Bob

Oooh....that sounds good!

Bob

Seriously?

You don't for one second ever think "well this is shit", about absolutely anything? Ikea furniture, drivers on the way to work, the weather, doctors appointment being late?

steveq

Things are different, things are better, things are worse, things "they" do are funny to us, things we do are funny to "them". But where-ever I've been for pleasure or work (28 countries to date), the people are the same.

dj6372

Oh it was, Tums are being used now!

Ash UK/US

Excellently worded!

themadpooper

Sounds frightfully middle class, not sure how your antidote helps those of us who are youngish males without kids. How does joining a British group help you assimilate, btw,? Surely that's the problem for far too many Brits who come over, they just don't want to. The only way you're gonna get over homesickness is by getting out there and making friends with Americans and doing American thigns, not surrounding yourself with HobNobs and having meltdowns in shops because god forbid they don't sell British things

themadpooper

Where do you live

New York pizza is amazing or come to Chicago and try proper Chicago deep dish or as we Chicagoans call it, "pie". Certainly beats Pizza Hut

Nutek

kodokan

Come now, I know PF is widely travelled, writes very well, and has extensive life experience, but it's still a little unreasonable to expect every one of her posts to cater for the entire spectrum of gender, age, and household formation.

I think 'assimilation' is an ambitious aim for a woman with young children who who moved here 6 weeks ago, a move that was to support her husband's career and therefore may not have been entirely something she wholeheartedly sought out?

Surely you can grasp that situation, even if you don't have the empathy to further extrapolate that someone who's already probably gone through several major identity changes in recent years - due to changes in her work/ relationship/ parent statuses - may just be a teensy bit overwhelmed with yet another one at a point when she's barely got over the jet lag.

You're probably on the right lines when you say 'Surely that's the problem for far too many Brits who come over, they just don't want to'. Maybe she didn't want to, not really. Maybe she had a career of her own she's had to give up, maybe she's never been a full time mum before, maybe she's ambivalent about sacrificing her career for her husband's and is worrying about the effect of the move on her prospects, maybe she's worrying about the effect of the move on their relationship dynamic now that she's a 'dependent' - the visa says so! - maybe she's fretting about the kids' education, etc.

Supermarket meltdowns are NOT about spoiled colonials wondering why the natives can't get on board with HP sauce - they're the tiny final straw that the expat, especially the 'trailing spouse' who's not had the benefit of effortlessly switching countries without any noticeable impact on their daily life waking hours, feels they can rant about because exposing the rest of it to the air is just too damn dark and raw.

For what it's worth, I also do have enormous sympathy for people who move overseas or even to a new city alone. Your working life ticks along in an easy enough fashion, but you still have to go home on a Friday afternoon and open the door on the dark, empty house, and realize once again that you now won't speak to anyone who's not a shop assistant for nearly three days. It's tough on everyone, at times, which is why we try to offer a constructive tone of 'poor you, it iS hard at first... pat, pat... but it gets better...have you tried X?' rather than 'why can't you just pull yourself together? It's merely a question of positive thinking, you know'.

Englishmum

You are spot on there, Bob.

I've been resident in Switzerland for a few years (not for much longer ) and over here there is an expat website for English speakers. Just look at some of the posts in this link to see what Americans, Brits, Canadians, Aussies, South Africans etc. all miss from their home countries and it's not just food, someone said that they missed the early morning blue mist in the bluebell woods:


What do you really miss the most? - English Forum Switzerland

After living overseas for 21 years (Singapore x 2, USA and Switzerland) what I miss most of all (foodwise) is just about any product sold in the Marks and Spencers food hall!

kodokan

Ah, good old English Forum. Whenever I get nostalgic and regretful about leaving Switzerland*, I go and read some posts in there, and on the Facebook group Grumpy Expat. That fixes me right up

*I loved Switzerland, but staying there would've been detrimental to my husband's career, and my son's education. I like many things about the US too and am happy here, but the driver for this move wasn't to fulfill my personal desires/ hopes/ dreams. The minute you go from a single to a couple, a couple to a family with kids, you enter the Land of Compromise for one or more of the people concerned when it comes to lifestyle choices. I am, for example, currently sucking up living in Dull Suburbs because my preferred options of rural with chickens or downtown urbanity don't remotely fit with my teens having a social life or an acceptable school system.

petitefrancaise

oh you are back? shame.
her toddler missed custard creams and all his friends and his granny who had looked after him since he was born. He had been crying himself to sleep for nights on end. She had hoped to at least find custard creams for him.

We can all cope with so much and much like the people who come on this forum, what is needed is a bit of well, Britishness to fortify us and help us deal with what is thrown at us in a foreign land. Not that you'd know much about it.

petitefrancaise

maybe I'm just getting a little old and crusty.

I liked Bob's post immensely. Talks a lot of good sense most of the time.

I don't want to assimilate - not sure I totally understand what people mean by that anyway. I think it means different things to different people and certainly there are degrees of it.

I am British but have spent a great deal of my adult life not in Britain, so I'm not even sure of my Britishness anyway. I have taken on mannerisms and attitudes from most of the places I have lived and I think what I am now is someone who is comfortable in her own skin. I don't want to "become" american anymore than I wanted to become french. Whatever that means. Who knows. I miss marks and sparks custard cream and underwear. I miss french patisserie, cheese, clothes and underwear and I'm sure that I will miss somethings from the US if I retire back to Europe.

Wanting to mingle with people who share your social background is comforting. Ever tried to talk about wombles outside of the UK? I think people who try too hard to become whatever it is they think constitutes an american/french or whatever come over as being false. Just as I find americans who try too hard to be British slightly disconcerting.

MidAtlantic

The title of this thread is food shopping. That's all I was ever talking about.

themadpooper

Your tone, like one or two others on this forum, isn't helpful. You know nothing about me and I'm pretty sure you have no desire to change that, so I respectively ask you, not for the first time, to drop the chip on your shoulder and learn to respect those who disagree with you. My experiences of the Unites States are just as extensive, if not more so, than a great deal of individuals who post on this forum, just because you've been posting yours longer, you don't have carte blanche to tell me to basically shut up