No Place Like Home....s

Hey! I'm gonna blog.

Lots of things have happened since I blogged last. Here's a one sentence synopsis: We moved to a new house, had visitors for a month, visited America, then another visitor.

To get the ol' bloggin ball a rollin again, I thought I'd do a Britland vs "The States" list. See, there were a lot of things we were looking forward to in America. Space, fountain drinks, space, food, space, oh, and friends and family... Once we got there, though, I was looking forward to some of the Britishy things I'd left behind. So here they are, all organizationally layed out for you and whatnot!

God Bless American...

* fountain drinks * road space * Mexican food * mountains *

smoke-free beaches with sunshine * boating * junk food * hot dogs

* campfires * Old Navy * friends & family * country music *

exchange-rate making everything on sale for us people who are paid in pounds *

campfires * lack of inhibition * Slurpees and SnoCones *

Reeses anything * stores that stay open past 5:00 pm * SUVs and pickups *

weaponry (pocketknives, bb guns, etc) *

Good Old Britishy...

* roundabouts * cheese * chocolate * Indian food * public transportation *

accents * politeness * wellies * rain on the conservatory roof *

markets * healthy eating * spunky old ladies * friends *

international holiday destinations * history * villages * London

* Caramel Digestives * teapots * Lush bath ballistics * footpaths * countryside *

Primark * double-decker busses * the kids saying Britishy phrases *

overall Britishy-ness *

It looked all cute and in different fonts and sizes, but then it all went away, because sometimes blogger hates me. Enjoy anyway!

Protecting Freedom. You're Welcome.

This link (at the bottom of this post) explains the whole story, but let's just say a certain 5 (or is he 6 yet?) yr. old back in America is pretty sure we ended the Revolutionary War with our move here- in the roles of American peace-making ambassadors, of course. Give it a read, it'll make ya laugh! It also puts a lot of pressure on us, I mean, we're protecting the freedom of all Americans here! (and I thought we were just enjoying the accents and fabulous cheese!)

http://allez-oop.blogspot.com/2011/03/vive-la-revolution.html

Quiz Night, Expat Edition

Not the cool pub kind. Even cooler.

I thought it might be useful to have some Q & A from real-life expats living here in Britland. I'm hoping to make a set list of questions and post answers from a different expat each month.

I've got a lot of questions I remember staying up at night thinking about before our move, and I think I broke the internet with all my millions of Britishy searches. I'll add my own questions to the list, but also want to hear from you!

So, here's the pre-quiz quiz:

What have you potential expats been Googling in hopes of insider information? What worries about your move have been keeping you up at night? What do you need to know to help you make all those life-changing decisions about your future in a country you might not have even been to yet?

Leave your questions in the comments for this post, and I'll try to include them in the quiz. If no-one has any real questions, I'll try my best to make a Q & A list of actual, useful questions, but I can't promise it won't just end up as a random list of insanity. That's just how my brain works, people!

If The Queen Only Knew!

I bet she'd be pretty pissed at the people delivering the post in her good name. (At least those sending it overseas, our own postman is delightful...)

January 12th we finally got our end-o-the year DVDs sent on their way to US friends and family. We do a DVD instead of a letter every year. Well, ok, not every year, I mean- you've all seen just how consistent I am with communication. But still... all the more reason this was a special delivery! After a few weeks, we were worried that the "5 business days" had come and gone.. and come and gone again... with no deliveries. After another week, 2 of the DVDs (out of 11 total) arrived.... to ALASKA and HAWAII!! At least if things had to go wrong, it was hilariously wrong. Of course our friends in Alaska and Hawaii get theirs before anyone else! Over a month since sending them off into the unknown, we decided a lonely/creepy postal worker along the way must have decided to keep the DVDs (one for watching, 8 for backup), so we sent them again, but this time in the luggage of a co-worker who was a good enough sport to start carrying our mail. Yes, you guessed it, before he even made it home, everyone else got the originals.

I guess, if I am to be honest and impartial, this could have happened after the DVDs made it to America. They could have been sitting in a USPS office for a month. However, we all know what happens when you disgruntle a postal worker in the US, so we'll place the blame on the friendlier of the two varieties of Post Office employees.

Now, the point of this story is not to complain. It is to warn The Queen about the false promises being made right in her own Royal Mail service. Also, it is to give me a place to post the pictures of a very important present before I send it, in case this is the last I see of it. So, Agelsfy, here are the birds I made for your wedding cake toppers! We'll send them expedited and super-protected and whatever else we can, with tracking, and if you could just hang out in Alaska or Hawaii for a week or so, I'm sure you'll get them before your wedding. Here are a few pictures of what you're looking for:

feathery hairclip to match Agelsfy's

...aaand yes, that's an unpainted gnome behind them. Gnome not included.

drugged up and uterus free

Hey all! This is going to have to be a picture-free blog post, so let's all pull out our imaginations and dust them off. Good, good!

Today I'm all drugged up, slightly dizzy and nauseous, and I am 100% more uterus-less than last time I posted. That's right- I'm one of those foreigners who has come to the UK and taken full advantage of the national health care system. Now we can go home! Not really. I was planning on having this done after moving back to the US, but life likes to shake things up a bit, so I went ahead and had surgery now. The good news is I will have several weeks of free-ish time to blog. The bad news is that I might be drugged up as I blog, so good luck making sense of anything I write.

I guess today we can tell you all about the differences in health care between the UK and the US. Now, you might think health care here is free. It is in that you don't pay any co-pays, and kids get free prescriptions. I feel like a thief every time I leave the pharmacy and they just hand over a bag of drugs and wave goodbye. Even though I know it's free, I have to force myself to just take the bag and leave without feeling like I'm doing something shifty.

It's not free, though, really. You pay enough taxes to cover costs that it makes one want to start dumping tea into the harbor. That being said, national health care is turning out to be a much better plan than I had thought it would be. I think some of that might have to do with the overall attitude of Britishy Folks, though. Here in Britland, the average Joe, or maybe average Dave since we're in Essex, thinks of health care like this: "Well, what a jolly good plan. We can't have people running about without a Doctor, can we? Let's all chip in, and everyone queue up at the Surgery. (doctor's office.)" In America people think national health care sounds great, but the average Joe thinks of the plan like this: "Heck yeah the government should be paying for health care! Psch! We demand doctors and hospitals, I mean c'mon, it's our right as human beings! Pay up, government! Now, outta my way, I'm ten times sicker than you, I get to go first in line." Yes, he is grammatically incorrect, but that's what he would say. So... yes the health care system here seems to be getting the job done, but it hasn't convinced me we should do the same thing in America.

Now, being the paranoid American that I am, we were glad to see basic private health insurance was part of our benefits plan. I was pretty sure without it we would all catch random diseases and die before we could get in to see a doctor. It doesn't quite work that way, though. As far as I can tell, private health insurance in the UK is like those FastPass Tickets at Disneyland. Without it we would still be able to get in to see a doctor for regular things like sinus infections and immunizations. We would still be able to get broken bones fixed or emergency procedures done. For non-life-threatening surgeries, though, you "jump the queue". I only needed 2 weeks notice for my surgery. If I didn't have private health care, I could have waited years from what people tell me.

There are other perks, too. When I asked the nurse at the pre-op appointment what the private health insurance did, she said, "It means you get a room of your own at hospital instead of sharing one with a crackhead." Pretty much summed it up right there, I guess.

So, kids, here's what we have learned in this drug-fog ramble of a post:

*National Health Care rocks in the UK, but would crash and burn among us demanding Americans

*I no longer have a uterus.

*Private Health Insurance in the UK is just your Disneyland FastPass

*Blogging on drugs might not be as good of a plan as I originally thought.

More to come! Anything you want a slightly loopy Phyllis to fill you in on in the next few weeks? Let me know!