Haunted by Transatlantica

Back in the fall of 1985, when I had only been in the United States a few weeks, I read a copy of Vanity Fair magazine that I'd found in the office I shared with several other grad students. One paragraph in the editorial in that particular magazine, written by Tina Brown, resonated enough with me even then that I photocopied it and kept it. I misplaced the photocopy at one point in one of my moves but I found it again today. Here are the words I wanted to keep:

In fact, once you've lived on both sides of the Atlantic, it's impossible to be content with either. One becomes haunted with the perfect place called Transatlantica, which is somewhere in between. Its population shares England's civility and America's energy, England's irony and America's optimism, England's coziness and America's breadth, England's sense of the past and America's belief in the future. Whichever side you settle, your sensibilities are forevermore on the frequent flier's program.

Britain vs the rest of the world

My DH forwarded this image to me recently. I think he remembered me telling him about  NFAH's comments on the topic!

 

What time is lunch?

I'm trying to remember what time lunch (dinner) was served when I was in school. I'm pretty sure it was 12 noon. My secondary school had 4 different dining rooms, so there were no separate sittings - everyone had the same lunch period/dinner time, though sometimes it did feel as though we spent much of it queuing! I'm pretty sure we had at least an hour for lunch too, maybe a little longer. Some kids went home to eat, and others to the local chippy. When I was in 6th form we persuaded one of the PE teachers to give up some of his lunch break one day a week to open the swimming pool for us. We must have had at least 20 minutes in the pool to make it worthwhile.

School lunch hours over here are much shorter - certainly nowhere near an hour. Both my kids complain that they don't have enough time to eat all their lunch, though I know part of that is because they spend too much time talking! Still, I was shocked to look at DD's schedule today and realize that her lunch hour is only 24 minutes long. Not only that, but she has 'first lunch' - which starts at 10:48 a.m. Not even time for elevenses and she's having lunch?!

Poor kitties!

The children were so stunned by these signs at the side of the road in the UK that they took pictures of them.

Disoriented

It was a strange feeling to be back in the UK after so long (over 4 years) away. It didn't exactly feel like home any more but it wasn't exactly foreign either. It was more like coming home to your own house to find that someone had redecorated and changed some of the furniture while you were away.

Shoot your own turkey

It must be nearly Thanksgiving! Apparently the turkey shooting is more organized than I thought - I had visions of people just wandering out into the woods to look for turkeys.

Search terms

I do like looking through the list of of search terms used by people who found my blog. Searches for Smarties vs M&Ms seem to have finally stopped. Here are some of the recent ones:

• scared of wasps
  Aren't we all?
  
• black currants, how to eat?
  I could get really sarcastic with this one, something along the lines of 'put them in your mouth', but it's actually not an unreasonable question. How do you eat something that sour? By adding lots of sugar of course!
  
• wasp nest blackcurrant bush
  Not sure how this is any different to a wasp's nest anywhere else. Presumably you don't want it and want to get rid of it.
  
• are there any other plants that look like blackcurrants but may be poisen. please show picture.
  If you think you've just poisoned yourself, looking up the answer on a stranger's potentially unreliable blog is perhaps not the best idea. Did you notice that s/he said please to a computer!
  
• how to learn speaking english well with red lavel
  I have a feeling this person was probably looking for a specific textbook.
  
• i am 9 and liking for a mice
  I wonder who taught this cat to type?
  
• glaswegian accent scary
  It can be, can't it? (For the record, one of my grandmothers was from Glasgow and, despite many years of not living there, never lost her accent!) I wonder just what this person wanted to know about a scary Glaswegian accent though?
  
• how do i wash dishes at a tent campsite?
  A questions asked by someone who's only ever used a dishwashing machine perhaps? Depends a little on the campsite. In France the sites we visited often had sinks dedicated to washing dishes. Camping at state parks here in the US we boil water on the stove, pour it into a bowl and do the dishes in the bowl, remembering of course to have some clean water to wash the suds off in case they poison us ;-)
  
• how long can i drive in the usa on my englishy liecence?
  That depends on the state I believe, though I may be wrong.
  
• pronounce: oregano
  I hate questions like this - people are either trying to make me sound more British or more American than I want to be.
  
• britain has too many rules
  Hmm - the obvious retort if the searcher is not British is to say "Well, go home then!"
  
• american back to the us after london culture shock
  If an American has to leave London because of culture shock, all I can say is they'd better not leave the US again because the rest of the world will probably be even more shocking! Not that you can't get culture shock traveling in the USA!
  

Finally, the following two continue to turn up regularly:

• the reasons americans shouldn't travel
• why americans shouldn't travel
  No one from any country should travel if they're not prepared to tolerate at least a little culture shock, try some new experiences, and accept that one of the delights of traveling is to visit somewhere that is different from home!
  

Culture shock

Not from Around Here pointed me in the direction of an excellent post on depression and culture shock on An American Bedu's blog. The post itself is interesting, the comments even more so. Culture shock is so much more complicated than many people realize. Many people think it goes away if you live long enough in the 'foreign' culture, but that's not always true. Some people never get over it and choose to go back home, as expat21 discussed recently on her blog. However, it's not true that returning 'home' will always be an improvement. There is truth in the saying "You can never go home" and reverse culture shock can be just as powerful as the regular kind!

Most of the 'graphs' of culture shock I've found online are based on the foreign-exchange student/temporary stay abroad experience rather than that of the immigrant:

Why would you emigrate?

Would you emigrate (would you have emigrated) if you knew the reality of the country you were moving to? I think for those of us who moved from the UK to the US or vice versa, we had a fairly good sense of what we were letting ourselves in for. There are always little things that surprise you though. Despite the similarities in the language, the differences can be disconcerting. Despite knowing about the US from TV shows and books, dealing with it on a day to day basis still resulted in some culture shock. I'm not sure if the shock is worse for those who come from a very different cultural and language background - surely you must expect the US to seem strange if you have moved here from Afghanistan or Somalia, whereas I was truly surprised to find the US seemed 'foreign'.

From http://booj.blogspot.com/2008/10/why-hell-would-you.html

" I like the idea developed in the Netherlands that if a foreigner wishes to immigrate there, then they have, apart from learning the language, to watch a film showing the life of the country, warts and all, drunks and nudes, hookers, hookahs, pornography, taxes, frost and floods and all. It gives a message to those who would enthusiastically tumble into Europe that it ain't necessarily quite the wonderful place you might think it to be. We have unemployment, we allow people to drink and become drunk, we allow people to express opinions, though we may not necessarily agree, we allow gays to express themselves. The clear message is "Don't like it? Don't come." "If you can't stand it, having come, go.""

Britz

Quite by chance I ended up watching the second part of Britz on BBCAmerica last night. Shortly before the end I was pleased to discover that it is being shown On Demand on our cable service so I will be able to watch the show in its entirety. (Though it is being repeated next weekend, it's on during the day when I won't have chance to watch it.) From the BBCAmerica website (where there are even a couple of video clips from the show):

On July 7, 2005 four men strapped explosives to their bodies, walked into the heart of London's transport network and blew themselves up. Fifty-two people were killed, in addition to the bombers - three weeks later, four more men tried to do the same.

None of them were mercenaries or émigrés sent from abroad. No one spotted them, they didn't stand out. They were born, brought up and educated in Britain - Manchester United supporting, iPod owning, dress-like-us, speak-like-us people. They were Brits.

Britz explores how a young intelligent British Muslim could feel so disenfranchised, so powerless and become so angry at their country of birth that they would commit an extreme and despicable act and ultimately it asks how we can ever hope to prevent such an incident re-occurring.

The idea for the films, according to Peter Kosminsky, started with the July 7 bombings. Kosminsky considered telling the personal stories of the July 7 bombers, in the way he had told the story of government scientist David Kelly in The Government Inspector. But in light of his own experience as a second-generation immigrant, he wanted to look more generally at second-generation Muslim disillusionment with Britain (domestic and foreign policy in particular.) "I decided, in discussion with my colleagues, that the best thing was to fictionalize it - to research the way Muslims think and feel at the moment - and then try to create some fictional characters drawing on what we'd learned."

Given my interest in immigration and cross-cultural issues, I found it fascinating, despite what seemed (to me) like some overgeneralizations. Clearly if it were a book there would be more time to develop some of the characters' motivations. Did anyone else see it? What did you think?

How do you want that?

It took me years to feel comfortable ordering a sandwich here in the US. I hated being asked "How do you want that?"

Umm - you mean I have choices? Which one of several kinds of bread? Toasted or not?

"And what do you want on it?"

Oh no, MORE choices! Mayonnaise, or oil and vinegar? Onions? Pickles? Tomatoes? Lettuce? Hot peppers? And on and on . . . it was just too much work. Oh, to be in the UK where I just had to decide which one of the prepackaged sandwiches I wanted. (Usually chicken tikka just because I never see it in the US!)

Eventually, I simply resorted to a sandwich that does not require choices to be made except whether I want fries with it - the tzatziki chicken gyro.

Learn to speak English, why doncha?

As evidenced by my blogroll, I love to read about other people's ex-pat experiences. I have a lot of ex-pat Brits listed here, but that's mostly only because I followed links from one to the next, to the next . . . However, most of the ex-pats I encounter in my 'real' life are not Brits. In fact, most of them do not speak English as their first language. Some speak almost no English at all. I remember being in that situation when I was in Asia - the foreigner who doesn't speak the language. The grownup who is treated as a child. The college-educated adult who is treated like an idiot. It's frustrating, and it's not a situation you can remedy quickly. It takes time (and a lot of effort) to learn a language, and some languages are harder to learn than others. Even when I lived in France and spoke the language well, I was always an outsider.

When I think of what new immigrants with children have to deal with in terms of language - specifically communications from their kids' schools - it makes me really angry when I hear people complaining "Why don't they learn English?" "Why should we have to provide interpreters and translations?" "They should just go home if they don't want to learn English!" These are all legal immigrants, and the United States government did not require a language test of them. They are hard-working members of society and the reality is that many of the parents are so busy working in menial jobs that people born here won't do that they have no time now to take English classes.

I met a teacher last year who has been in the US as long as I have - over 20 years. Originally from Germany, her English is excellent. (In fact, she teaches English to new immigrants.) Yet even she - a fluent English speaker, familiar with the public school system - said she felt discombobulated trying to navigate the system trying to get support for her special needs child. The people who are complaining that parents in our school system should make more effort to learn English clearly have no experience themselves of having to navigate real daily life (not just tourist life) in a second language and culture. I'd love to drop some of those complainers off somewhere like China or Russia for a year and see how they fare! Sadly, the experience would probably do nothing for them except to 'prove' to their blinkered satisfaction that the United States is the best place in the world to live.

Chuck E. Cheese

I was very cruel to my husband today. DS had a birthday party to go to and I suggested to DH that he might like to take DS. He knew that the party was at Chuck E. Cheese's, but apparently what that involved was unclear to him so he said yes. I've never been there myself, but I've heard enough about it that it was the last place I wanted to spend my Saturday afternoon!

Several hours after he returned home, and three beers later, he was still shaking his head in amazement.

"An onslaught to the senses."

"No wonder people don't like America if they think that's a typical American experience."

"It was so awful!"

"Hell on earth!"

"Chuck E. Cheese would make a lot more money if they sold alcohol to anesthetize the parents, but they probably couldn't sell it fast enough!"

Apparently the parents of the birthday boy were stunned too. "It wasn't like this 20 years ago!"

DS, on the other hand, had a blast and wants to know if he can have his next birthday party there.



That would be a resounding "NO!" from both parents.

Apparently I now owe DH big time!

A nation of wasteful abundance

I remember being shocked in my first few days at university here to see the amount of food and paper serviettes (napkins) that were wasted at every mealtime in the Dining Commons on campus. It seemed as though everyone took half a dozen napkins instead of just one. Lots of people took far more food than they could possibly eat and then threw it away. My culture shock at this was nothing however compared to Mark Mathabane's. Mark is about my age but grew up in the black township of Alexandra in South Africa under the apartheid regime. He ended up studying in the United States too. In his book Kaffir Boy in America (sequel to Kaffir Boy , the story of his childhood in South Africa) he writes of his first few years in the United States. He too was (unfavorably) impressed by the amount of wasted food. His shock was clearly far greater than mine of course. I got over it to some extent but the memory of the shock is still there.

Occasionally as I look at our well-stocked pantry and wonder what we should have for dinner, I think how spoiled we are. We bulk buy because it's convenient. We can store far more food than we would be able to in the typical English house. Although we might not be eating what we wanted, we would have enough food for several weeks should something happen to stop us from getting to the stores.

It's not only food, but all the other 'stuff' in our lives that is embarrassingly abundant. I assuage my guilt a little by trying to throw as little out as possible. No, that does not mean hoarding! We recycle paper, glass, and plastic, and would even if our town did not require it. I pass on outgrown kids clothing to friends with smaller children, or to local agencies that collect such stuff. Recently we have used Freecycle as a way of passing things on that we have no use for anymore. (Freecycle exists in many other countries including in the UK too.) It's a small thing to do, but why throw things out when someone might be happy to reuse them? Enjoy the abundance, but cut down on the waste!