The newest visitor

This one only arrived in the past week. Most interesting is that he/she (but it looks like a 'she' to me) comes up to the doors and stares in. If the doors are open, she almost wants to come in and raises a foot to do so, but then sees one of us and backs off. If the doors are shut, she'll bat at a finger which is run along the glass...she seems most curious as to what we're up to and will stand outside and stare in...

The state of the 'heather in europe'

The US President gets to do his state of the union address, there's also usually a 'state of the state' done by a state govenor, as well as the 'first 100 days' review...periodically I do a 'state of the heather', although I don't usually put it onto the blog. However, as earlier this week marked my first 100 days in the UK, here are my thoughts:

1. How do you feel about leaving Germany and coming to the UK?
Superb. 100% this was the right decision.

2. What's do wrong with Germany?
Nothing's wrong with Germany, it's just that five years there marked the break even point, so I got out at what I deemed to be the right time. Search for my posts tagged 'german' to review the past five or so years if you're really curious for more details.

3. What's so right about the UK?
I wanted to come back to the UK for a long time, and not just for language or cultural reasons. A few Germans have mentioned to me that they feel that Germany is closer to America than America is closer to the UK. Not sure that I disagree with that sentiment. Although Germany has long held close ties to the UK as well.

Essex has a gritty feel which reminds me of Philly. Tuesday morning I was car number three parked up in line waiting for the facilities guy to open the parking lot entrace at benevolent company J's industrial street office at 06.53. The office is chock full of foul language and is mainly men. I can wear trousers every single day and swear like a sailor and no one will blink twice. It's comforting to just 'be' and not have to stress about office politics.

Having grown up sandwiched between blue collar Philly and the rural outskirts, it's comfortable to me to be in this environment. I was in Asda (the Walmart equivalent) late one evening looking at their brand of rice which was on sale. The stock person (I love to shop 22.00 or later when it's only the stock people) noticed me looking at the package and suggested that I check out the endcap special--I could get the rice plus either pasta sauce or pasta on a two-for-one special. I'm not so far removed to remember where I came from and I have a good job, pension, car etc. but it's easy for me to slip back into this environment. I know what it's like to live hand to mouth and in Germany it was a foreign concept. In the UK it's easy to slip back into what I was, and I'm happy to be there.

If I had to boil it down, I'd make this summary of points:
1. Work permit/citizenship topics
A. The UK offers the option to go to permanent residency and then UK citizenship with dual US citizenship. UK citizenship offers entry into the EU job market. Germany draws the line at permanent residency, unless you want to give up your existing citizenship, which most of us don't want to do. Why should I have continued to spend more years in Germany which counted for nothing when I could start the clock ticking again toward UK permanent residency and then citizenship? The best I could have mustered out of the deal from Germany was to fling my German 3rd country national permanent residency toward another EU nation (excluding England, Ireland and Denmark).

B. My work permit is based on my personal application, I am not sponsored by benevolent company J here. At any time I may jump ship, unemcumbered, and change to a different job/company. Not that I want to, granted, but that is a huge weight off my shoulders. OK, so I must renew after three years, but that's the easy part, assuming that one finds a job and pays taxes. The difficult part was the initial entry.

2. Superb healthcare
Ticktock. UK maternity benefits are not as good as other EU countries (i.e. Germany, France), but cost-wise they are impressive and thus far I've been impressed with the healthcare I have received.

3. Similarity to the US in some major (to me) items
Store opening times, English language literature, free libraries, prevalence of veg foods, etc.

What would I change?
Intellectually, while the British English is a little different, I'm not mentally challenged without the stress of converting everything into another language. This should change a little when I start at LSE in the fall.

What else pleases me these days?
A few things, actually. I'm in the process of buying a flat. That one deserves a whole separate post. And I've been seeing a nice British boy. As we all know I'm not especially forthcoming here, so consider the magnitute of that one. ;-)

Looking back over the past 100 days, I don't think that I would change a thing, and for me who must analyze, review and improve, that's a pretty big thing. :-)

A countryside walk in Essex

When the rain stops, the countryside here is gorgeous. Even when it's overcast, the green colors in the fields and forests are fantastic.

Into the countryside we go...and for the record, it's not really a private road, it's a public one with a fancy sign.


We've yet to see them...wondering why type of training they do here?


Of course because it's the UK, they add the 'Please'. Do you thing a peeved dog added the smear around the T in 'with'? ;-)


"And the plane flies through the air"
We saw lots of old military planes going past.

New friend Ian, can you see beyond the rapeseed? Or maybe the Essex Police are somewhere in there training?

Growing mushrooms

I love mushrooms. When I'm waxing eloquent, I attribute it to my Lithuanian heritage where they have a love of forests and all things found within. So when I was buying seeds a few months back at the garden center, and I saw this, I thought, why not?


I've never attempted to 'grow' mushrooms, so this was an interesting (albeit slow) process. Inside the box were two bags, one with a woody wet substance and the other with a rich dark soil.



The instructions say to spread the former in the box, wet it, and put the box somewhere warm. I did this on April 15th. What a great celebration of American tax day! As I owed money this year, perhaps I was feeling poor and that I would need to depend on my wits and grow my own food.

After 10 days, the 'regular' dirt gets added and mixed with the woody dirt, and the box lid gets propped up to allow for air passage. It was a right good mess to mix the soils. Good thing I wasn't depending on this for my survival. As of May 1, not much was happening:

Finally, on May 15th, the little white specs which had appeared somewhere along the way became actual mushrooms (the small, white blobs on the right). I think I may have overdone the watering or I excel at growing mold:

I became busy with work and other stuff, so the mushrooms were off doing their own thing. I thought perhaps that the other little pinheads in the box would have done the same as the first bunch who would be patiently waiting. Not quite. Not only did none of the other little mushrooms decide to grow up, but the original bunch appeared ready to take over the house:

For size comparison purposes, here they are next to a box of tissues:


At the end of the day, they went into a Malaysian sauce:


I wasn't sure if they would really be edible or would be too woody as they were supposed to be button mushrooms, thus the 'back up' serving of broccoli and tofu. However, they actually turned out to be quite good.

Studying the UK culture

The last time I was in the UK, I learned a lot about British culture from television, while a UK person tried to explain what I was seeing. It was V Graham Norton and Big Brother.

This time, I've been sucked into Question Time and Britain's Next Top Model. I'm not much of a TV person except for educational purposes.

Pity the UK person who watches TV with me, they must suffer through my one million questions, primarily:
-Where's he from?
-Where's her accent from?
-What's a chav?
-Why is that cricket man out?

Into a three day weekend I go...

Just for the record

I love that Germany and the UK often have differing public holidays. I get a lot done when Germany is off. Since they have off today and most are taking tomorrow as a bridge day, they will come into a pile of emails from me on Monday while we have the UK public holiday. Then they'll be sure to return the favor and send me a pile. :-)

Thankfully, the weather has been picking up this week, so we'll see how it holds for the weekend (fingers crossed!) and then Monday. :-)

What could be better...

Than schlepping across downtown London at 445 PM with a camping backpack and work heels?
Doing all of the above while also lugging along two German pillows.

After a few long days away, I couldn't be more exited to be able to break them in tonight...

Still here....

but busy. back with you late Wednesday night. off to play in London for a few days. ok, ok, it's for work...

Back to Germany - June planning

Don't worry, only for a week. ;-) I have a loose agreement with the office, to come back on an 'as needed' basis, which I'm hoping bottoms out to once per quarter. I've taken the first two plus months here to detox from everything I didn't like about the country and to be taken over by life in the UK.

Being out of that environment makes it a little easier to see the positives of life there (which tended to be overshadowed for me by the shouting, bumping cranks breathing down your neck in the supermarket queue, which wasn't a queue as much as a free-for-all.)

(Sidenote--I've been bumped into only three times in the UK so far, twice at the London marathon, and all three times people apologized. Ho ho ho how life is different here.)

So my work colleagues have been asking more than once, so back I go. I've been querying my work colleagues to make sure that everyone is around, and to try to arrange some small visits, in particular, I'm arranging my schedule around my German hair stylist and my English student.

I'm staying the Friday night and leaving Saturday morning so that we can get a proper drink up in place involving Koelsch and maybe some veg burgers on the bbq. I've already put in my request for Gaffel which was, of course, met with resistence.

German Colleague: Pfui! Gaffel!
H: Ja, ja, you'll have the Reissdorf.
GC: Of course.
H: (thinking) So you're a meat eater who will eat exclusively veg meals with me, but God forbid I ask you to bring another Koelsch brand into the house. ;-)

If you're in the Cologne/D'dorf area June 14-18--let me know if you want to meet up in the evening after work. I haven't yet booked those flights, so if you want to host me and humor me the night of Saturday, June 13th, I'll come in a night earlier. ;-)

The farmers market in Hertford

We left Essex this weekend and went to Hertford. It was a smaller market, with local based sellers:

The text is a little difficult here, it's a 'Nectar Patisserie' American Apple & Cinnamon Cake.

The expat sub-conscious

People talk about the subconscious mind as a powerful thing, often in a positive way--to harness one's subconscious thoughts will allow someone to find increased productivity, happiness and success.

I find the stakes change when you live as an expat, all bets are off. The subconscious functions at an entirely different level due to the differences it encounters all day long. Even in an environment like the UK which is similar to the US in not only culture but language, I spend much of the day processing what I see--whether it is the intentional or unintentional noticing of things.

When I lived in Germany the subconscious would occasionally voice its concern about being ignored by appearing in my dreams, in particular, in German. Sitting in an office with only German speakers, I picked up a lot of the language, even though I find it to be an unattractive collection of sounds. I had no interest to better my language skills, but that did stop it from plowing its way in and taking root. Then on occasion, for whatever reason my dreams would be frequented with German speaking--nothing I would on a conscious level encourage.

Here in the UK, I get the feeling a lot of the subscious behavior and actions are processed in the background. When processing is stalled or halted (for whatever reason), the subconscious takes over the only area it can find, my night-time dreaming, and then goes haywire with the amount of freedom of expression it suddenly encounters.

Last night, as I was falling asleep I found myself driving in California. Specifically, on El Camino Real (the 82), near Menlo Park, complete with Safeways and everything. I fought to stay awake while driving and suddenly shifted into a different part of the dream which turned into a nightmare. Upon waking from this nightmare I was able to recall this half-awake driving dream. Specifically, I was sitting in the right hand side driving (UK side), but driving on the right side of the road (US/Germany side). I'm not sure why this combination came together as it did, except that the driving here still requires conscious thought, and obviously the subsconscious has been working on it too.

I spent the rest of the night battling vivid dreams, (but not nightmares), waking up from one to fall back to sleep into another one. Why? Not sure. I've spent most of my free time this week (ie. every waking hour outside of work) focused on a non-work project, (which relates indirectly to what I do for work) and went too many days on minimum sleep. The dread? I rarely go one night like this--usually it will be two or three nights or so of such activities...

The poster child for death warmed over

Either corporate cost cutting found its latest victim in the filter coffee, or the facilities staff is proving their true worth by dragging their feet on the refill ordering, to prove their point that people should be nicer and load the dishwasher to keep on their good side. (And honestly--if a coffee drinker was a chief culprit, I wouldn't be surprised by such actions here.) As we know, there's not a huge following of 'real' coffee drinkers in the office here, so not really sure that this is a money saving mechanism, so really hoping its the latter.

Today was day 3 without filter coffee. As we know--I find the taste of instant coffee to be lacking--in effect it's the equivalent of licking tree bark. Yes, really. The first day it was perhaps seen as a little blip of a delay....day two and the grumples are coming out...day 3 is showing what people are made of.

One person (obviously a male) left the filter basket on the counter with a filter in it. I imagine he does that at home and the coffee fairy magically fixes everything which is wrong with his world.

I ran into someone who (sheepishly) had a french press in hand. (That will be my tactic starting Monday. Three days of this was sufficient to highlight this point to me.)

Because we're all attempting to make do with the substandard instant and feeling the hurt--that ran out at 10.30. One coffee drinker then had a meltdown in the kitchen, that it isn't fair that tea drinkers get fresh milk, which is expensive, while coffee is not being provided.

A few more days of this and I'll be off caffeine, as I'm seriously low right now as I've gone to extremely limited consumption rather than suffer the indignity of licking tree bark.

I like coffee in the morning. It makes the world a more pleasant place. Thankfully I am at home and looking forward to French pressed happiness tomorrow.

Because I can...

After a month of hemming and hawing, I finally got off the fence and signed up for LSE.

The good:

*Benevolent company J agreed to allow me to work my full-time job around LSE class hours and to work either early or later than normal EU hours when classes are in session. Granted, I support Asia, the US, and South America in addition to Europe--so there is always a location whose business hours I can be working with that timezone mix. :-)

*In addition, they agreed to pay through their UK tuition reimbursement program. They pay 50% now and 50% upon completion. So in effect, the degree becomes free (assuming that I stay past the 'holding' period upon completion).



The bad:

*The holding period locks me into Benevolent company J for another 3 years after the 2 year degree completion point. Nothing against company J, and I think it's a fair policy--I'm just not so fond of owing anyone cash, which in effect this is to me.

*The commute from Essex into London is readily possible with regional train, but not so pretty--building in time for the train or tube to be late--2 hours is the conservative estimate for travel time door to door.

*I do need to front the 50% they fund upon completion until I actually complete. Currently all my side hustle earnings are going into an empty pasta sauce jar toward this end. (Arriving in the UK without UK credit history I was only able to get a 'student' passport bank account--one without interest gaining--for my first year here. So I'd rather hold onto it than let the thieving scoundrels of my giant banking conglomerate have any extra interest free cash.)



The ugly:

*Travel costs from my corner of Essex (assuming I pay for a round trip ticket each time I go and cannot find any travel card alternative or advance buy alternative) is between 17-22 GBP/trip which I will have to front.



The good (again):

*The semesters are short-http://www2.lse.ac.uk/termDates/Home.aspx

*It will look nice on my CV.
*I am a proverbial student.
*It will nice to make some new connections whose circles I probably wouldn't otherwise cross.
*I suspect the subject matter will actually be quite interesting and overall helpful to me from a professional knowledge standpoint.

In case I'm missing Germany while living in the UK

No problem, I only need to drive 7 minutes to go to this one:

Or Aldi is 10 minutes in the opposite direction. See the sale advert on the wall next to the door? Just like in Germany.

Did you bring your change to get a cart? You don't need it for Asda, Tesco or any other UK supermarket chain, but you need it here:

The layout of the store is similar to the ones I've seen in DE. A row of beverages/candy, with dairy along the back. Selection here does seem a little different. I had to check out the two websites. I see Greek week is coming up in DE, not so in the UK. Although both are offering bicycle clothing right now.

Oh look--Schnittlaunch and Petersilie, and the little signs are in the same font/style as in DE. Cheaper! (Billiger!)


I had popped in after work on Friday, which is something I wouldn't do so quickly in Germany, just because I know the store would be packed with people buying a full cartload of items. Here, people were coming in just for a handful of things. (Although, they have competition next door from the low cost frozen foods place.)

Well, here's an improvement, I don't recall 'Butter Toffee' Popcorn in DE:


So we're continuing to propagate the myth of 'American Style' Pizza.

Overall--it's always good to have options, but it won't be on my regular rotation. Although it wasn't in DE either, as I preferred Pennymarkt or Aldi Sued there. Still to come in the UK--Aldi.

To the doctor in the UK

I previously had thoughts on the German medical system. As we know, Heather in Europe grew up under-insured in America where medical care was an unnecessary luxury. These habits permeate my thinking today; old habits die hard.

Thursday afternoon, I came to the sudden realization that Monday's issue was allergies. It was only after a mixture of sunny and rainy days, and feeling great on the rainy days that I realized this--duh. This is too early for allergy problems for me. Although--I've been told that what I have will get worse with age, it's only appeared during my graduate university years and progressively worsened since living over here, so it's anybody's guess at this point.

Wanting to grab the bull by the horns (and because I conked out from my America allergy drugs for 11 hours), I figured it best to take steps toward seeing a doctor. I looked up the closest one on the NHS website and called them on Thursday. A very nice woman on the phone answered that they are taking new patients from my part of town, and that I would need to show up in person to register and provide my passport and proof of address. Oki doki.

So I took my housemate along for moral support (and because he should have previously been registered in any event and was not yet) and showed up today.

Him: Hi, we recently moved to the area and need to register.

Her: OK, do you have your NHS card?

Him: I don't have mine, and she never had one.

Me: I only arrived in February.

Her: Well you didn't take long. Did I speak with you yesterday on the phone?

Me: Yes, that was me.
(I LOVE my corner of Essex, that people recognize 'the American'!)

Her: My son is marrying an American, they're coming here in the summer.

Me: Really?!

Her: Yes, he works in Chicago, I knew this would happen. But he comes home, that's the important part. And he's happy...
OK, you both need to fill out these forms. And did you bring proof of ID?

Me: (Good Lord, I lived in Germany--I brought along at least five pounds of paper.) Yes! Here is my passport and the work permit page...here is my NI number letter with my address...is that OK? Or I have my payslip with my address....or my work contract with my address....or.....or....

Her: Yes, the NI letter should suffice.

So off we go to fill out papers. As we're filling out forms, I'm half listening with an idle ear.
-no one was asked for any insurance card or paper or payment.
-the lady was very nice to everyone who called, there were two openings today that she offered to people trying to get in.
-one older woman walked in with a cut that wasn't healing well, she was asked to come back later in the day when there was an opening so a doctor could look at it.

So we turned in the papers. I mentioned about coming in at some point with the allergies and the woman asked if I could wait until next week, until they get me set up in the computer with a number? Yes, of course. She had handed me some office introduction materials. They aim to see everyone who wants an appointment within two days of request. In the US I've had to wait over six weeks in some offices. AND you're not going to charge me for this? (Ok, ok, so I'm paying for it through taxes...)