Re-entry

Over the past five years, I’ve been writing an annual update on what’s gone on in my life as an American expat in the UK. The year 2018 changed things dramatically as I was ‘recalled’ to the US and unexpectedly rejoined ‘merica.

Rather than talk about what I’ve done since my return, I thought I’d write about my observations as a returning expat. There’s definitely the reverse culture shock as you return to the familiar, but having had such a different experience of life over an extended period of time, you see things in a different way. So, while you can be comfortable, and you know ‘how things are done,’ you still have this sense of difference that can cause you to pause, or at a minimum think ‘when can I go back?’ Before I start, I’ll state the obvious – of course these observations are based on specific situations that I’ve encountered and aren’t an ‘all or nothing’ statement about the country or people in the US, or in the UK, for that matter.

My first observation is that even with the advent of the internet and 24×7 news, Americans are generally clueless about what’s going on outside our country. I know that this is a broad generalization and there are those of us that work globally, but given that the news on TV as well as the major online outlets only ever talk about the US, you have to really make an effort to find out what’s happening outside our shores. Even my iPhone news app is designed to ensure that I only see headlines about the US (unless I trick it into displaying alternative sources).

• In my first consulting assignment upon returning, I asked about whether the primarily American-based company was making contingency plans for the Brexit (they have offices in the UK and Europe). I had a lot of blank stares, and ‘the what’s-it?’ I suggested that they confirm that ‘someone’ is looking at this issue as it could create problems for them in their European operations.
• One of my best hires in Europe is Ukrainian and living in Poland. In the past, I had regular news updates about what’s happening in the Ukraine via the BBC and other European news sources. Now, not so much. Fortunately, I have contact with him through WhatsApp, and can ask how things are going at home and whether the war is finally winding down (answer is – it was, until Russia captured Ukrainian ships).
• The state of the economy in China and what’s happening with their New Silk Road is absent from the news, and takes a fair bit of digging to see how that’s progressing (news flash – this isn’t necessarily a good thing for the countries they are going into, or ultimately for the US).
• And, on and on. Thankfully, I can get access to news about what’s happening outside, but it takes some effort and diligence to keep on top of world events. I sometimes feel like the scene in ‘Lord of the Rings’ where the elder hobbits are cautioning Samwise Gamgee and Frodo about getting involved in things outside ‘our borders.’ For those who have read the books, or lived / studied the two world wars, you know what happens when a country resolutely ignores what goes on outside its borders.

Television, television everywhere – there’s no escape! You really can’t avoid TVs, even if you try. Just about everywhere you go, there’s a TV blaring (or maybe on mute, but still blasting out bright lights and pictures). As in the past, when I tell people I don’t actually own a TV, I’m met with looks that would be similar to me saying that I don’t actually breathe.

Americans really do wear athletic-wear everywhere. This is a running joke in the UK where Brits routinely express their shock at Americans wearing sweats, lycra (yoga outfits, running skins, and the like) and baggy t-shirts everywhere.

• From their coiffed hair and perfectly applied make-up, you can tell that women wearing tank tops and leggings haven’t just rolled out of bed, or finished their workout and gone to Starbucks – they clearly intended to look like they just came from (or are going to) the gym, and chances are very good that they haven’t been anywhere near a gym since high school or college. Unfortunately, my gym clothes are really smelly, and only get to appear when I’m outside running, in the gym at my apartment or in a hotel gym. They’d never get taken to Starbucks to go on display.
• I even see women (mostly, haven’t seen a lot of men) who are wearing slippers out shopping or to restaurants. These are usually matched with pajama pants and a puffer vest. I love my snuggly, warm pajama pants, they are perfect for wearing – to bed, or maybe in my kitchen when I’m making my first tea of the day.
• Jeans, which used to be reserved for Fridays or the weekend are now for everyday at work.
• When shopping for women’s work clothing, the ads emphasize how they’ve taken lycra or sweatshirt materials and made them into comfortable work clothing. I’m all for machine wash and getting away from everything being dry-clean only, but I seriously don’t want to wear sweats to work or out to a restaurant, thank you very much.
• My favorite British designer (Ted Baker) does have American shops, but unfortunately, they cater to this desire of Americans to wear sweats everywhere, and the line they sell here is significantly different than what is sold in the UK.
• That said, I am happy to be back where petite sizes are commonly sold, and I can find outfits that are proportioned for me.

Food portion sizes are ridiculous! I loved the whole European thing where you could eat a starter (appetizer), main (entrée – even though that’s not what the word means) and dessert, and not feel like you’d just eaten all your calories for the week.

• I appreciate the fact that the upscale, trendy restaurants are starting to offer smaller portion sizes (yes, I realize that it’s more expensive, because you’re getting about 1/3 of the amount of food you’d normally get for the same price). When a ‘half salad, half sandwich’ requires that you get a ‘doggy bag’ or throw away the uneaten portion, I have to wonder at the headlines talking about how obese the US is – well, duh!
• The ‘supersize it’ culture has taken over everywhere, and suddenly a ‘small’ drink is 12 ounces.
• It’s also amazing what we’ve done to chickens – the breasts are huge! When buying chicken in the grocery store, I couldn’t find smaller breasts (unless I went with organic, but even those are bigger than what you’d see in the UK). I’ve now taken to cutting the breasts in half before freezing them – I simply cannot see eating a whole American chicken breast in one sitting.

The two favorite American foods are sugar and salt. When I was pregnant and later when my kids were small, I became a resolute reader of food ingredient labels. That habit continues, and I have to say that there’s an incredible amount of preservatives, sugar (and all its variations, including sucrose and high fructose corn syrup) and salt in our foods.

• Things like whole grain bread will often have sugar (or honey) in the first five ingredients, which shows that it’s a significant ingredient. So, bread which is supposed to be healthier for you than white bread really isn’t necessarily that great.
• While the Brits do serve chips (aka French Fries) with most meals, you can actually ask to skip them, and they won’t charge you with treason. They also tend to give them to you unsalted so that you can smother them in salt and vinegar (a personal guilty pleasure of mine). In the US, we take it one step further, and the French Fries are about the same volume as the actual burger (or whatever else you ordered), and if you want to substitute a real vegetable, you’re gonna pay for it (both in the snide look from the server for being a food snob, and on your bill for the upcharge).
• The number of preservatives (including salt) is surprising and I have to wonder whether all these different chemicals are really healthy. While I would love to go for the convenience of prepared foods, I’m still cooking most of my meals from scratch to avoid all these extra things.

Thou shalt drive – everywhere! Except in older neighborhoods, or downtown, there are no sidewalks.

• If you walk, you are suspect (years ago, I was stopped by a police officer asking if I was ok – I was walking from a shop to my house which was about a mile away. By the way I was dressed, and the fact I had a shopping bag from Talbots, I clearly wasn’t out for a run, so therefore something was wrong).
• If there are signals at crosswalks, you have about 10 seconds to cross 4 lanes of traffic before the ‘don’t walk’ starts flashing. Drivers will also routinely come at you in the crosswalk (‘excuse me, but I believe that I have the right of way when the walk sign is on’), and expect you to run across so as not to dirty their front bumper.
• Especially in suburban areas, walking from one massive shopping center to another one right next door is taking your life in your hands. There is no area marked for walkers, and drivers see you as target practice.
• Even in my neighborhood, where my church is just over a mile from home, I get looks of shock and surprise when I say that I don’t drive, unless the weather is terrible or I’m bringing extra things with me (and don’t want to carry them). Inevitably, I also get, ‘can I give you a ride home?’ as well – no, seriously, I really like to walk (or I would have driven my car here).
• In the winter time, it’s rare that the token sidewalks in the suburbs are shoveled, so if you do walk, you’re climbing over snow drifts or practically crawling so that you don’t slip on the icy paths.

In addition to having to drive everywhere, everyone speeds – it’s not enough to go 5 mph over the speed limit, you must go at least 10 or 15 mph over or you will be honked at, glared at, or worst. When the driver in a hurry does pass you, they will then speed up to 20 or 25 mph and weave in and out of the lanes to make their point (‘you’re driving too slow!’). In the UK, the rule was that if you speed you will be caught and you will pay a fine (as well as get points on your license). There were speed cameras everywhere, and if there wasn’t, you might go a few mph over the speed limit, but only fools would go 10 or 15 mph over. Even in residential areas, you can feel the impatience of drivers behind you if you insist on driving 30 mph (or g-forbid, the 25 mph posted in some areas). While I’ve seen a few areas that do have speed cameras, for the most part, if you’re going to get stopped speeding, it would be by a police officer in a car – which means you’re stupid, because you should have seen them (lol).

We are spoiled for choice, especially in the grocery stores. The amount of foods and the selection are way beyond what we probably ‘need.’

• Many grocery stores are designed to force you to walk through aisle after aisle to find what you’re looking for (and hoping you’ll buy more since you’re walking by something you didn’t know you needed).
• There are something like 25 different kinds of ketchup – what’s up with that? Why do we need so many different versions of the same exact thing?
• This also comes in the shape of other consumer goods – how is it that a Walmart and a Target can actually stay in business when they basically sell the same things and are directly across the street from each other.
• While we joked that British towns were defined by how many pubs there are, it seems American towns are defined by how many stores there are by block. As a result, we also have a huge number of empty strip malls that mar the landscape, because we really can’t support yet another grocery store, fast food restaurant, bedroom store or nail salon.
• That said, there’s a dearth of coffee shops in the suburbs – sure, you’ve got at least one Starbucks every mile or so (in addition to the ones that are inside Target and other major retailers), but there aren’t a lot of other options. For a country that loves its coffee, I’m surprised there aren’t more independent coffee shops outside of big cities.

It’s really hard to ‘reduce, reuse and recycle.’ In the UK, the smallest trash container was for ‘rubbish.’ We had a separate one for yard and food waste (to be composted by the local town council) and the largest one was for recyclables.

• Plastic has enormous negative press in Europe, and most restaurants, fast food places and so on were banning things like straws. In the US, I sometimes get 2 straws in a drink (why is this? Do you think I want to drink out of both sides of my mouth at the same time? Maybe I can’t get enough liquid from one straw, and picking up a cup and sipping from it is illegal?). You can’t get them to stop putting a straw in your drink – there is no option to say, ‘no,’ it just comes that way. Same goes with the plastic lids on coffee cups – even if you’re not carrying it out, you get one.
• My local grocery store baggers resist using my reusable bags, and will search to find ‘something’ that can go in one of their plastic carrier bags. No matter how hard I try to get them to stop, I always come away with at least one (‘no, please, my light bulbs really don’t need to be bagged separately from my fruit’).
• In the UK, if I forgot my own bags, I had to pay 5p to get one of the cheap grocery store ones (or there was encouragement to buy yet another reusable bag). It’s not much, but it’s a reminder that you shouldn’t be using plastic since it’s bad for the environment (not so much that 5p is going to break anyone’s budget).
• I don’t think the ‘Blue Planet’ episode where Sir David Attenborough sparked the efforts by the UK government to ban plastics has made much of an impression on Americans who seem to put plastic in, and on, everything – for example, why does a small box containing a plastic bottle of food coloring need a plastic cover? Why does my baking potato need to come wrapped in plastic?

Local commuter trains are REEAALLYY slow and old, and if you miss one, you’re going to wait an hour or more for the next one. No wonder everyone drives here. The commuter trains are so slow that it takes almost an hour for me to go 30 miles into the city. I found this in both Boston and Chicago, so it’s not just Chicago (or Boston). When I lived in Hitchin (UK), the best train took 31 minutes to go 42 miles into London. I also had several options an hour to choose from, so if I missed the ‘fast’ train, I could get a slower train not more than 20 minutes later that stopped at more towns, and still be to my station in 45 minutes. The trains here are also really old (read that as dirty, uncomfortable plastic seats with rickety windows), and if you don’t have a pass, you have to buy your tickets from a conductor (cash only, please, and I’ll punch the paper ticket with my handy dandy hole-puncher).

We are still a cash-based economy. The ‘chip and pin’ which has been in Europe for years is making slow inroads into the US, but for the most part, people still expect you to be carrying a lot of cash, or to sign a piece of paper that will ultimately go into a trash bin. I know that Finland is an extreme (no one carries cash), but even in the UK, you could use your debit card (or Apple pay or another smart phone app) at 99.9% of places where you buy things. I could get away with not having a lot of cash with me in the UK, but here I have to constantly remember to refill my wallet so that I can pay for small purchases – like train tickets or tips. Thank goodness, the app-based parking lots are here though, if I had to plug quarters in a parking meter, I’d probably end up taking Uber to the train station instead.

The whole tipping culture is so aggravating. Why should I tip my masseuse? Why don’t you just pay him a living wage and charge me appropriately? If I pay an exorbitant amount to ship my car from Texas to Illinois, why should I pay the driver extra? Aren’t you paying him to do this job? If I order a car cleaning service at work, how in the world do I calculate what tip I think I might want to pay as I’m placing my order (i.e. before they actually clean my car)? I get the whole credit card companies charging 3% to process the credit card, but the fact that I have to have a whole load of cash in my wallet in anticipation of needing to tip is a pain. I wish that we’d just ante up and pay more so that these mostly service-based employees could earn an appropriate wage (and not rely on customers to decide whether or not they can actually afford to live).

The medical system is different, and sometimes that’s not in a good way. I have had people tell me that the NHS / British socialized medicine is the best thing, but I don’t actually agree with that assessment. After having experienced both systems, my assessment is that the systems are different – sometimes, it’s better for citizens / patients, and sometimes it isn’t.

• On the US side, one difference that frustrated me this year is the way that our system is set up to be ‘test heavy’ and every little piece of it requires you to set up a different appointment at a different office (where every little piece is then filed with your insurance, and billed separately). Even though I had no symptoms, and had just had my ‘blood work’ done a year ago, when I had my physical, the number of tests run on my blood was shocking. Of course, no one had advised me to fast, so the accuracy of the test is suspect, but hey, I now know more about my blood composition then I ever did before, so it must be ‘better.’ I’m pleased to say that the really important pieces (cholesterol, blood sugar) are just fine – just like they were a year ago.
• Even though we pay a lot for our medical care, customer service is pretty non-existent. Doctors seem to be on a time-clock and are only allocated a very short period of time to talk to you. Unless you’re really assertive, you’re not going to have an opportunity to ask about your health as they rapid fire their ‘standard’ questionnaire at you, then rush you out of their office. However, if you pay out of pocket and go to a specialist (for example Chiropractor), you get much better, caring customer service, and if they’re on a time-limit, you wouldn’t know it.
• Our system isn’t set up for people who live alone, or who don’t have family in the area to take them to tests that require an adult to accompany (yes, I mean the colonoscopy). I ended up having to cancel this particular test, because I couldn’t make arrangements for someone to come with me. I found this odd – it wasn’t about my fear of drinking liquid drain-o, worries that I might have cancer, the cost of the procedure, or insurance coverage, it was that using a taxi or Uber (to deal with the fact you shouldn’t drive afterwards) wasn’t sufficient. I was required to have another adult accompany me – as a person new to my area, I’m not on that kind of friendly terms with anyone (‘excuse me, I know we’ve only just met, but would you go with me to a colonoscopy appointment?’). There were no resources or assistance offered to help me over the hurdle, so I was left with no option but to cancel it (and then get a nasty-gram from the doctor’s office saying that this test is vital to my health, and I was a very naughty girl for cancelling it).

On the good side, people in the Midwest are still really friendly, and will talk to strangers. If you’re dining alone, they do strike up a conversation and are genuinely interested in learning about you. Of course, in my suburban outpost this is generally along racial lines – there is a divide between those who are clearly different. There’s a bit of surprise if you try to engage in a conversation with someone who is of a different race, or, for example, a woman wearing a hijab. I didn’t find this to be true in other countries where people who are different are the norm.

Another positive is that you don’t have to apologize for the President. In the US, most people didn’t vote for him, or at a minimum disagree with where he’s taking this country, so there’s no point in saying anything about it. Outside of the US, I found myself feeling guilty for what we’ve done to the rest of the world for putting someone like him in office. This was a shared experience with other Americans who said that when someone realized they were American (usually by our accent or inability to speak other languages), they found themselves apologizing to non-Americans for what we’ve done. I found this with both those who identified as Democrat and Republican, Americans abroad generally feel the need to apologize for what’s going on at home. Or, at a minimum to explain that they did actually vote absentee, and did not vote for him.

We generally live in a segregated society, and have little opportunity to interact on a daily basis with people who are different. Yes, I realize that I’ve moved to a suburban hub where this is generally the case, but it still surprises me that I don’t routinely run into people from other countries (i.e. wearing ‘different’ clothing, speaking other languages than English or Spanish, or speaking with heavily accented English), people who are different races, and so on. I loved how you could see people from all over the world in London (and in many cities and towns in the UK), and no one seemed to bat an eye. While Brits are usually quite reserved, and don’t speak on the trains or in the Tube, you could actually speak to someone who looked quite different than you, and not feel like you were making a political statement. When I look at the level of fear around ‘others’ in the US today, I can’t help but think that we’ve set things up so that we cluster in our own socio-economic, racial or religious groups so that we don’t ever have an opportunity to learn that ‘others’ really aren’t scary.

I didn’t intend for this to be quite so long, but I’ve enjoyed going over some of the ‘things that make me go, hmmmm’ about my return to the US after living and working abroad for 5 years. It’s nice to be back where I can take short flights to visit friends and family, and to not have to Google or really think about ‘how does one do this here?’ or ‘what’s the British English word for this American term?’ There are a lot of things I miss about living in the UK. Overall, I would say that having an opportunity to really experience another country, culture and way of life is important to broadening and expanding your world view. It goes beyond a short vacation trip, since you rarely get to know a country or its people when you do a big rush to see and do everything in a week. I would do it again in a heartbeat, and maybe I will, someday. For now, I’ll just continue trying to readjust to my little corner of the US, and plot additional travels – to other countries, or maybe just to other states I haven’t seen yet. In other words, there is more to come – I’m not one to be tied down for too long, before taking off on another adventure.