven't taken a single vacation. It turns out that I really like vacations. And my kids? They really seem to like vacations, too.

We returned to London rested, somewhat relaxed (What can I say? We're pretty tightly wound...) and just a bit detached from our lives here. As our minicab slipped through the streets of London, I found myself thinking what a good idea this trip had been and congratulating myself for a such well planned, strategically placed vacation. And then we got back into our flat and dropped our bags on the floor and Paul heaved an enormous sigh of relief. "It's not your fault, because you didn't know how it would all feel," he told me. "But we're not ever traveling so close to an impending move ever again. That was an impossible situation."

Huh. So, uh, I take it all back. Perhaps we weren't all so rested and relaxed after all. Except... I kind of think we were.

King of the mountain

But wait -- there's more

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 10:23:00 +0000

Thanks to all of you who commented or sent emails or called me about this week's photo slide show... seems it was a fitting way to wrap up an amazing two years abroad. Don't go waving us out the door just yet, however, because we still have 2 and a half weeks of nearly non-stop action, including just one more European adventure, ahead of us before we call it quits and head stateside.

If it feels a bit disjointed have watched a departure-themed retrospective only to now read about our plans for another vacation and upcoming swimming lessons and playdates and camp here in London, well, welcome to the confusing schedule of events and emotions that is my July. The kids' last day of school was last Thursday and with it came a flurry of goodbyes and the end of our regular "life as we know it" routine in London. It was an emotional week, full of busy schedules and sad farewells and way, way too much sugar. With all of that now behind us, I feel very much as if our time here has reached its natural conclusion. It's time to go. And yet due to Paul's work schedule we really can't leave for good until the end of the month, so here we still are.

People tend to get out of London pretty quickly when the school term wraps up, and a lot of the people we care about are already gone or departing momentarily. We knew this would happen and so we booked one last trip to forestall the melancholy emptiness I knew that we'd feel once we had said our goodbyes. It was a good idea... in theory. But packing for vacation when we're also packing for the US is bizarre and looking forward to the week and a half that will be left when we get back here is even odder. It's hard to know what to look forward to and what to mourn and what to think and what to pack. It's harder still to know how to feel.

Several hours from now, we will be in Austria, climbing every mountain and fording every stream and hemming and hawing bizarrely when people ask us where we're from. This will either turn out be the best way we could have spent this week or money down the drain, but the trip is booked and so off we go. Tune in a week from now to hear about Salzburg and Zell Am See. For now, to London we say so long, farewell, auf wiedersehen... but not quite yet goodbye.

In lieu of 1,000 words

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 16:17:00 +0000

English

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 08:50:00 +0000

Evan and I were sitting on a bus stop bench last week, talking -- as we often do these days -- about our impending move to the States.

"When we get to New Jersey, you and Daddy and Julia are going to have to show me everything," Evan reminded me for perhaps the eight dozenth time. His face was sweetly anxious, his high pitched voice decidedly British in its apprehension.

I wrapped my arm tightly around him and pulled him closer to my side. "We will, don't worry," I assured him, just as I've done so many other times in the past several weeks. "There are lots of wonderful things about New Jersey that you're going to love, and we're all really looking forward to sharing them with you."

Evan nodded solemnly. He'd heard this many times before and had clearly just wanted me to say it again. But this time, a new concern had occurred to him. "And if people there don't speak English, what will I say?" he asked as the worried look spread back across his features.

I tried to turn my amused smile into one of reassurance. "Oh, don't worry honey," I replied as gently as I could. "They speak English in America." The older English woman who was sitting beside Evan on the bench let out a snort. "Of a sort," she remarked dryly.

Evan looked confused. I automatically laughed, wondering guiltily as I did so whether I was being disloyal to my American roots in my amusement or whether my reaction was actually more American than anything else. And then we climbed about the big red bus and rode off up the left hand side of the street, Evan musing silently about the puzzling cipher that is America and me about the one that is England.

Brighton beach memoirs

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:39:00 +0000

There was a time when Paul and I went to Nantucket every summer with a group of friends. We would rent a big house for a week and putter around, spending our days on the beach or cycling around town and our evening gathered together over elaborate meals that everyone had pitched in to help prepare. We started making the trip pre-kids, then there was that memorable summer when we all waddled around town with burgeoning bellies and then in the 2 years that followed, you were as likely to find empty baby bottles on the table as you were to find empty wine bottles when you wandered downstairs in the morning.

Our Nantucket days were wonderful and I still think of them fondly, but we knew it was time to stop making the trip once the children were all a few years old. Nantucket was great for the adults, but kids, we realized, need kid-friendly vacations -- rental houses that don't have breakable tchotchkies and local restaurants that welcome children and maybe some mini golf and a boardwalk to keep them entertained.

I remember feeling strongly that family vacations needed to be geared toward the kids, remember arguing this point vehemently during a late evening debate on the subject on one of our last Nantucket nights. We have the rest of our lives to go to Nantucket, I insisted. But first, we have an obligation to give our kids proper childhood memories in the kinds of borderline tacky environs that children adore. The following year -- and the year after that -- we talked wistfully of Nantucket and then we loaded up the car with buckets and tricycles and headed off to the kid-paradise that is the Jersey Shore, confident that we were doing the right thing for our children.

All that lofty catering-to-the-children nonsense went out the window when we moved here, of course. We traded vacations built on boardwalks and ice cream stands for holidays filled with castles and cathedrals, shouting "once in a lifetime" over and over again as we dragged our children to see all that Europe has to offer. Along the way, as it became clear that I had severely underestimated my kids' ability to enjoy attractions and activities which are not expressly kid-focused, I started to think that maybe I had overestimated the importance of the child friendly vacation destination.

It turns out I hadn't.

We took the kids on a day trip to Brighton this weekend. Just an hour south of London by train, Brighton is perhaps the English equivalent of the Jersey Shore. It is broad expanses of beach fringed by an endless stream of souvenir shops and Fish and Chip stands. It is a giant pier with funfair and amusement arcades. It is families with small children begging for one more ice cream, young adults hanging around the beach during the day and crowding into the local nightclubs when night falls. It is flashing lights and win a prize here and please-can-I-have-some more-ride-tokens-Daddy. I had completely forgotten how much kids like places like this.

All told, we maybe spent a grand total of about 5 or 6 hours in Brighton. In that time, the kids hunted for shells on the rocky beach and collected giant piles of smelly seaweed for reasons known only to them. They dropped 10p coins into the kiddie version of a slot machine and gorged themselves on candy floss (otherwise known as cotton candy). They gleefully rode a 2-seater merry go round and giggled endlessly as they rammed their Dodgems cars (bumper cars, natch) into each other. Evan rode a kiddie coaster. Julia had her first log flume ride. And then they universally declared our handful of hours in Brighton the best trip we've ever taken. Four days in Paris? Meh. A little under a week in Barcelona? Just fine. But Brighton, they insisted joyously, was the best place EVER.

Paris wasn't meh, of course. My kids loved Paris. Ditto Barcelona and Stockholm and Edinburgh and Rome and... must I type out the whole extensive list? I totally underestimated my children that night in Nantucket when I made that broad sweeping blame-it-on-that-extra-glass-of-wine proclamation that you must take kids to kid-focused destinations in order to have a good family vacation. But watching them delight in Brighton this weekend, I realized that I hadn't been all wrong about those child-magnet places, either.

I'll never forget or regret any of the trips we've taken here. But I'm looking forward to next summer and the promise of some time spent "down the Shore" all the same. We've given our kids endless European memories and now I want to give them some of those proper childhood memories in borderline tacky environs. Not because it's our only vacation option or because it's our "obligation" as I believed a few short years ago. Just because it's fun.

Calculating

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 08:06:00 +0000

The scene: Julia is on a Skype teleconference with her grandparents, catching up on the events of the week.

Grandma: So Julia, what did you do in school this week?

Julia: A lot of math. We're adding numbers in columns by tens and units. Oh, and I know my 2s time table up to TEN!

Grandma: Wow... that's great!

Grandpa: What's 2 x 8?

Julia: 18

Grandpa: Close, but not exactly. Want to try again?

There is a short pause, during which we all presume that Julia is re-calculating to make sure her next answer will be correct. This turns out to be exactly what she is doing, but not at all in the way we had anticipated.

Julia: I know my 2s times table up to SEVEN!

She may have a way to go where rote memorization of math facts is concerned, but something tells me that when she gets to the problem solving section of the math curriculum, the kid's going to do just fine...

So you're thinking of traveling with your small children in tow

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 08:40:00 +0000

The first time I took my kids (then aged 3 and 1) to visit their grandmother in Arizona, I actually shipped an entire case of soy milk to her house a week before we left. Mind you, neither of my kids are actually lactose intolerant. They just preferred soy milk at that age -- a specific brand of soy milk -- and I wasn't taking any chances that anyone would not have their preferred beverage and therefore not get enough hydration and therefore not be on their best behavior and therefore make the entire week a living hell for everyone.

Needless to say, I've loosened up just a bit in the past few years.

I don't pre-ship soy milk any more. I don't even bother to buy fun surprises to pack in the kids' backpacks so that they'll be entertained on the airplane. (Here, kid, have a barf bag. Make it into a puppet or something. We'll be there in about an hour.) But I do continue to very carefully plan ahead to make sure that our trips will be successful, and this planning has paid off in the form of quite a few fabulous trips in the past few years. So for those of you about to embark on your own adventures with children, as well as for the armchair travelers out there living vicariously right now, I humbly offer the single most important thing that I have learned about planning vacations for our young family:

Where you stay is far more important than where you go.

When traveling with small children, a hotel room is not just a place where you lay your head. It's also the place you escape to when your kids are just too wound up or worn down to do any more sightseeing. It's the place you'll need to entertain said children when they awaken at bizarre hours because of the time change and the place you'll need to keep yourselves entertained after you tuck your little travelers into bed at a decent hour. Staying too far away from the action is a mistake when you're dragging kids back and forth to the city center, but staying in the "best hotel" in the heart of it all can be just as fatal if that hotel is too attached to its breakable accessories and starched white tablecloths. Grunge is bad. Glam is equally bad. And a concierge and wait staff who don't much care for children are the kiss of death.

This may sound ridiculous to non-parents, but I suspect that anyone with young children will understand and appreciate my wisdom here when I confess that I have booked entire holidays in locations I hadn't even previously considered visiting simply because I stumbled across great family-friendly acommodations there. Slight overkill? Perhaps. But the world is a big place and there are wonderful things to explore and discover in nearly any locale. There aren't always good places for families to stay. You do the math.

So where are these great acommodations? They're out there, I promise! We've personally found short-term holiday apartments to be preferable to regular hotels in many European cities, but we've also had luck with aparthotels, suite hotels and hotels which offer "family room" setups on occasion. The key to finding the best properties is inevitably word of mouth. If you have friends who travel, they can be a great resource, but I often find Internet reviews to be an equally reliable source.

I've recently been doing a bit of writing for Travel Savvy Mom, a new site designed to be a resource for family-friendly acommodations worldwide. My obviously biased opinion is that this is a great place to start when looking for acommodations; the property reviews are not only very funny, they're also honest and real and exceedingly helpful. The site is still in its infancy, though, so if you're not looking to stay in a treehouse in Oregon or a children's castle in Tokyo, you may temporarily have to look further for a good recommendation.

TripAdvisor is the best of the major hotel review sites in this instance; several of them let you specifically filter family-friendly properties when searching their list of reviews, but TripAdvisor seems to get it right the most frequently. Kid-specific travel sites like Travel For Kids, Take The Family and Baby Goes 2 will often turn up some good suggestions. Occasionally, I'll hit the jackpot simply typing something like "family friendly hotel London" into a search engine. And then I cross-reference. One positive review could be a fluke. A couple of different ones on different sites are a good sign.

No matter how good the reviews elsewhere, however, I always go directly to the property's website for a quick look around before I make a booking. You can learn a lot about a place simply from the tone of its marketing materials. I don't need 6 pages of description about the ways that they cater to children or a big furry mascot who will make our stay "non-stop fun for the little ones." But if soft violin music accompanies a montage of couples-only photographs and seven different "romance package" offerings, I get a bit suspicious about how welcome my children will actually be upon our arrival. At a minimum, I want to see the word "families" appear a few times in the web copy. If they don't want us enough to market to us, we probably don't want them either.

"Your children have been so well behaved that it's been a pleasure to have them," a B&B owner once told us when we checked out of her lovely property in the English countryside. We had selected the place in large part because it was advertised as family-friendly, so her next sentence threw us a bit. "If all kids were like yours, we'd actually want to have them stay here." We pretended not to notice this odd slip, thanked her politely and ushered the kids quickly out of the house before someone screamed or touched something or otherwise blew our well-behaved cover. And then in the car on the way out, I carefully drew a black line through the words "family friendly" in our library-borrowed guidebook. If you recently checked that book out of London's Swiss Cottage library, you're welcome.

Up, up and away

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 08:25:00 +0000

There's a new display up on the main bulletin board at the entrance to Evan's school this week, a travel-themed project put together by his class. Each child created and decorated a paper mache hot air balloon and a little woven paper basket to go beneath it. A small stuffed bear (selected because his class is called the Bears, of course) sits in each basket, alongside a cloud which says where the bear is headed.

Darling, no? This is a classic example of the cute, creative art projects his teachers dream up; just one of about a gazillion things I'll miss about this school next year. The display was adorable and probably enough, given my current fragile state, to make me prematurely nostalgic in and of itself. But it was what Evan had chosen to write on his cloud that actually made me suspiciously misty eyed:

Damn straight, kiddo. But perhaps the journey would be a bit less onerous if we just took a plane?

The loaves and the fishes

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:08:00 +0000

"Hey, Evan, want to know another great thing about New Jersey? In your New Jersey school, you'll get to celebrate Shabbat every Friday. Sometimes I'll even get to be the Shabbat Mom, which means I'll bring your favorite book and snack in to share with the class and then we'll all go to the sanctuary to sing songs and say prayers and eat challah and celebrate Shabbat together."

"Wow, really? That's great... Friday's already my favorite day because of the fish!"

"The fish?"

"Yeah... fish on Fridays. Fish and chips and challah on the same day will be great!"

Paul and Julia and I may be moving home, but I am beginning to suspect that Evan is going to find himself in a foreign country come August...

Wanderlost

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 16:27:00 +0000

The weary travelers have returned again, this time from Spain, where we have just spent the week of our final school Half Term break of the year exploring Segovia, Madrid and Toledo. (Oh my God, did I honestly just say the weary travelers have returned? I've written so many of these trip recaps by now that I'm resorting to overused cliches. But if ever an overused cliche has summed our experience up so succinctly that it just screamed to be used, it is that of the weary traveler right now. Because people, we. are. weary.)

I personally am so weary that I hardly have the energy to give this trip the enthusiastic review that it surely deserves. It was, after all, a great vacation when viewed in isolation. We loved Segovia, liked Toledo and tolerated Madrid. We visited the most amazing castle we've seen in all of Europe, enjoyed some stupendous scenery and took great pride in our horrendously abysmal attempts to sound like locals. We stayed in just the right places, ate in many of the right places, visited as many of the right places as we could realistically pull off with the kids in tow. We enjoyed it all. It was a well planned trip. It ought to have been -- I've planned over a dozen like it in the past two years.

OK, gang, you know the drill... smile like maniacs while some stranger snaps our photo.

And that's my problem, I think. I viewed this trip not in isolation but in the context of the dozen-or-so trips that came before it, and from that vantage point it was all a little but unsettlingly ho hum. In the face of all of those pack-it-up-and-move-it-out adventures stacked one on top of the other, my wanderlust is beginning to make way for something else, stability-lust, maybe. I'm beginning to think that in our haste to see and do it all before our time here is up that we've seen and done too many things, to the point that our travels have begun to lose some of their lustre and charm. This was yet another good trip for us. We've got this travel business down to a science. And that, I think, is kind of sad. Because travel should take you out of your ordinary and give you experiences that you would never get to enjoy in your regular day to day life. When it becomes the ordinary and the day to day, an essential piece of what makes travel so exciting disappears.

Do I sound like a spoiled brat here? Oh poor me, I've just dragged my kids to too many fabulous places in the past two years. That's not it, of course. I'm incredibly grateful for this opportunity and well aware of how fortunate I am to find myself among the cliched travel weary of the world. But I'm also grateful that our jet setting days are drawing to a close this summer. As hard as it will be to say goodbye to our life here, I'm ready to say goodbye to this lifestyle. I'm ready for roots and routine and a same-old-same-old that's supposed to be a same-old-same-old. I ache for a calendar filled with soccer practices and playdates rather than one which reads like the index of a Lonely Planet guide. I look forward to settling into real life again, to unpacking the layers of tissue that protect my old familiar things and dusting off my old notions of normalcy. And maybe it's too much to ask for, but I'm hoping that I might just find my wanderlust there again too.

Time keeps on slipping (slipping, slipping) into the future

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Wed, 21 May 2008 10:20:00 +0000

The first removals company came yesterday to quote the job of shipping our belongings back to the States. Hours earlier, I had called our landlord to let him know that we are leaving and to recommend friends of ours as the next occupants of this flat. Taking care of these simple routine details has consumed me a bit more than I had anticipated. All that I can think about these days is our impending departure.

Our London life can be counted down in weeks now -- 10 1/2 more, to be exact. On August 1, we will be on a plane back to New Jersey and our time here will be nothing but a memory. Already, it has begun to feel like a memory, like we are living moments that I can fondly recall before they have even had a chance to occur. I'm ten steps ahead of myself it seems, because in my mind's eye we are already strapped into our seats as the plane hurtles down the runway, pointed towards home and away from home all at the same time.

"Slow down," I want to beg the clock, the calendar, the people around me. "Slow down," I want to tell myself as my brain launches into overdrive planning yet again. Slow down. Let me enjoy this. It's not over yet.

But there is no slowing down. I try to stop, to savor the moment, to really look at our current life and to enjoy what remains of it. But even that effort betrays me; if I open my eyes, I'm forced to see how quickly this has become this:

Any day now it seems, those new leaves will already be changing color and tumbling to the ground, blanketing the path of someone else's daily routine. It won't be mine. Our time in London will be over then, just as it now seems to be over even before it has actually come to an end. We're still here and yet we're already on that airplane, too. Fasten your seatbelts, folks. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

The look of friendship

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Sun, 18 May 2008 10:43:00 +0000

A good friend and I have an expression that we often use when talking about new acquaintances whom we've hit it off with: "she looked like me." This description has nothing to do with a person's physical appearance and everything to do with who she is inside. A person can look like me in philosophy or parenting style even if on the surface we look entirely different. A person can look like me in her wardrobe choices or her preferred reading material, her sense of humor or her passion for chocolate. Sometimes it's entirely intangible and undefinable why a person looks like me. But I know it when I see it, and those are the people I seek out as friends.

When we made the decision to move to London for a few years, I worried a lot about whether I would find anyone who looked like me here. I'm the kind of person who needs other people around me to be happy, and I don't tend to do a very good job of faking it with people for whom I don't feel a natural affinity. If I couldn't find anyone who looked like me in London, if I couldn't find anyone who I could be real with, I knew that these would be two very long, very lonely years.

I worked hard at making friendships when we arrived in London. Sometimes I could spot the ways in which the people I met looked like me easily (the other ex-PR mavens from New York were a slam dunk), but I also saw reflections of myself in the Swedish mother who thought about parenting almost as hard as I did, in the English woman who refused to wear stylish, uncomfortable shoes when she was just going to pick up her son at school and in the Israeli neighbor who knows that a quick cup of coffee or glass of wine with a friend can make any day infinitely better. I have also met plenty of wonderful people here who don't look a blessed thing like me here, however, and I've been pleasantly surprised to discover that it's been possible to form great friendships with a lot of them even without that initial click.

Last night, Paul and I went on a London Walks Hampstead Pub Walk with a big group -- mostly friends, with a few friends-of-friends sprinkled into the mix. For every person who looked like me on that tour there was one who doesn't, but it was a congenial, well matched group all the same. We all had a great time getting to know the area that we call home a bit better, and along the route we traded our own stories and observations along with the guide's official patter. As we stopped in front of a local theatre toward the end of the evening, I commented that Paul and I had once seen a singularly unimpressive production there. "I desperately wanted to re-write the whole damn play," I said as I described why it hadn't worked for us. "What else is new?" a friend standing next to me replied wryly, and everyone within earshot started to laugh.

I threw an arm around my accuser, laughing along with the group. Two years later, there's no question that the friends I've made here know me well. They know that I'm blunt and often forthright, they know that I'm obsessive at times and they obviously know that I have a bit of a bug up my butt where good writing is concerned. They may not look like me, but they're willing to look at me and they like what they see. And that, I now realize, is far more important in the making of a friendship than the similarities ever were.

One man's trash...

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Tue, 13 May 2008 13:07:00 +0000

Score! Found at the Hampstead Women's Club Nearly New Sale this past weekend (price: 75p):

I am fairly certain that I am the only person in ~~Hampstead~~ ~~London~~ ~~the UK~~ the known free world who would consider this a treasure.

Do you haiku?

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Thu, 08 May 2008 08:45:00 +0000

My last few posts have been far too verbose, even by my standards. And so today, I offer you a succinct little 17-syllable summary of our overseas experience.

Expat existence:
Marvel at our foreign life
Then go clean your room

Last call for booking enquiries

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Wed, 07 May 2008 09:41:00 +0000

I'm busy readying the house today in anticipation of our 28th American visitor, who will be arriving tomorrow morning for a weekend stay. My friend Kari is leaving her children (including a beautiful new 4 1/2 month old daughter) in her husband's capable hands and escaping to London for a weekend of girl talk and sightseeing, and I could not be more excited about her impending arrival. Her visit will be the highlight of my May, just as my parents claimed that honor for April, close family friends for both March and January, one of Julia's best friends for December... the list goes on and on.

I suppose that the fact that we've had so many visitors here speaks as much to the appeal of our current location as to the allure of our company. If we lived in Podunk, USA and people came to visit in droves, now that would be a testament to our friendships and our great charm as hosts, but London's a slightly easier pull. With the price of hotels and the exchange rate being what they are, who wouldn't want to take advantage of free lodging in one of the world's most amazing cities?

Nonetheless, I can't help but feel incredibly touched that so many people have made the transatlantic trip to see us in the past two years. This will be the 15th time in 20 months that I've stocked the fridge and prepared guest linens and laid out extra towels, and each time it's given me a thrill to know that the relationships we hold dear have stood the tests of distance and time. Kari's not the first person to leave a baby behind to come see us. Others have even brought their kids (if voluntarily flying across an ocean with small children for a visit isn't a sign of love, I don't know what is). A few hardy souls have actually come back to see us a second (or even third) time. Each time, our guests are our whole world for as long as they are here, and the warm glow of familiarity and cameraderie that their presence brings to our London home lasts long after they've left.

I will do the Buckingham Palace/Trafalgar Square/Big Ben and Parliament/London Eye loop for about the eighty-fifth time this weekend. I will make yet another trip to Kensington Palace and I'll point out the highlights of my neighborhood for the gazillionth time. We will visit a classic English pub for a pint, a classic English park for the pictures, a classic English tchotchkie shop for the requisite souvenirs. I've got the tourist shtick down pat by now and I'd be lying if I said it still holds the same "wow factor" for me that it did two years ago. I could very nearly give the full Thames boat ride spiel myself. I'm kind of over Diana's dresses. I still don't much care for warm beer. And yet, somehow it's still fun every time.

It was great to see my father in law's delight at the sight of cars with steering wheels on the right. It's been fabulous to watch Julia and Evan show "their" London to other American kids. It was exciting to host our friends who are Giants fans for a game played on London soil. It's been lovely to welcome back people who've come to feel a bit at home here themselves. And most of all, it has been unbelievably important and wonderful for us to discover over and over again that despite the fact that we up and left everyone we cared about to move here, our American relationships remain strong and true and real. The whistle stop tour of London may be getting old, but our guests provide all the "wow factor" we need.

I'm hardly a natural hostess and this is not a huge flat. Our lives and routines are thrown out of whack every time someone turns up on our doorstep. And yet surprisingly, that's been just fine with me. I'm going to miss these intense stints of sharing time, adventures, and tight living space with the people we love. I'm even going to miss the extra meal planning and the schedule juggling and the tour guide routine intrinsic in each house guest's visit. Kari's the last scheduled guest on our calendar, but we've still got a few months left here in London and fares are pretty low right now. The sleeper sofa still has some life to it and there's some more money left on the extra mobile phone and Oyster cards we keep ready for guests. Anyone else want to see Big Ben?

From the diary of a not-so-young girl

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Thu, 01 May 2008 10:30:00 +0000

I must have read Anne Frank's diary about a thousand times as a child. We were both Jewish girls who dreamed of writing, and in my youthful mind, that made us kindred spirits. Never mind that she faced persecution and eventual death while I enjoyed the privileged of a suburban middle class upbringing; if anything, I thought that I envied Anne her dramatic story and the writing material she was able to extract from her situation. (I may have been lacking in first person experience, but I clearly had the melodrama thing down pat...)

Last weekend, Paul and I took advantage of a visit from my parents and left the kids in their capable hands while we headed off for a weekend trip to Amsterdam. The top item on my "must do" list, unsurprisingly, was a trip to the Anne Frank House.

We followed our guidebook's advice and arrived at the museum late in the day to try to avoid the worst of the queues, but we still had about a 15-20 minute wait before we entered the building. As I looked up and down the peaceful, tree lined street, I kept trying to see it as Anne's last sight when she entered hiding and her first one two years later as she emerged in the custody of the Nazis. I couldn't wrap my mind around any of it. Intellectually, I understood what had happened in the spot where I was standing, but I found myself unable to connect any emotion to that awareness at all.

Numbly, I entered the building and numbly I walked through the exhibits. I studied the model of the annex from above, listened to the recorded interviews with those who remembered Anne and her family after the war and viewed the artifacts on display. "This is the bookshelf I read about so many times," I told myself as I entered the stairwell. "These are the walls the family stared at, this is the attic where Anne and Peter escaped to be alone. This is what I read so much about, imagined in my mind so many times. This is it." They were just words, though, and these were just rooms. None of it was sinking in.

I walked slowly through the annex, careful not to miss anything, as I waited to feel... something. It didn't seem to be happening. After years of imagining a connection based on a book, I felt no connection whatsoever as I finally stood in its setting. This was a museum, carefully staged to convey meaning and evoke emotion. But all of that careful cultivation wasn't working for me. Here in the house where she had lived and written, I could no longer identify with or even recognize the young girl who had captivated me so much in print.

Resigned to a museum experience but determined to make the most of it, I continued on to a room which featured a recording of Otto Frank talking about what it had been like to first read his daughter's diary after the war. He described his surprise at the thoughts and reflections expressed within the pages, so different and so much deeper than the ideas Anne had shared with him in person during their time in hiding. He had thought they had talked about anything and everything, he said, and yet here was so much more to his daughter than had ever met his eye. "From this I can only determine," he said, his face carefully composed around his grief, "that as parents we can never truly know our children at all."

I thought of my own children, of the ways in which they are still transparent and of the complicated layers underneath their surfaces which I am beginning to sense and unable to penetrate. I pictured how completely I had known them in their infancy and how much less I seem to know them with each passing day. I reflected on the odd mixture of wistfulness and pride their blossoming independence sparks in me. I contemplated the experience of watching your child's shoulders hunched over in concentration as she secrets her innermost thoughts away day after day. I thought about what has to go so terribly wrong before you are privy to those reflections. And then -- finally -- I felt my heart break open into a thousand pieces.

At 10, it was Anne Frank with whom I felt an imagined kinship. Twenty five years later, it is her father with whom I identify the most. Anne is frozen in time as a teenager, but I am not, and I should have realized that time would change me and my perspective. What time hasn't changed is the impact this one family's story has on me. I walked out of that house wanting to go back and re-read the Diary for the first time in many years. But as I look at my children and reflect on my obligation to protect them, I wonder if I could even make it through the book now, reading it -- as I surely would -- through Otto Frank's eyes.

Just when I thought I was beyond the challenges of the American/English divide

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:14:00 +0000

This was the first week that Julia has not come home with a Super Speller sticker affixed to her school jumper on a Monday afternoon.

The Super Speller stickers are a great example of the English practice of expecting serious academic work from seriously young kids. Julia comes home from school every Tuesday with her list of spelling words for the week. She and her classmates copy down the week's 10 words (often made up of suggestions from the class or taken from a book they are currently reading) and after the teacher has checked their lists for accuracy, they have just under a week to learn the words before their regular Monday spelling test. And then, because they're 6, they get a pretty sticker if they get all of the words right on their tests.

In typical "it's hard to believe we share any genes at all" fashion, Julia adores the very concept of spelling tests and works hard to master her words. Up until this past week, she was one of only two children in the class who had never gotten a word wrong. Trust me to ruin her perfect streak.

There were a couple of particularly hard words on last week's list and a few of them looked to have been fixed when Julia's teacher had checked her list before sending it home. One word still looked wrong, however, and the proliferation of eraser marks and odd letters in and around the word led me to wonder how closely her teacher had looked at Julia's corrections. "In America, this word is spelled with an O that you don't have here," I told her the first time that she showed me her words for the week. "I suppose it's possible that the British spelling of marvelous doesn't have an O in it, but I'd be awfully surprised. You should really check with your teacher."

Julia being Julia, she didn't want to approach her teacher with the question, but she did assure me that she'd checked with her friends and there was definitely an O in marvelous here, too. And so she altered the spelling accordingly, I quizzed her on her words as always, and she went into school on Monday confident in her spelling skills. She did a marvelous job of spelling her words exactly as I had taught her. And that turned out to be her crucial error.

Marvelous, I am now fully aware, does have an O on both sides of the pond. It also (who knew?) has an extra L over here. (Remember all those odd letters in and around the word? Perhaps they were meant to be there after all...) Marvellous. Julia's American spelling did not pass muster in her English classroom this week and I have just officially flunked Year One Spelling. I think I owe my daughter a sticker.

Seen one bridge? Seen 'em all? (I'm not quite sure, really.)

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 13:39:00 +0000

We pride ourselves in being fairly seasoned in the use of foreign public transportation at this point. We’ve ridden busses in

Sweden

, trams in the Cech Republic, trains in

Belgium

, subways in

Spain

… the list goes on and on. Each place has its little idiosyncrasies of course (would it kill the Italians to mention that you have to validate train tickets in those little yellow boxes on the platforms?), but in general, we’ve got the transport thing under control. So when we arrived in the Venice train station loaded down with luggage and tired kids who had not yet had their daily gelato fix, we weren’t too concerned. Paul purchased our vaporetto passes and we were ready to be on our way.

“We need the 2,” he told me squinting at the route map. Looking up, we easily spotted a “2” sign. We were in luck; the boat appeared to be there waiting for us. “Come on kids,” we yelled, grabbing armloads of suitcases and backpacks and breaking into a run. “Wait, wait, no wait,” Paul called to me moments later as I charged down the gangplank. “This one’s going the wrong way.” We re-traced our steps as he studied the signs again. “Do we want that one?” I asked hopefully, pointing off to our right. “Cause it looks like there’s a boat waiting there, too.” Sure enough, that appeared to be our route, and so again we charged, racing to get aboard. “Get seats near the window,” we urged the kids. “Look out at Venice.” And so they did and so we did. They sat and we looked as we bobbed up and down on the big square yellow boat. One minute we sat. Two minutes we sat. The view did not change. The boat did not move. “When do you think we’re going to leave?” the kids finally asked. “I think,” I replied slowly as I surveyed our surroundings more carefully, “that we’re not leaving ever, at least not until we board an actual boat.” We had raced, it turned out, to catch a loading dock.

After that auspicious start, is it any wonder that I felt lost the entire time that we were in Venice?

Venice is without a doubt the most disorienting city I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s all narrow passageways and little bridges and signs that shed absolutely no light on your whereabouts.

Perhaps signs like this are funnier if you have any sense of direction whatsoever? I wouldn't really know.

Bringing kids to Venice, contrary to the “expert” advice, is absolutely no problem; the back alleys and wide canals provide a rich wealth of sights and discoveries for an enthusiastic child. Bringing a geographically challenged adult to Venice, on the other hand, is probably not such a wise idea. I wandered around Venice for 3 days in a constant state of confusion and disorientation. I've never seen lovelier vistas or more charming views, but damned if I could tell one from another. “OK, so we’ve definitely been here before,” I would announce confidently every time we came to a bridge or stepped into a square. I was wrong every time.

Before long, even my kids were laughing at me. (I can only hope that this means they inherited their father's navigational skills rather than mine.) So I left the navigating to Paul and concentrated on taking my photographs. If worse came to worse, I figured, perhaps I could scroll back through my memory card and use the images as digital breadcrumbs to lead us home. Trust me when I tell you I did some serious weeding out before I posted the Venice photos on Flickr.

Did I adore Venice as much as I'd expected? Meh. I was too disoriented by Venice to truly say that I loved the city. There were a lot of tourists and a lot of mediocre restaurants, and that's generally not a winning combination for me, particularly just coming off the high of our Florence adventure. Nonetheless, Venice is a simply beautiful and incredibly unique place and I'm not just trying for the easy, trite blog wrap-up when I say that I'm so glad to have had a chance to seen it for myself. (At least... I think I saw Venice. It's also entirely possible that I just saw one bridge over and over again from different angles. If so, let me tell you, it was one heck of a bridge.)

OK, kids... say "Mommy's lost again!"

Il mio cuore appartiene a Firenze

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 09:56:00 +0000

For the past two years, we've carefully planned our travels with our children's limitations (or at least what we perceived to be their limitations) in minds. Short trips. Single destinations that have plenty of indoor and outdoor activity options within easy reach. Apartments rather than hotels wherever possible so that we can all spread out a bit. Minimal amounts of packing up and moving on.

These guidelines have made for many a successful holiday for us. The formula wasn't really working when I sat down to plan our April trip to Italy, however, and so I had reluctantly booked a different kind of vacation -- a night in Pisa, two nights in Florence and 3 nights in Venice. Our itinerary involved flying in and out of different airports, two significant train journeys, two different hotels and an apartment. We would be on the go, rushing to pack and catch some form of transportation roughly every two days. To say I was nervous about how it was going to all work out would be an understatement.

It worked beautifully. (In fact, it worked so beautifully that Paul and the kids kept asking me why we don't always travel this way. Go figure.)

Despite the fact that the kids were really excited to see the Leaning Tower (the Wonder Pets and the Little Einsteins have been there so it must be great, they figured), even Julia announced after we'd taken the requisite dozen photographs of ourselves holding up the tower that she was pretty much "done with Pisa." We agreed; it's a cute town and we're glad we saw it, but half a day was enough. Fortunately, half a day was all we had, and we set off for Florence the next morning.

Children unclear on the concept: "Does it look like we're holding the tower up now?"

We made our way to the Duomo that first afternoon in Florence and after admiring the gingerbread house-like effect of the massive structure's white, green and pink marble exterior, we went inside. As we stood gazing up at the elaborately painted ceiling, Julia noticed the thin corridors located along the perimeter of the dome. "I want to walk in the ceiling," she announced. Paul and I looked at each other doubtfully. The path up to the dome had 463 steps and no lift. Neither of us were exactly enthusiastic about the prospect of carrying a child up or down any portion of those 463 steps. "I think it's beautiful and I want to see it up close," Julia persisted. "I won't complain about the steps." I shrugged my consent. "If she wants to see the ceiling of the Duomo that badly, I think we kind of have to do this," I whispered to Paul.

Julia's inspiration: the Duomo dome

926 steps later, we had admired the ceiling up close and emerged at the top of the dome, with the entire city of Florence laid out before us. We had taken our requisite photos, admired the view and counted off each and every step as we made our way back down. Neither child had voiced a single word of complaint. They were both high from the experience, incredibly proud of their stamina and excited about what they'd done and seen. "That," Julia told me happily, "was not boring."

Please explain to me how the same children who whine at climbing the single flight of stairs up to our flat were not even winded at the top of this ridiculously high building...

With this kind of motivation and excitement from our kids, Florence was the surprise hit of our trip. I had been unsure how we were going to do in a city so focused on art, but once we completely chucked any museum hopping aspirations, it was great. Art is everywhere in Florence, so why not leave the Uffizi and the Academia with their timed entrances and huge crowds and velvet ropes to the other tourists? We found beauty in other places -- in the Duomo and Baptistry ceilings, which awed and impressed my kids, in the extensive greenery and breathtaking views of the Boboli Garden, in the glittery gold of the Ponte Vecchio, in the markets full of buttery leather and colorful scarves, in a little storefront museum filled with beautifully constructed wooden machines which helped my children to get a hands-on understanding of Da Vinci's inventions, in the piazzas where they played, and most especially in the pizza, pasta dishes and colorful selection of gelato in which we indulged at every opportunity.

David, schmavid. People, this is art.

By the time we left Florence on a train bound for Venice, we were all more than a little in love with the place and I was wishing I'd packed my fat jeans. It was time to move on, though, and we were all ready and excited to keep going. Tune in next time for Venice, where all the bridges looked exactly the same yet I still felt compelled to pause and photograph each and every one of them. And every gondola. And every water view. And every mask shop. (Don't worry. If you skim -- or even skip -- that particular Flickr set, I'll never know the difference.)

Photos from the Pisa and Florence legs of this trip are now up on Flickr if you want to check them out!

On making travel accessible for children

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 16:06:00 +0000

The train rolled through the Tuscan countryside en-route from Florence to Venice. Julia was hard at work planning our Venice itinerary, working from a series of articles I'd printed out about taking children to Venice. None of these articles were particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of Venice as a family vacation destination, but Julia seemed unwilling to let this dampen her own enthusiasm for the next leg of our trip.

"Venice may be a great town for kids to live in," Julia read aloud, "but it probably wouldn't be anyone's first choice as a tourist destination for the preschool through junior-high crowd. Hand a copy of Venicewalks or Venice: A Literary Companion to a child, and you're likely to hear, 'Mommy, why can't we go to Disney World?'" Scowling, she crossed these sentences out with a green marker and wrote "not true" in the margins of the page. "We don't need Disney," she told me proudly. "We're going to love Venice."

I smiled in agreement, trying not to look too smug as I sized up my 6 year old travel snob. "Obviously the kids described in those articles must not be the kind of experienced travelers that you are," I replied, to which Julia beamed in response. As she returned to her list making, I turned back to the window to drink in more of the most unbelievably gorgeous views I've ever seen. Evan, who had been following the conversation, also turned to follow my gaze.

"Hey," he shouted, his high pitched voice overcome with excitement, "I think the Little Einsteins have been here!"

Chalk one up for Disney after all.

(Just back, obviously, from a week long trip to Pisa, Florence and Venice... one of our best holidays to date. Photos and a trip report to follow soon!)

Oceans apart (in more ways than one)

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 13:04:00 +0000

Prior to our London move, I consulted every source I could find for information and advice about moving to the UK. Unable to anticipate the shape our lives would take in the coming months, I hung on ever word ever written about the expat experience. Only some of the conventional wisdom that I so diligently took to heart turned out to be particularly accurate or applicable, but I was on the whole very grateful for all of my pre-move research and preparation once we arrived here. (I am, however, still using up a stash of Secret deodorant purchased in a frenzied pre-move Target spree after I read somewhere that English deodorant doesn't work very well. "Did you expect us all to smell all the time?" an amused English friend asked me recently after I confessed to this misconception. "Um, yeah, I guess I did," I replied ruefully. Is it any wonder that the whole ugly American stereotype holds strong around here?)

I've been told that repats (or returning expats) often have an even harder adjustment upon arriving back in their home countries than they experienced when they first moved abroad. It makes sense; you move back to a place that you consider "home" only to find that you have changed and the place has changed and nothing fits as you expected. When living abroad, you had a ready excuse for your cultural confusion and occasional ignorance, but that excuse rapidly disappears when you hit your home soil. You're left in a place that looks, yet doesn't feel familiar, trying to figure out how to break back into a community which has quite rightly gone on in your absence.

It sounds quite dreadful, doesn't it? I'm certain that it is at least partially accurate, of course; it seems awfully naive to think that I could just slide back into my former life as if nothing had changed. But just as I have been delighted to discover for myself that my friends here don't actually smell, I'm choosing to believe that my repat experience won't always stink either. No, I don't expect this move to be without its challenges and frustrations, but I've weathered my share of those here and come out the other end, so surely I can do the same back there. Just to be on the safe side, I'm once again attempting to forestall the inevitable challenges that lie ahead by doing my research in advance, however, this time by devouring every resource I can find for British citizens who are moving to the US.

Stop laughing. I'm not deluded enough to believe that I've become British after less than 2 years here. There aren't a lot of repat resources to be found out there, however, and my appetite for things to obsess over is insatiable. So I figured maybe I'd at least find a bit of a clue about American lifestyle issues which might be likely throw me after having lived in the UK if I looked to my British equivalents in the US. It worked... to a point.

I found plenty of discussion on British expat forums about the mysteries and challenges of life in the US. Some of it I was able to gloss over right away. I will not have visa issues, nor trouble obtaining a Social Security number, and no one is likely to tease me about my accent. Hell, I won't even be missing bangers and mash. Maybe this won't be so hard after all, I thought. But then I kept reading. People who move to America from the UK find the clothing styles boring and predictable after European fashions, I discovered. Fair enough. I don't dress all that European now, but I can make an attempt to jazz up my wardrobe before I head back. People who jump the pond in reverse also can't figure out the lack of electric kettles in American kitchens. I agree whole heartedly with this one. Fortunately, I've pre-shopped at Target and I think I'm good there. Moving on. Everyone misses the prevalence of pubs and many who have landed in suburban America bemoan the loss of their walking lifestyles. Oh, God. Those are some of the things I love most about London. Am I going to be miserable driving around in my gas guzzler back in the US???

As the panic began to set in, I hit the kicker, the longest thread in the whole forum. Pages and pages and pages of discussion about the issue that this group of British expats appear to find the hardest about life in the US. They hate American washers and driers. Life would be good again, it appears, if only they could return to something like this (you know, that appliance which is naturally broken for the gazillionth time right now, just as I am attempting to recover from a week of missed washing opportunities due to house guests while simultaneously trying to gear up for a week-long trip to Italy).

Call me crazy, but I think I'm going to be just fine back in the good ole' US of A.

My Bologna has a first name

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 14:03:00 +0000

Our agenda for the weekend was really remarkably low key. Food. Lots of really good food. Wine. Lots of really good wine. Some retail therapy, maybe, and a bit of culture perhaps. Whatever we happened upon was bound to be good. I don't think any of us even glanced at a guidebook before we set foot on the plane, so relaxed were we about this trip. This was not to be a journey of itineraries and carefully timed meals. We had no need of such travel shackles. For once, we would not be going anywhere or do anything that was stroller accessible, whine inducing, kid-friendly, or bo-ring. And damn, were we giddy about that.

All American expats living in London, we are by virtue of our current circumstances a reasonably well traveled group. Between us, we have shuttled 10 children between the ages of 1 and 7 to virtually every European city, as well as quite a few more far-flung holiday destinations. We've each got the traveling with kids thing down to a science, from the rectal thermometers in our toiletries bags to the ability to say "chicken nuggets" in absolutely any language to playground-divining instincts which would put a homing pigeon to shame. Traveling with children, we all agree, is wonderful and culturally important and absolutely worth the effort. It is also a royal pain in the ass, which is why we all jumped on the opportunity to ~~ditch the little ones~~ leave our offspring to bond with their fathers for the weekend while we spent a few days in Bologna.

Why Bologna? I mentioned the well-traveled thing, right? Once we'd eliminated every place that at least one of us had visited in the past year or so, there weren't really very many places left within a few hours' reach of London. We contemplated some serious second and third tier cities in our search for a destination, before finally deciding that it didn't much matter where we went provided we actually went somewhere. The Northern Italian city of Bologna looked like it would provide just enough sightseeing to keep us busy, but not so many "must see" attractions that we would feel guilty about eschewing them in favor of a glass of wine at some cute little outdoor cafe somewhere. The flight times were convenient and the fares weren't too insane. And of course, there was that fun Oscar Mayer theme song to add a little kitsch to our weekend. Who could say no to O-S-C-A-R?

From the moment we saw the shop located directly next to our hotel, it was clear that we had picked an excellent destination to visit without our children.

"I think I'm seeing a blog post emerging here," Christine muttered to me moments later as I focused my camera on a fountain in Piazza Maggiore.

She was right. Bologna's adult delights were without a doubt worthy of a blog post. But those delights, as it turned out, were not nearly as X rated as my early photos of our trip might have indicated. Instead, the delights of the flesh we encountered in Bologna took the form of food.

Lunches that looked like this:

Shop displays that that looked like this:

Our purchases in Bologna may not have been made at that silly little store next to our hotel, but they made us dizzy with anticipation all the same.

I got bronchitis and felt like hell. Karen's husband got called away to New York on business just as we were leaving Gatwick, resulting in unbelievably complicated last minute child care calisthenics. Both Suzy's husband and Christine's husband managed to lock themselves and their children out of the house while we were gone. But the four of us had a fabulous adults-only weekend in Bologna anyway.

Cheers!

There's a bee in the bonnet pun to be made here, but I'm still too incoherent to make it

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:42:00 +0000

(The Girlfriend Getaway post is coming when I have the time and energy to sort through my photos. But first this...)

"How are you feeling?" my friend Sarah asked sympathetically as she very kindly dropped Evan off at home after school on Monday so that I wouldn't have to leave the house in my sickly state. I sort of groaned and leaned against the door jam limply. "Oh, well then you'll be delighted to see this," she said brightly, handing me a missive from Evan's teachers. I glanced at the sheet and then groaned again.

"Wednesday is Easter Bonnet Day," the note enthusiastically proclaimed. Each child, I read on, must decorate their own bonnet ("remember, any hat will do!") at home and bring it in on Wednesday morning to wear in the school parade. "Your bonnet could look like this," the sheet cheerfully continued, followed by a picture of what an Easter bonnet might look like if the entire team of Project Runway set to work to create the perfect Easter ensemble. "Be creative!" I was dangerously close to audibly weeping as I thanked Sarah, shut the door and crawled back into bed.

I'm not Martha Stewart on the best of days, and these have not been my best days. But Evan needed a hat and a hat he would have. Julia promised to help and I pumped myself up with antibiotics and fever reducers in an effort to rise to the challenge. I was in a delirious enough state by then that I was beginning to see Easter bonnets that didn't really exist, but Evan kept us firmly on course. Together, we would create the perfect bonnet, provided I didn't keel over or cough up a lung first.

We took the "any hat" option very seriously and started with Evan's fireman's helmet. A covering of purple tissue paper, a swig of star garland and an assortment of Easter-themed Hama bead creations later, my boy had a bonnet.

In my feverish state, I actually thought it looked quite fine indeed. Aw, hell, if he forgives me for the purple butterfly costume some day, surely he'll forgive me for this as well...