To be fed up with 'expats'...

[EveWasFramed72]

I am an American, living here in England with my British husband and children (who have both nationalities, but have only lived in England). I've been here for 4 years, and when we were first here, I was miserable;I was at home full time with a new baby, then preganant running after a toddler, basically no close friends, etc. I pulled myself up by the bootstraps and got myself a life: went to uni, got a job, driving licence and created a life for myself outside of my husband. Now, I love our life here, I have loads of friends, a job I like, etc.

But...I am part of a group of American women living in the UK, some of whom have been here longer than me, married to British men. They won't drive, work, survive without several care packages of food from home(because they can't possibly eat what's on offer in England), basically, they sit around and moan about England, and how much better EVERYTHING is at home.

Now, I love my home country, and I do get homesick sometimes, but I just find myself fed up with these women who have given up on life because they are living abroad (and didn't they REALISE that marrying someone from another country means living in said country at some point???). When they aren't moaning, I do enjoy them...it IS nice to have home connections, but this attitude of deliberately NOT acclimating drives me nuts , and I feel like they make the rest of us who enjoy life in England look bad!!!

Rant over...I know, you're going to tell me to cut them off...and I have largely...just not completely.

I just want to know if this is 'typical' expat behaviour?????

The thong thing makes for much hilarity.

No Eralc I'm not easily offended :)

pegsontheline excellent quote, and I think it's so true!!
Yes psycho GREEN...they look revolting, and taste of mint!! I LOVE Guy Fawkes night...I will miss that if we go...

Alsace is gorgeous. My host family also spoke German and Alsacian, which is a Germanic dialect. So I managed to pick up a little German.

But school was all in French. And there was no translating or help.

It was like, 'Here is our new pupil. She is from America. Okay, here's the lesson for today . . . '

I had a headache every day for months! But I knew I'd turned a corner when I dreamed entirely in French. Even people I knew didn't speak French were speaking French in the dream.

And I woke up and went downstairs and was about 10 minutes into breakfast before I realised I had not thought in English or Spanish.

I could have punched the air!

I still giggle when people talk about their thongs in a truely immature fashion !

It is probably too late for DS1 but I hold out hope for the baby.

Yes...thongs=hilarious

I still call them thongs. 'Those cheap thongs you get in Primark are great for the showers at the gym and giving yourself a pedi.'

Oooh, I know that headache!

I have yet to find the thongs with a white bottom and a coloured top bit. You know, the ones you see all over Eastern Asia (and in America they're easy to get, too, well, they are in melting pot Houston where I'm from).

Or those ones my uncle from India always wears, with the leather X for a top bit.

Agree Bob. I hate it when say, people introduce you to people from your nationality all the time, assuming that you'll get on/know each other. Doesn't always happen.

One of the most difficult things, IMO, is hanging onto bits of your identity. I lost my South African accent very quickly (out of necessity. Nobody had a clue what I was saying) and I do miss it (and get fecked off at people mocking the few words that are still in my old accent . Like your weirdy Australian/Canadian/American mess is anything to be proud of - doucheface (referring to a particular person here)). I do find now that I buy more SA products and talk about it more, but that's because when I first arrived I was so incredibly homesick, talking about the Old Country reduced me to an emotional wreck. It was three months before I could look at pictures from home without crying (I was 17).

what I have become is a big mishmash of all the cultures and places I've lived in, and I quite like that. I choose the best bits of all and stick to those.

That's a tough one, Eve. I think you just have to shrug off the negative comments if they don't fit in with what you want to be concentrating on. I mean, UK houses can be small and cold etc etc, but then again US ones can be soulless and in anonymous strip developments, where you need to drive miles and miles to do anything. It's all got advantages and disadvantages, but you just have to make the most of the best bits in any particular place.

Psycho, I used to absolutely dread it when the phone rang and there was no one there but me to answer it.

I'd leave it ringing sometimes :o.

The phone was my last hurdle.

I was once reduced to tears when this man, a client, rang for my host mother. I couldn't make out what he was saying, but explained Madame was away.

He made me go get out a dictionary and was spelling out words to me to leave his message.

Wanker!

I secretely hated him the entire time after that :o.

Everytime I meet a S. African I have to forcibly restrain my sef from saying 'Diplomatic Immunity' ala Lethal Weapon.

It is strange how language 'wins' over geography when it comes to feeling at home. I feel I have more in common with Americans than I do with fellow Europeans quite often. I remember the glee I felt when an American friend used feet and inches to describe her height!

I do love it here though!

I think that the advantages/disadvantages thing is very true BoffinMum - I think it's hard sometimes to remember the negative things about your home country when you are somewhere new - the rose-tinted specs come out big style. I think the best way that I've found is to try my hardest to stop comparing things to "back home" - it's much healthier to just accept that things are different, and to get on with it to some extent (easier said than done sometimes though!)

I like the way S. Africans sounds. There are more than a few S. African/Scottish couples I've seen and they all say the same thing, 'Oh, I just loved his/her accent!'

I was not an expat in Germany as I was fully assimilated. German DH, German friends, colleagues. I hardly spoke English for 14 years.

Since moving to Geneva, things have changed. I don't speak fluent French, I get by but am no where near fluent. I have no French speaking friends, only other expats.

In Germany it was sink or swim. Here in Geneva I can paddle along quite happily.

I know a woman who did ALL her shopping in the American Food Store in Geneva, at an incredible mark up. She must have spent a fortune on food.

One thing I have realised is that the Americans find it difficult because everything is so different in supermarkets. If you move from UK to Germany, there are a lot of similar brands. Dr Oetker, Nestle, Findus... The Americans find that the supermarkets are filled with stuff that they don't recognise at first sight. My friend told me that it took her ages to find simple things because they were packaged differently. I guess some people just cannot be bothered to spend the time workign it out.

She also said that Americans use more processed food, so find having to cook from scratch with unfamiliar ingredients challenging.

I know that I never baked in Germany cause getting the right ingredients was difficult.

My 52yo brother can't get over the thongs thing, either.

I would really like it if I could find an expat community to liase with; I live in a foreigner-free zone and even the nicest people who grew up here agree that it's parochial and very very narrow-minded. Though I have lived in the UK 19 years, I am suddenly fed up with it. Feel like getting my US passport and skipping back to California to see if that might suit me better after all.

Oh yes, phonong was a nightmare. No body language to fall back on.

And at the very start when a conversation takes an unexpected turn and leaves you all at sea!

Did the French also use you to practise their English? The amount of stubborn and painful conversatiobs I had at first with me speaking dogged German, and the othet petson speaking (rather good) English!

I used hardly any processed food and am American.

But I am also a Latina of Mexican and French extraction.

My DB and his wife are the other extreme though. Upon moving to the UK, they decided they were "English". It became a bit like the Coopers/Kapoors in Goodness Gracious me. They have never returned, DB started going on about "playing footie with me mates on a Tuesday night" and SIL got heavily into Trisha and middle class snobbery. It was nauseating AND they started rubbishing South Africa. Then, during the Rugby World Cup. They did the unthinkable - they supported England over SA (and thus supported the losers ). I looked into disowning them, but then karma bit them on the ass and they had to move to Scotland. That stopped them from being so "English" all the freaking time, pretty quickly.

Oh, yes! They'd say, 'I can speak English.'

But really, outside of a few I met in Paris, they couldn't.

I eventually learned how to get them to give up by introducing topics there was no way they'd be able to tackle in English.

My step-sister and her husband (Americans) lived in Brussells in 1998-1999. They INSISTED to me that it was impossible in that city to buy fresh milk (not UHT). They were pitied by American relatives for being too poor to eat out . I spent a lot of time biting my tongue.

Well, I see my mum popping back and buying various things that are hard to get in the UK - egg cookers, special frying pans she likes, a particular water spray thing for when you are ironing, shoes, etc. I pop over there too and buy dumpling mix, little sachets of vanilla sugar, favourite Dallmayr coffee and so on. But I think we are both quite good at seeing each country for what it is, and effectively being citizens of two countries (although we can't have both passports because you can't combine German nationality with anything else).

I am looking forward to getting satellite TV to watch the dreadful German TV, however. It is truly awful and makes me laugh until I cry.

I do not miss the silly bureaucracy over there, nor the grumpiness towards working mothers.

Likewise over here sometimes things are run very inefficiently and it does my head in.

It's actually quite a positive aspect to my life, thinking about it, because I can enjoy what I choose to like about both cultures.

Expat
I know, that was an awful generalisation, I hesitated to post that, but it was an American friend who told me that.

I had DH's German friend on the phone last night, talking in English to practice. It is awful cause I don't understand him and want to shout Speak German!