Posts Tagged "England"

It Started Seven Years Ago…Hello England

Posted by cafebebemama on Feb 7, 2012 in It Started Seven Years Ago | 0 comments

So in the previous installment of “It Started Seven Years Ago…”, Mark had picked me out of the crowd at Luton Airport and we were about to spend our first weekend together. It was a bit of a weird prospect, actually. Crossing a channel and flying to a country I’d only seen on television to spend the weekend with a man I had only spoken to over the telephone. We were both nervous and unsure of what to do. Well, I know I was!

The drive from Luton to Mark ‘s home took about an hour. I babbled incessantly about my first few days in France including the tale of the toilets without seats. Mark laughed in all of the right places and I felt quite comfortable with him even though he didn’t have a ton of things to say. This is the way our relationship continues to this day. I am the talker, he is the listener. Here is an exerpt from my journal from our first evening together. Mark made us chilli con carne and we drank a bit of wine…

It’s at this time (with only slightly wine tinted eyes) that I decide that I could very easily fall in love with this man. I have no idea on the planet what he’s thinking though and I am not about to push it. I decide then that I am going to wait for him to make the first move.

On the Saturday, I wake up mid-morning thanks to my jet lag and then begin to feel entirely unwell. The jet lag and exceptionally curvy roads are a bit too much for me and I find myself in a perpetual state of nausea and wooziness. I don’t make the best company in the world but I don’t say a thing and do my best to play along. I am taken on a tour of Stamford where I eat my first fish, chips and mushy peas. We also go to Peterborough where I get a tour of the mall and Peterborough Cathedral. Little did I know that I would eventually call all of these places home.

Eventually, riding in the car totally gets to me and we return home where I take up residence on the couch for the remainder of the evening, watching the first round of the Rugby Six Nations and eating tortellini. We have less than 12 hours together but neither of us know what to do. We’re both attracted to each other but me living in France and ultimately America is obviously the “Elephant in the room.” My incessant nausea doesn’t help my mood and both of us are left feeling a bit out of sorts.

Our journey back to Luton the next morning is painfully quiet. When we arrive at Luton, I am expecting that Mark will just say, “Thanks for coming” and drop me off at Departures but he parks and escorts me into the airport. It’s time to say goodbye after only 2 days together. After all of the phone conversations and a slightly awkward weekend together, the rest of our future lies in the next few moments. What to do, what to do? I begin to babble and say thank you and blah, blah, blah like I can do so well. I say that I had better be going and walk closer to Mark. He steps in a gives me a light kiss on the lips and then I wrap my arms around him and hug him tightly. He puts his arms around me and rests his chin on the top of my head and we both sort of sigh. He kisses me on the top of my head and I look up at him. We kiss again briefly and he mentions that he really needs to come to Paris so I can show him what a wonderful place it really is. I say “Really??” and he says yes. A flicker of hope…there very well could be something there.

I grab my bright pink suitcase and say thank you and goodbye and again and we both go our separate ways. Both wondering, hoping and just a bit happier after a pretty lovely start to something…but what would come next?

Paris!

It started seven years ago…the beginning

Posted by cafebebemama on Feb 2, 2012 in It Started Seven Years Ago | 0 comments

Life as I know it? It started seven years ago! I left the United States on 31 January, 2005 to begin a study-abroad term in Caen, France. You see, I was back at University in my hometown to complete a 2nd degree to become a French teacher. One of the requirements for the degree was to spend a semester (3 months) abroad in an exchange programme. My University was “twinned” with the University of Caen in Normandy, France. I packed up far too many things in 2 massive suitcases and 2 massive carry-ons and flew across an ocean to begin my adventure.

I had begun talking to my now-husband Mark in November of the previous year. I had been good friends with his twin sister when she and her family were based in the same town as me. When I told her about my study abroad programme she insisted that I give her my contact details so she could pass them on to her brother. He lived in England and as I was going to be in France, she figured that having a person to know on this side of the pond would be useful. I believe that she secretly knew that we would make a match made in heaven. Clever clogs!

I gave Julie my details and that’s the last I thought about it! Little did I know, Mark was sitting, an ocean away, trying to build up the courage to ring a woman he’d never spoken to before. Then, he lost the card that I had written my details down on! A few months went by. Mark decided to get rid of the 3-piece suite in his lounge. When he moved one of the couches, the card with my details on it appeared as if by magic. (Perhaps he should have cleaned more often??) Eventually he rang me. He got my mobile answering service:

Uh, hello, this is Mark Joyce, Julie’s brother, from England. I’ll try to ring you back another time. Cheers!

That was it! But imagine little old me, a simple gal in Wisconsin, USA, picking up messages off my mobile and hearing an English voice and wondering who the heck it was and OH MY GOD…how do you dial international??? Eventually Mark and I managed to connect through the phone wires. We talked for over an hour that first time and while I was training my ear to understand his accent, Mark was making a real impression on my heart. Those first steps toward each other happened through the phone lines and emails. Well, I say emails but really ME emailing HIM as Mark isn’t very fond of email or the internet.

We eventually made plans to meet. I was leaving the US on 31 January to arrive in France on 1 February. I decided, in my own pea brain, that if this was going to develop into something, I wanted to meet Mark in person sooner rather than later. I made arrangements to fly from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris via easy Jet to Luton Airport in England on Friday 4 February, 2005. This required me to take a 2 hour train ride from Caen to Paris, a 45-minute plane ride from Paris to Luton and spend the weekend with a man I had never met! Oh and through poor planning, I realised that I needed to change my flight on the Sunday from Luton back to Paris which required me to pay 99€ on the spot for the luxury. I tell you what…it was worth it.

I’m going to share with you, over the course of a few days this week, some exerpts from my journal at the time. I decided to chart my path with paper and pen way back then…blogging wasn’t quite at the forefront of my plans then. I read back through those entries and can still laugh out loud at some of the experiences I had. I was such a different woman then and had no clue how much my life would change all thanks to a note card with some letters and numbers on it.

Tune in tomorrow to read about my first few days in France and my nervous anticipation for my weekend in England.

Flashback Friday: Home is where the heart is

Posted by cafebebemama on Jul 29, 2011 in American Mum Me, Blogger Love, Flashback Friday, Little Miss Adventures, Motherhood, Travelling Adventures | 4 comments

This is one of my favourite pictures of Ella. It was taken in December of 2008 during our first visit back to the US with Ella. She was 6 months old and is sleeping on the shoulder of my Dad, Ella’s Grandpa. This visit was a special one for us. First of all, we hadn’t been back to the US since 2005. I had gone back to the US in September of 2005 to settle my life there before moving permanently to the UK to be with Mark, my then-fiance. Mark joined me for 1/2 of my visit and got to meet my family and see what my life was like in Wisconsin. We journeyed back to the UK in October of 2005 and didn’t go back until November 2008 as a family of three.

Ella had a WONDERFUL time on this adventure to my homeland. Everyone adored her and she succeeded in charming everyone she met. It was a bit of a bittersweet journey for us as my paternal Grandpa had passed away in March of 2008, prior to Ella being born and Ella also met both of my Grandma’s who may not see her again due to their increasing age and our lack of funds to travel back and forth to the US whenever we like. But everyone got to meet her at least once and that was the important part.

People ask me what it’s like being so far away from “home”. Well, for one thing, for me now, HOME is where the heart is. England is my home but America (specifically Wisconsin) is my homeland. Being away for 6 years now makes it difficult to feel that I belong in the US because I’m not there experiencing it on a daily basis. I have no clue what is going on in the US. Politics, celebrities, television shows, fuel prices, shops…not a clue. And because I’m not there on a regular basis, I don’t see a lot of point dwelling on it.

I miss my family, no doubt about that. Particularly now that I have a family of my own. Having my inlaws a 5-minute car ride from our house makes me painfully aware of the fact that I can’t take Ella to Grandma’s house for the afternoon or ring up Grandpa and Nanna Janna to see if they’d like to meet us for lunch somewhere. Ella misses out on valuable time with her Grandparents and that does make me sad. But what are you going to do? Our home is in England. Their home is the US. An ocean apart but never out of touch.

Skype is a saviour (when the connection is good) so at least the relatives can SEE Ella and she can establish a connection with them that does seem to carry through until the time that we finally meet again. But it is hard. For them and for us.

There will be no trips back to the US again this year. The last time we were back was October of 2009 when we attended my only brother’s wedding. More than likely, we won’t be traveling back to the US until Summer of 2012 at the earliest when we hope to take our family of FOUR back to enjoy friends, family and a Wisconsin summer. Until then, we’ll Skype and ring and hopefully have Wisconsin come to us when Bebe #2 joins our family.

Today is Flashback Friday! Take a memory from your past (any past…last week, last year, 10 years ago), write your “story”, share a smile with us and link it back for others to venture back in time to. Simple. No theme, no stress, no strain! Thank you, in advance, for sharing your life…it’s a pleasure to be invited!

Guest Expat Blogger- Vegemitevix

Posted by cafebebemama on Mar 5, 2010 in Blogger Love, Guest Bloggers | 20 comments

New Zealand Flag

US Flag

The delightful world of blogging has allowed me to get to meet so many brilliant people and Vegemitevix is one of them.  We’re kindred spirits, in fact.  Vegemitevix is a Kiwi (from New Zealand) who came to England much the same as I did.  For the love of an Englishman.  She and her Englishman have a similar love of Paris as well as I found out on her lovely post A Girl Guide in Paris.  You can read more about her life and adventures at http://vegemitevix.com.  I think you’ll love her writing and tales as much as I do.  Vegemitevix has this to say about herself:

Vegemitevix moved from the seaside city of Auckland in New Zealand to a small rural town in Hampshire in August 2008, to follow the love of a Englishman she met on holiday in Paris in 2007. She took along for the ride, her kids (two teens and a tweenie) the family pets, twenty boxes of earthly possessions and guts! Swapping pavlova for pork pies, beautiful beaches for Blighty and sun, sea and surf for snow and sleet, Vegemitevix blogs stories from the expat frontline.

I now bring you Vegemitevix’ guest post for my Friday offering.  It’s all about being an expat…something I know just a bit about.  If you’d like to read my post on Vegemitevix’ blog…head on over there after you read this one.  My post is entitled “Pork Pies and Other Faux Pas”…it’s a corker!

Things I’ve learnt from being an Expat

This is my third experience of living the expat life. I spent my early life living in a gold-mining town of Vatakoula in Fiji, I spent my kids’ early lives in Brisbane, Australia and now I’m here – in Hampshire, UK.

New Zealand’s national bird and icon is the flightless kiwi – a discreet brown little bird who forages for food on the forest floor! Yet Kiwis have a reputation for lots of travel. Who says Kiwi’s can’t fly? Huh!

I’ve learnt so much from being an expat. Some silly things, some trivial, some deep…and…meaningful, some things about the world, the universal way of things and some sometimes alarmingly revealing things, about myself.

Here’s a few of them.

You wouldn’t go into someone’s home and tell them they had a small house, you didn’t like the food and laugh at their accent, would you? It’s never a good idea to complain about your host country and compare it with home. It’s hard to not do this. At first everything is so new and different and interesting, but after a while the exotic light dims and the comparisons begin. My son (aged 14 when he first arrived in England) would often come out with terribly embarrassing comments such as

‘I got really lost on the way back cos all the houses look the same’.

And in answer to questions about whether he’d found a girlfriend at school.

‘No, all the girls are really fat in England. (He wasn’t trying to be rude, it’s not quite such an outdoorsy lifestyle here and he just lacks social graces sometimes..)

Ahem. Moving on…

Your home country’s national dish may be pickled turnips on a bed of fattened frog’s livers, but nothing in your new country will ever hold a candle to it. I will never understand what is so appealing about Cornish pasties. To me they are a heart-attack wrapped up in a stroke! Who would enjoy stewed mince meat and bland potatoes and veg swimming in coloured cardboard gravy, wrapped up in soggy pastry?

My Englishman!

He comes over all nostalgic and moist-eyed when he sees one. I don’t get it! But then he doesn’t get my favourite food, oysters. I particularly love Bluff oysters from the deep south of New Zealand! He doesn’t understand the attraction of what looks to him like the contents of a sailor’s spittoon and tastes like fermented cough mixture!

I’ve discovered that being an expat will do crazy things to your memory. You will all of a sudden magically memorise every single word of your national anthem, (even the Maori words that you used to mumble!) and you will be prone to bursting into song at any minor sporting triumph. You’ll remember the words and actions to the Haka despite the fact that it’s a Maori man’s ceremonial war dance. And you’re a woman! You’ll watch every All Blacks’ game you can (NZ’s national rugby team), despite the fact you loathed rugby and despaired of your rugby idolising nation!

Memories tinged with homesickness become more vivid when you’re an expat.

You’ll remember a hotter sun, a longer summer, a keener surf, and an easier lifestyle, at home. No doubt the grass is greener there too, despite the fact it doesn’t rain as much as here in England.

Nowhere has as much rain as England!

I’ve been here over 18 months now and I’ve been amazed at how few Kiwis live in my neck of the words. I haven’t met one fellow Kiwi – with familiar squashed dipthongs and flattened vowels – in this little town. This sad search for fellow countrymen and women lead me to throwing myself at a man at the Basingstoke Ocktoberfest who was wearing a t-shirt with a Kiwi advertising slogan on it – ‘Yeah right’. (It’s advertising for a beer called Tui) Keen on making friends I bounded up to him like a friendly Labrador, patted him on the back and said about the rapidly diminishing beer supplies at the festival

‘Beer at a beerfest, yeah right’

He gave me that look that silently asked ‘How long until your meds?’

I tried to explain but failed in light of the fact he was English and the t-shirt was a gift. I hurriedly lost myself in the crowd.

It’s possibly a blessing in disguise that there aren’t many Kiwis living nearby, as there’s no way I can loose myself in a clicque of countrymen. I’ve had to assimilate, though I’ve learnt to be careful to remain true to myself and my identity. I have to encourage the kids to not pick up the local accent. I was horrified when my ten year old daughter came home talking…

‘like is, dropping the ‘t’s in words like, y’know like wah-a not water’. I got her to drop it immediately. The fake accent. Not the t’s.

Being an expat makes you an immediate expert about everything that comes from your home country. At times you become something of a walking talking tour guide. Lord of the Rings? I know all the scene locations. America’s Cup – I was there wearing lucky red socks! How to shear a sheep….um….I’m a city girl!

Everyone you meet knows someone who lives in New Zealand, and they want to know if you know that someone too.

‘Where are you from’ asks the key cutting engraver.

‘Auckland, New Zealand’s major city’

‘OOOOOh I know Fred and Martha Anderson they live in Auckland. Do you know them?’

Patient look. Faint pleasant smile.

‘No sorry I don’t think I’ve come across them.’

There’s just under 2 million people in Auckland. I’m a friendly girl, but not that friendly! I don’t know everyone!

I’ve learnt so much from being an expat.

The most important lesson of all I think, is how deeply unsettling homesickness can be. It creeps up on you not on the dull dark days, but when everything is working out well. When the sun’s shining and the new family dynamics are working out. There’s no explanation, and often no warning when homesickness will strike. Learning how to work through it has been one of the major lessons of my life. After all it’s simply learning how to deal with change. Our whole lives we are travelling from place to place (emotionally if not physically) from age to age, from circumstance to new circumstance. Learning how to cope with change has meant that I am painting myself with resilience. I’m adapting and growing.

I’m forever learning and that is a very precious lesson indeed.

Happy Christmas from England

Posted by cafebebemama on Dec 26, 2009 in American Mum Me | 4 comments

Little Miss & Daddy meet Santa

I’ve lived in England for nearly 4 1/2 years now and every Christmas I manage to miss the Queen’s Christmas Message.  We’re usually having Christmas dinner or something like that and about 15 minutes after it’s over I say, “Oh no!  We missed it  again!”  So I’m providing you with the You Tube broadcast of the Queen’s Christmas Message.  Thank you, Queenie…I might miss it every year but now I can rely on You Tube!  Wonder what videos the Queen watches on You Tube!

Happy Christmas Everyone!  Here’s to a smashing end to 2009 and an awesome start to 2010!  Love to everyone…