" 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.""
When I lived in the south of France, my preferred brand of sun tan oil was Bergasol. It gave very little skin protection, but I did get a nice tan. Of course, given the amount of time I spent in the sun, I would have got a nice tan no matter which oil or lotion I'd used, given that back then no one used high SPF products. I certainly wasn't thinking about protecting myself against skin cancer. Apparently the original formula Bergasol is no longer sold because of the amount of the tanning accelerator psoralen, a cancer-causing substance, that was in it.
It is possible to get Christmas crackers here in the US now. Not 20 odd years ago though - or at least nowhere where I shopped. Even so, a confused American blogger in the UK recently referred to them as "cylindrical "bang" packages" and clearly had never heard of them, let alone seen them before. Of course it's the same here as in England - cheap crackers have cheap junk inside them. Expensive crackers have better quality junk. Our crackers this year came from The Christmas Tree Shops so I don't know why we bothered. The internationalization of holiday traditions goes both ways as last time I was in the UK for Christmas I noticed that it is possible to buy candy canes over there now. Again, that wasn't true when I first came to the US.
For British expats in the US: Stinking Billy wants to know - when you first came here, did you plan on putting the UK firmly behind you and never returning to live there again?It would seem to make sense that if you're going to move several thousand miles that it would be with a plan. People like Sarah, for example, emigrated quite intentionally, knowing that they were committing themselves to their new country. The long-term plan wasn't that clear for some of us though. My original plan was to stay in the US for as long as it took to get a Master's degree and then return to the UK. Other people also emigrate on a temporary basis - moving because a job posting has forced them to, but not really intending to stay in the country they've moved to any longer than the job lasts.
"Consider sharing a recipe that your family, a family member or you, enjoy that doesn’t seem to be appreciated by many other bodies on the planet."I'm not sure that this really counts as a recipe, but something my mum served when we were growing up and I loved, was grated cheese and ketchup sandwiches. I remember her serving them at a birthday party of mine and some of my friends thought they were weird. I seem to remember most people eating them though. Well, some people anyway ... though, come to think of it, maybe that was me and my sister! I tried feeding them to my own kids last weekend as we had somehow ended up with a lot of cheese in the house. (We rarely buy it as too many of us in this household have high cholesterol.) I was very disappointed to find that when offered this rare treat, the children decided they hated it. I thought that as Americans they would eat anything that was accompanied by ketchup.
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.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?
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."
Born to Indian parents in London and raised in Rhode Island, author Jhumpa Lahiri spoke in her interview on NPR about becoming American of a "sort of a half-way feeling [of being American]."
Like me, she is a US citizen who does not always feel American. She seems to have struggled with this over her 40 years in the US, particularly with the idea that her parents stood out as not American despite the fact they did have American passports. They never socialized easily with her friends' parents.
"I think this was a two-way street. It wasn't just that they were afraid or unwilling — there was a fear, an unwillingness on both sides."As a white immigrant, with an English accent rather than a foreign language accent, I have had less difficulty fitting in than many immigrants to the US. Some people seem to put me in a different category than the more obviously foreign newcomers to the US. One person, mid-rant about how all immigrants should be sent home, paused to say, "Not you of course, you're different." The irony was her grandparents immigrated from Poland! It is important to remember that assimilation IS a two-way street. I fit in partly because it is assumed I will. I listen to comments made about some of the immigrants I come into contact with through my work, and am amazed that people see them as so different just because they don't speak English well - and then they wonder why these immigrants don't assimilate better?! 'Black' president or not, we have along way to go in learning tolerance!
"You can go backwards and forwards as much as you like, subject to legal and financial restrictions. And you can stay in touch with everyone back home. You can read their blogs, you can speak to them on the phone."You don't have to go that far back though - even 20 years ago it was a very different experience than it is today. Phone calls home cost dollars per minute instead of cents, there was no such thing as the Internet yet (as far as the general public was concerned anyway) and blogging certainly hadn't been invented. The experience must be very different for a new immigrant (or even an exchange student) in any country than it was for those of us who moved pre-Internet and cheap phone calls! I wonder if it doesn't have the potential for worsening culture shock in some respects because it allows you to cling to home? Or maybe for some it lessens the disorientation because you don't have that shock, like jumping into cold water, of being completely immersed in the foreign culture?
"Feeling like an outsider at a young age made Diaz become a "fanatic" for his home country."I don't think that I ever would have thought so fondly of Santo Domingo had I stayed there my whole life," he says."
You can hear the interview here.
