Are you there fellow expats? It's me, soon-to-be-American

I know. Long time no speak etc etc.

The cats didn't eat us.

Although we were nearly consumed by their cuteness:


Why hello.

In fact, what's been occupying my time is the business of getting married. And my, what a business it is. I was trying not to get dragged into the whole sorry world of wedding magazines and TV shows, blogs and related consumerism, but, well, I kind of wanted to have a pretty dress and who doesn't want to throw a really big party?

In reality, most of my time has been taken up with diplomatic cross-Atlantic relations. We decided to have the wedding in Atlantic City, where the resident American in the LB household is from. First problem: his parents had more or less packed their bags to go to England the morning after we told them we got engaged (at a Sonic Youth concert in McCarren Park Pool. No water was in the pool though. In fact, I believe it's now being turned into condos. So it will be a good story to tell any really little LBs). Right, so they'd packed their bags, resident American's dad was already planning the outfit to go with the bowler hat he wanted to wear, and resident American's mum (who is terrified of flying) was also envisaging some kind of royal-wedding-type hat. So of course, living instantly up to my terrible destiny as a daughter-in-law, I decided I wanted to get married in AC (if you've never been, it's a coastal town that's seen better days, much like Portsmouth, and it has a very dear place in my heart.)

And more recently, my own dear parents have been doing their very best themselves to sabotage things from 3000 miles away (of course, it was my fault for deciding to have it in this country but still....) They managed to announce their own divorce shortly after the RA and I got engaged (I've been trying not to dwell on the significance of this coincidence) and they've been busy keeping various lawyers and lately also the Hampshire constabulary and U.S. immigration officers well remunerated and in work ever since. The less said about all that the better, because while I'm beginning to find it all very funny it's certainly been a rough few weeks for nearly everyone involved.

That, my lovelies, coupled with a hefty dose of work, friends and family visiting and the inevitable summer cold (thank goodness it's not swine flu) has been keeping me out of blogging touch. I just wanted to let you know I'm still thinking of you all, and I hope to be back and in touch soon, full of refreshment after our five-day honeymoon (Thanks America!)* and the joy of married life. The big day is a week on Saturday, so please pray to the immigration gods that all our remaining friends and family not yet in the country are granted access to it and that all goes swimmingly. Thank you!



* so, we're not really doing a proper honeymoon owing to the fact I have no vacation time and we wanted to take advantage of all our friends and family being around and over here. Instead, we're doing a biggish road trip as far south from AC as we can get from Sunday July 19th and be back in New York by Saturday July 26th in the evening. We're planning on driving along the coast, along the outer banks, I believe they're called, and hopefully we'll make it at least to Charleston. If you have any tips, or know the area, let me know! I'm rather excited that I might make it to an outer bank named Portsmouth, and maybe pass through Portsmouth, VA, thereby ticking off some of the Portsmouths on my planned Portsmouth-in-the-U.S. road trip...

Cats in the city

We're cat sitting at the moment, which is an eye-opener for a dog person, I can tell you.

I was pretty excited about this little experiment because, firstly, THE MICE and, secondly, ever since I left my brothers on the other side of the Atlantic, I've had an urge greater than Mother Nature's to look after something. I had been hankering after a dog -- but since we have only just about enough space in which to swing a cat, dog-swinging is out of the question. Oh, and, technically, under the terms of our lease, we're not allowed pets at all (although the landlord appears to have a more flexible opinion of uninvited pets, such as mice, cockroaches etc etc).... So anyway, I'd been lobbying for a small animal for a while and although my first choice would have been a dog, I'd narrowed this down to a cat given the space concerns and I jumped at the chance to take care of two cats to realise just how much fun it would be...

It's not like i haven't met cats before. I'm just rather confused by their lack of response to me, brimming over with love and affection for them, and desire to look after small animals. I keep wanting to pick them up and cuddle them and all they do is stare glacially, barely veiling their disdain. I am reminding myself of my youngest brother, who, aged about two or three, had learned the word 'teddy'. The problem was, he couldn't tell the difference between a stationary, harmless, stuffed animal and a mobile, living (and possibly dangerous) animal. I remember him tottering after a family friend's Siamese, arms open to embrace the beast, gleefully shouting "Teddy! Teddy!"... We just about managed to prevent the cat from piercing him with more than just its icy stare.

Anyone for a bacon butt?

I've been working late shifts the last week or so, which makes stopping off at bars on the way home rather convenient, knowing that I don't have to get up at the crack of dawn the following day... Last night we dropped in on one of NY's few Boston-friendly bars to watch the Red Sox v the Minnesota Twins.

"It smells like they've been cooking bacon butts back there," reported my fellow bar-hopper, on his way back to the bar from the loo.

"They what?" quoth I, images of cigarette butts in bar toilets and the Spanky's pig (for some reason) coming to mind:



It turned out he meant bacon butties, which makes it an even odder thing to have thought the bar smelled of as to my knowledge he's never smelled a PROPER bacon butty made with thick-cut bacon in the U.K. But in his defense (kind of) this bar does do very good BLT club sandwiches.

Visions of England...

On an exciting bank-holiday Sunday evening at home, we were eating dinner on the sofa and watching baseball in apparent domestic contentment until even I realized (slowly) we were in fact watching a repeat of Saturday's Mets v Red Sox game and I wrestled away the tv switch. I changed to a public tv channel that was showing a programme called 'Visions of England - an aerial view of England', or something like that.

It was narrated by a lovely lady with probably a very English plum stuck up her bottom and a particularly fetching way of pronouncing 'Salisbury' so that even the resident american noticed it wasn't pronounced 'Salizzberry'. She was quite entertaining.

She told us that Stonehenge was constructed around the same time as the Pyramids. I'm sure those in the know would debate this, but as the resident american said it wasn't a very favourable comparison... I excused our ancenstors, suggesting that the colder weather probably retarded our development compared with the Egytians in their desert heat, and fortunately the programme then showed the the Uffington horse, which showed a more artistic side to our ancient relatives than Stonehenge:



But thanks to the plummy lady I can only now think of Stonehenge as a rather clumsy construction by some developmentally-challenged cave people who were probably so chuffed with themselves for getting three stones to stack together that they all went off to sample the best of the local scrumpy and forgot all about decorating their little construction... All while their distant relatives to the south were busy writing great long poems with hieroglyphics to explain their intricate buildings and painting friezes that would have made Laura Ashley proud.

Sailor boys

There were various groups of men clad in pressed, pristine white bell-bottoms and shirts mingling with the usual tourists, naked cowboys and harassed business types outside the office in Times Square today.

It seems it's Fleet Week again, yet another mystifying and rather awesome U.S. tradition. When I first heard about Fleet Week I really thought it was just some kind of joke -- it seems to provide such reliable fodder for so many locally-based comedians -- I'd never heard of it in a serious context. But really, it's pretty straight forward. Instead of having a few measly days a year (November 11th, say) on which you were bedraggled paper poppies or donate to a veterans' organization, there's a whole week in which U.S. sailors descend on the Big Apple and are treated as royalty by the locals -- they get the best seats at (new) Yankee Stadium, their own parade etc etc...

I went to school in Portsmouth (home to the British navy) but I think the closest I'd ever come to seeing a sailor in full costume dress was an old photo of my dad in uniform for the navy unit of his school's Combined Cadet Force. I'm assuming this is probably because no Royal Navy man would ever be caught walking through deepest, darkest Portsmouth in full regalia for fear of attracting the derision of the locals.

When it comes to respect for the armed forces, it's just another way the U.S. and U.K. are poles apart.

(PS.I'm just saying. Not making any statement on whether or not this is a good or a bad thing. I would say, though, that Portsmouth-based sailors might rather enjoy walking around Times Square in full navy dress -- lots of photo opportunities (and probably more) with fascinated female tourists.)

Cheesy Guest Blog

The resident American has been moved by a recent living-with-a-Brit life experience to share some thoughts with you, dear readers. Enjoy, as they say ici:

Last Saturday while chopping avocado for a green soup, I smelled, very
faintly but unmistakably, the smell of garbage.

Now, Little Britainer cleans the kitchen like a clergyman nearly every
day, so the idea that something was producing an unaccounted for,
unapproved smell was disquieting. And we were having dinner guests,
which made it doubly disquieting.

I checked the trash can. It had some vegetable peelings in it, but LB
had just emptied it an hour or so earlier, so I thought they were
innocent. Our kitchen window, which opens (in the grand New York
style) onto a brick wall, was flung wide. Was something rotting in the
alley? Impossible to check. Was I smelling, as my dad likes to say, my
upper lip? Doubtful. My worry was that one of the mice (the population
seemed to be recovering last week) had died, and its carcass was
rotting somewhere breezy and difficult to reach. I mentioned the smell
to LB, but she didn't smell it.

Now, as the resident American, I take a lot of crap about this
country's cheeses. LB regards American cheese as an alien and possibly
dangerous substance, best kept away from real food stuffs. My weakness
for mozzarella is a cause for pity. The one time I bought Kraft
singles, to use in the mousetrap, LB looked at me like: and you really
think it's safe to leave that sh*t lying around the house? (Not
really.)

Which is why it was interesting to me...very interesting to me that
the person who later discovered that the source of the garbage smell
was the camembert cheese that LB bought for our dinner was...LB
herself.

And it wasn't in a
you-silly-American-how-could-you-mistake-cheese-for-garbage kind of
way.

She went like this. "Oh, I smell it too [the garbage]!'" and then she
zeroed right in on the cheese/source.

I don't know where I'm going with this anymore.

But I'll tell you when I ate the camembert later that night, I thought
the texture was lovely, the flavor reminding me somehow of
Thanksgiving dinner. And when I exhaled its vapors out of my nostrils,
it smelled delicious.

Really.

On top of old smokey...

I had meatballs and spaghetti for dinner this evening. Really fat and tasty meatballs in tomato sauce. Delicious. It seems odd now, but I don't think I'd ever had spaghetti and meatballs before I came here. Even though one of the few songs I still remember from Brownie Girl Scouts when I lived here 20 years ago is 'On top of old smokey (all covered in cheese, I lost my poor meatball, when somebody sneezed)'.

When I moved here three years ago, I'd order meatballs at every restaurant and want to make them all the time. Meatball subs - long baguette-type sandwiches, filled with meatballs and sauce and covered with cheese (of course) were one of my favourite discoveries. Like American pancakes, I felt I should try and make up for the deprivation of my earlier life and I just kept eating more...

It never occurred to me that beyond pizza and burritos and an entire spectrum of fast-food restaurants, America could introduce me to new foodstuffs. There's a lot I didn't know about. The whole world of barbeque, for instance (not New York's strong point), but also a huge range of Italian and Greek food beyond the pizza and pita that every Brit knows. Indian food is sadly so much better here (in authenticity terms, I think) that it doesn't taste like an 'English' curry - but I don't miss it too much when there's so much other good stuff to eat.