Last weekend, my husband took the empty cardboard boxes to the tip. (It took us ages to work out why no-one could tell us where the tip is. It’s because it’s called a dump here, not a tip.) Moving house uses hundreds of cardboard boxes, and moving house trans-Atlantically seems to use even more. We had 302 packages in our container, and they were all wrapped in either special bubble wrap or tons and tons of filler paper and boxes.
We took the seats out of the car, so that there was a huge space to fill. Even so, we filled the car twice with boxes.
This is what we woke up to this morning. We knew it was our car because we could just about make out one of my son’s turtle stickers on the side. There has been nearly a foot of new snow today and it’s still snowing. Unfortunately, there was a lot of wind as well, and the wind caused a problem with power on the mountain. All the lifts were using generators for power, and there was only so long that they could carry on with that. By lunchtime, all the lifts were shut.
So we played in the snow. We threw each other in the snow banks, and hurled snowballs around, and broke stalactites off the roof outside the room we’re in. And we went to Nevada for lunch.
Harvey’s Casino in Heavenly, Nevada. A rare, empty section.
Heavenly straddles the border of California and Nevada, and the state line is one block from where we’re staying. Nevada’s gambling rules are a little more lax than California’s, so as soon as you cross the state line, you’re surrounded by vast casinos with endless fruit machines, roulette wheels and craps tables. Just like in Ocean’s 11. We were fascinated. The children were fascinated by the very existence of the casinos, and I was fascinated by their size and the number of customers they had at lunchtime on a weekday.
It’s bizarre, really. California and Nevada are so different – and each so large – that anywhere else in the world, they’d be different countries. Yet, in America, you can cross the border from one culture to another without passports or ceremony.
The middle school, for ages 11-14. The lower school sits on the opposite side of the playground.
The children go to Marin Horizon School in Mill Valley. When we were considering whether or not we could tolerate the idea of living in America, the choice of school was of fundamental importance. The British school the children attended was a seriously tough act to follow. So I set out to find a school that was similar to the British school in its philosophy; that would celebrate the children as individuals and nurture their specific passions.
Luckily, Marin Horizon stood up to the test. I suspected it might a good ‘un when I saw on their home page that they referenced books by a British education advisor and hero of ours: Sir Ken Robinson (if you haven’t heard his talks and you have children, click here, here and here, because you really should. His speech on how schools are killing creativity is our favourite).
The school takes kids from age 3 to 14, but it’s teeny tiny. You could fit the whole school in half a sports pitch (field).
Half of the playground ( called a “blacktop” here). The green area and steps in the shade double up as performing area.
There’s no indoor community area here; just classrooms. That means that when the children perform, the performance takes place on the grassy area, and the parents sit on the bleachers to watch. There’s no dining room either, so when children get their food, they sit outside in groups to eat, or in their classrooms if it’s raining. That’s possible because we’re in California, not Britain, where it’s reliably warm and dry for most of the year.
The floorspace may be tiny, but the school’s philosophy is definitely not. They have talent shows that encourage every child to get up and perform. They have celebration days that are all about protecting the planet. And they bring in experts to teach the children how to do something creative and important, like hula hooping (if you haven’t followed the link to watch any of Sir Ken’s stuff, you probably won’t understand why that’s important).
When we visited last April (2010) to check out the school, the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull forced us to stay an extra ten days and the children were invited to attend school while we were stuck here. It just so happened that the school was celebrating Earth Day at the time, so our children joined in. One of the events put on was a Recycled Fashion Show: the brainchild and production of two 8th grade girls. They motivated other children to create some recycled fashion garments out of unwanted items, whether old clothes or other materials. Here’s a video of the fashion show that the school uploaded onto YouTube. The school and its students don’t think small.
We’re very happy with our teeny tiny school and its big vision.
The threat that we’d buy stickers for the car wasn’t empty. They’ve arrived and been applied. This is my daughter’s choice; a rainbow family:
That’s a lot of stickers
And my son’s, a turtle family:
I don’t suppose we’ll be flying under the radar with this many stickers
We wouldn’t have put stickers on our car in Britain, because it wouldn’t have been “the done thing”. But we don’t know what the done thing is here, so we can do what we like. One of the joys of being expats is that we don’t have to abide by a set of arbitrary cultural norms. It’s an extremely liberating attitude, and one I hope we can sustain.
It’s OK. The panic’s over. My husband has found his hi-fi. The removal men in Britain packed it into a box marked “Children’s Toys”. Clearly, they had a sense of humour!
Sadly, so does the universe. Despite being American, it doesn’t work here. Not much electrical does because America uses a different voltage. We’ve had to buy a new iron, kettle, toaster, heater, hairdryer and garden tools. My husband had high hopes for the hi-fi, because he bought it in America in the first place. However, the amp is British.
We’re waiting for a new electrical transformer to arrive so he can listen to proper music again. And then, for him, normality really will be restored.
Oh joy, it brought our beds. Our lovely, cosy, familiar beds. You haven’t seen two children get into bed so fast in the evening. And their parents weren’t far behind.
And our sofas. Which look a lot better than the solo sofa bed we’ve had in the living room for the last few weeks.
Though I still haven’t found the garlic press, cheese grater and potato masher. And my husband hasn’t located his all-important hi-fi yet.
The children decided not to heed the advice to open up and deal with just one box at a time!
The children whooped with delight when they rediscovered long-lost, stuffed furry friends that had been languishing in boxes for the last two months. My daughter was particularly excited about finding her stress ball. When we packed up at the beginning of December, she had no idea she would miss it so much. And my son had already pulled out his Prehistoric Park set within two minutes of getting home from school and finding it.
We have also found a whole load of rubbish, though. What were we thinking of, bringing all this useless STUFF from Britain? The last two months without these things has shown us that we really don’t need most of them. So we’re being really ruthless with the unpacking, and refusing entry to anything that hasn’t been missed. Sadly, that involves opening each of the 53 million boxes here to work out whether to throw or donate the contents.
We enjoyed the Zen-like emptiness of the house before, and we’d like to get back to a slightly less austere version of that again. Meanwhile, we still have another 52 million, 999 thousand boxes to work through.
The hardest thing to do when moving country – without any exception – is leave family and friends behind. It’s the bane of the expat.
We love Skype and FaceTime. They’re free and we can talk to friends and family for ages and ages and ages.
It’s like being in the same room. We can have a cup of tea together (actually, the time difference means that the people in Europe can be drinking a glass of wine). We can make faces at each other. We can laugh together. The 5360 miles disappear in the twinkling of a technological eye.
It’s said that communication is 7% words, 35% intonation and 58% body language. Unlike the phone, Skype and FaceTime give you all of those.
When moving country, you expect the big things to be different. You know that the landscape isn’t going to look quite the same as at home. You know the food’s going to be bewildering. And you know the language is going to cause some misunderstandings. So it’s not the big things that take you by surprise. It’s the little things that smack you in the face and say: “Gotcha!”.
We’re buying a piano, so I asked a piano technician to check out our preferred choice on our behalf. As payment, he asked me to post him a cheque. No problem, I thought. Think again.
Problem #1 – How do you write a cheque? There’s an extra space for a something on the cheques. And where does the signature go? No idea, so I asked one of the helpful people working in our local Blockbuster. As it happens, the extra space is for me to write what the cheque is for, and it will be printed on our statement. I like that.
Problem #2 – Where do I buy envelopes? Ours are all in the container (though it wouldn’t have made a difference if they were here because American paper – and therefore American envelopes – are a different size. The shops don’t even stock A4 paper, I now know). No need to buy one today. The lovely people in Blockbuster gave me one.
Problem #3 – Where’s the post office, so that I can buy stamps? Easily sorted. There’s one next to the supermarket, and the UPS store also sells them.
Problem #4 – What do the letterboxes look like here? Blue, it turns out, so I stopped looking for red ones. Even so, it took a moment or two to work out how to get the envelope in there.
So, between the arrival of Floyd and the posting of the cheque, I’m feeling a little bamboozled.
Yesterday we bought a car. Not a small thing, actually. You can’t buy a car here without having insurance in place. And it goes without saying that you can’t get your insurance in place without knowing which car you’re going to buy. Nor can you get insurance without having first passed the written part of the driving test. Did I mention that you can’t take the written part of the test without a social security number?
Anyway, my husband and I both took the written test and passed. While you might think that this would be easy because we can both already drive and know the Highway Code in Britain, there are many, many, many things that are disturbingly different here. For example, “for the smoothest driving”, you should drive in the middle lane on a motorway. That’s not the proper etiquette in Britain. And if you’re about to turn right, you must use the bike lane for the last 200′ before you approach your right turn, instead of avoiding it as we’re used to doing. It’s going to be very easy to get things wrong.
One question I had to answer on my test went like this:
You can be fined $1000 and given a 6 month jail sentence for which of the following?
A – dumping an animal on the highway
B – making a U-turn at an illegal spot
C – driving across a red light
The answer is A. Heaven forbid you ever think of harming or neglecting an animal here! That’s much worse than driving unsafely.
My husband’s flown to Britain this evening (just because it was his job that brought us here in the first place doesn’t mean his job can’t also take him back!), so while he’s away and can’t stop us, the children and I are going to buy stickers for the car. My son wants turtles on one side of the car, and my daughter will have anything as long as she can have seven and get one for each colour of the rainbow.
Is this the container carrying our belongings? Er, no. Ours has been delayed.
January 21, 2011
My mother asked for an update on the status of our furniture. Well, the ship carrying our container was due to have arrived in port on Wednesday, but we received an email saying that it won’t arrive until next Tuesday. And then we have to wait while Customs decides what to do with it. While this can take as little as 3 days, it can also take up to 16 weeks. Two other families have been relocated here with us. Adam’s container spent 7 days in Customs, and Clive’s spent 10.
My parents-in-law are now here with us for 3 months, so we need more furniture. Luckily, Adam’s and Clive’s containers arrived before my parents-in-law, which meant that both families were able to lend us some things to help us out. Clive provided another sofa bed, while Adam offered two wicker chairs and some garden furniture.
The tidiest child’s bedroom ever. That’s because it’s empty apart from one bed and the few toys my son could carry in his suitcase.
Even so, our house is quite Zen-like.
And contains some unusual features: my resourceful husband has found a hundred uses for upturned bins.
What’s really struck us in the last few weeks, though, is how little we actually need. I really miss comfortable sofas, proper beds, and pictures on the walls to add a dash of colour. My husband misses his hi-fi.
And I really, really, really wish I’d thought to pack a garlic press and potato masher in the luggage that flew with us.
There’s not much in the living room either. There is a visiting turtle tank, though.
The children would like their toys. The garden table and chairs for the deck would be useful. We’d all like some books (though we’ve just found the library here).
But other than that, we can’t think of anything we’re missing.
We filled a 40′ container with STUFF. It seemed really important that we bring it all here with us, but this period of deprivation is proving to us that we’re not all that deprived.
So if we’re not missing that much from the container, what, exactly, is in it?
One day last week when I collected the children from school, my son was holding his favourite fact-filled Turtles and Tortoises book, which he’d been given for Christmas. A teacher there saw it and asked if he was interested in turtles. Oh, if only she knew! She owns some, and promised to bring them in to show my son.
Today, when I went in to school the teacher was there. Then began a conversation with a twist that I should have seen coming. This is how it went:
Teacher: I want to show you what’s coming home tomorrow. Here’s the tank. It’s empty at the moment, but it will have the Painted Turtle in it.
A library picture of a painted turtle.
Me: Wait. When you say it’s coming home, you don’t mean our home, do you?
Teacher: Yes, of course. Floyd, my painted turtle, is going home with you tomorrow for a week.
Me (squeaking): Whoa! You can’t be serious. You’ll have a dead turtle coming back.
Teacher: Don’t worry. This turtle went missing in my back yard for 2 months and he came back fine. You won’t be able to kill him.
Me (beginning to perspire): You don’t understand. I don’t do animals. I don’t even stroke dogs.
Teacher: That’s OK. I thought if your son had a turtle for a week, he could decide if he really does want one.
Me (really sweating now): He’s never having a turtle. Not until he’s 18 and leaves home and can do whatever he wants.
Teacher (oblivious): Don’t worry. You can use it as motivation if he does his homework well.
Me (choking): No way. He is never, ever, having an animal of any description ever, ever, ever. I don’t do claws or teeth or fur or sharp bits or smells.
Teacher: He did mention that he’s been trying to have goldfish for the last 3 years.
Me: Does he know, or can we still back out?
Teacher: Oh, he knows. He’s really excited.
Me: (resigned, head in hands): You’re going to have to provide fool-proof instructions, right down to where to put him, including whether he goes in the sun or shade, like a plant. Oh heck, you’re going to get a dead turtle back.
My new cleaners came to clean the house for the first time yesterday. They were fab. They climbed up onto the bathroom work surface to clean inside the lights, they asked for a ladder to clean the rotating fan on the ceiling, and they scoured every surface. I’ve never had cleaners like these.
The downside – the only downside – is the shock of the cost. I’ll get used to the numbers here, I’m sure. And when we go back to Britain, I’ll think that everything is ridiculously cheap. That will be exciting. Cleaning here costs $20 per hour. And the cleaners were here for 5.5 hours. Yes, that’s $110 each week to clean my house (I fell off my chair too).
One large box of air freighted belongings. Not a cheap solution for the removal company.
January 11, 2011
We shouldn’t have any air freight. All the contents of our house, apart from the 9 suitcases we carried with us on the plane, should have been put into the container so they could take forever to sail across the Atlantic right now.
However, the removal men forgot to empty a cupboard. Not a particularly small cupboard either. It’s 6′ high, double width, and contained all my nutritional files. It was fairly important to me. It also contained the art and craft stuff, so it was fairly important to the children too.
The container was already packed up and on its way, so the removal company resolved the problem by packing the lost cupboard into boxes to be sent as air freight. And yesterday it arrived. Yippee! Its familiarity brings the comfort of home.
My 11-year-old daughter said “What’s the F for? Is it ‘first class’? Wouldn’t an A make more sense, for ‘air’?”. Um, confused. Did we jump conversation when I wasn’t looking? What do you mean, F and A?
Frustrated, my daughter replied, “A for ‘air’. Instead of F. Why isn’t it called ‘A rate’ instead of ‘F rate’?”.
Forget the air freight; I’m off to unpack our F rate.
Money is measured here in quarters, nickels and dimes. The coins don’t even tell you how many cents each is worth, just their names. To make a quarter, you need 2 dimes and a nickel. Or maybe it’s 2 nickels and a dime. You can pay 26c with just 2 coins. And all the notes are green. How am I supposed to tell at a glance how much money is in my purse if all the paper is the same colour? Apparently, there are different figureheads on each note, but if I have to look at them closely enough to see the figurehead, I can also see the numbers.
Temperature is measured in Fahrenheit. I heard someone telling a friend that it’s 5 degrees in Chicago. No biggie – it’s minus 5 in England. But then I realised that because she was talking Fahrenheit, her temperature of 5 degrees was actually minus 15 degrees Celsius. Maybe that was a biggie, after all. Not that it seems to matter, because the forecasts here have been universally wrong, by a long way, even taking into account my dodgy translation from Fahrenheit to Celsius. The forecast yesterday was 61 degrees F, or 16 degrees C. But the car, and my body temperature, both agreed that it was 38 degrees (3 degrees C) in the morning, warming up to a mere 48 degrees (9 degrees C) in the afternoon. That’s some way off the forecast.
But the measurement that confounds me the most is weight. I’m used to asking for weights of food in the supermarket in grams, but I wasn’t worried about shopping for weight in pounds here because I know the conversion rate from grams to ounces. Yesterday I wanted to buy 400g chicken, so I asked for 13 to 14 ounces. The person serving me on the meat counter translated the weight to be approximately 0.9 lb. He created a metric fraction for an imperial measure! What a batty, mixed up way of measuring.
This stubborn clinging on to archaic units of measure makes me wonder if people here will measure my height by taking off their shoes and actually using their feet.
It will take two months for our container to make it around the southern tip of South America. It left Britain in December, so we still have another month without our belongings. That means our rented house is sadly lacking in furniture. When my husband visited here in December, he bought IKEA (all of it, it seemed to him). Along with everything else, he bought the sofa beds that we’re sleeping on at the moment. We’ll be able to use them as sofas when our furniture finally arrives, but while we’re using them as beds, we have no sofas.
Nothing but an abandoned rocking chair
Luckily there was a two-person outdoor rocking chair here when we arrived, left by a previous tenant, so we’ve moved that into the living room. That’s the sum total of furniture in the living room. It’s really empty, but my son thinks that makes it good for scooting.
The best scooting house, ever
The playroom room has a drum kit, TV and nothing else. It does at least have carpet. Sitting on the floor is comfortable for a while, but the novelty wears off pretty quickly. I need to find some sofas before Sunday, because that’s when my octogenarian parents-in-law arrive, and I can’t see them sitting on the floor.
Empty
Living abroad for a couple of years sounds glamorous, but actually just starts out as a series of logistical impracticalities <sigh>.
The children declared their love for the house on steamed windows
Since being here, we’ve seen a pair of deer twice, some pelicans regularly, frequent birds of prey, cormorants, and the occasional humming bird.
Our neighbour says the deer are so unafraid of us that they’ll stay resting on the grass while we come near. She’s had to fence off her roses because they kept eating them. She assures us that we’ll have plenty of opportunities for taking photos of deer – more than we’ll want. And she’s adamant that they may look cute to foreigners, but they’re pests, like rats. They just have better PR. We don’t believe her.
Today was the children’s first day of school. We met a classmate in the supermarket yesterday, and she told us that our daughter would need a binder for school, but nothing else. I assumed that a binder was a lever arch file, but our daughter said that it was more like a furry lunchbox (what?!?). A list of supplies from school and a trip to Office Depot later, and we’ve solved the mystery. A binder is a larger-than-A4, zipped canvas file with pouches everywhere that holds everything. It’s a school child’s equivalent of the ready-for-anything, perfect handbag. It is a lever arch file, but a lever arch file on steroids.
School years are numbered differently here. Year 7 is 6th Grade, and Year 4 is 3rd Grade. Lessons are named differently too. Apart from the obvious Math (instead of maths) lesson, there are also Vocab and Language Art (both subsets of English).
The school here is called Marin Horizon School, and it’s tiny. 6th Grade has just one class of children, rather than three. And 2nd and 3rd Grades are deliberately mixed and split so that there are two classes, each with half of 2nd Grade and half of 3rd Grade. This is to teach the children how to help each other. Once they move into 4th Grade, they work by year group. There’s no uniform and the children address the teachers by their first names.
It’s all very different from Britain. We have a lot to learn.
“Home” is such a familiar, reassuring word with no consistent meaning for us at the moment. In the last week, “home” has referred to the English village we lived in, our temporary home after our house was emptied into a container, England, our rented house in America, or even the eco-lodge we’re staying in near Santa Cruz for a short holiday.
My son said, “When are we going home, Mummy?” Which home? “Home home”. Ah, that’s much clearer. Not. Still no idea which home you’re referring to.
Needless to say, we’re a little fed up with limbo and looking forward to going home. Wherever it is.
I’ve read Homer’s Odyssey in Greek more times than I can remember (it’s one of the side-effects of reading Classics at Oxford), but there’s a section that has never made an impact on me until now. It takes place halfway through the epic, when the eponymous hero visits the underworld. There, he speaks to the prophet Tiresias, who tells him that the only way to appease Poseidon – whose son Odysseus has killed – is to make a journey inland with an oar. He’s to go so far from his home that the oar is mistaken for a winnowing fan, a tool used to separate grain from chaff.
Once there, he’s to plant his oar in the turf and make an offering to the god of the sea. In return, he’ll be guaranteed a long, blessed life, a gentle death, and good fortune for those around him.
I’m an Englishwoman living near San Francisco, a long way from what I recognise as home. This blog is my offering. I’m planting my oar.
Planting an Oar 