Tag Archives: expat

The Question of “Home”

Posted on by

4

Re-posting this, just because….

The eternal TCK** question –   Where is “home”?

Dictionary.com tells us the following

home [hohm]

noun

1. a house, apartment, or other shelter that is the usual residence of a person, family, or household.

2. the place in which one’s domestic affections are centered.

3. an institution for the homeless, sick, etc.: a nursing home.

4. the dwelling place or retreat of an animal.

5. the place or region where something is native or most common.

Synonyms

1.  abode, dwelling, habitation; domicile. See house.

2.  hearth, fireside.

3.  asylum.

For Third Culture Kids or Global Nomads, it is an ongoing topic.  The eternal question – where are you from?  Where is your home?  These are not easy questions to answer.  Home is here and everywhere.  I am from here and everywhere.

That very last word is my favorite.  Asylum.  The place where you feel safe.  That is where home is.  That is where home should be.  What makes you feel safe?  People you trust.  People who love you.  Mutual understanding and respect.  Comfort.  Growing up, my home was always where my family was, unless I was with them, and then it was wherever we were.  It didn’t matter if it was a hotel room or a house or an airport.  As long as we were together and had a pack of cards nearby, we were at home.  A good card game could get us through anything.  Some of my fondest memories are of blackouts during torrential rainstorms playing cards by candlelight.

We all continue to search for the elusive “home” but I think we know where to find it when we really need it.

“The strength of this family bond works to the benefit of children when parent-child communication is good and the overall family dynamic is healthy. It can be devastating when it is not. Compared to the geographically stable child, the global-nomad child is inordinately reliant on the nuclear family for affirmation, behavior-modeling, support and above all, a place of safety. The impact, therefore, of dysfunction in this most basic of units in exacerbated by the mobile lifestyle.”

Excerpt from GROWING UP WITH A WORLD VIEW By Norma M. McCaig

**TCK’s are people who lived outside their passport country as a child

Expat Book Review

Posted on by

1

51RalYaTFiL._SY300_

 

Here We Are and There We Go  by Jill Dobbe

Jill and her husband were school teachers in Wisconsin USA when one day they moved half way around the world and their lives changed drastically.

Like Jill’s children, I was born into the nomadic life of the serial expat.  I lived in West Africa, Mexico, Asia, South America, and Europe, so I can identify with many of her experiences.  I grew up speaking different languages, like her children did, and I continue to have the travel bug today.  Like her children do.

What truly amazed me about this book was that they just jumped headlong into it with no safety net and blinders off.  They made the decision to move to Guam almost on a whim.  They didn’t even know where Guam was.  That was either very gutsy or completely crazy.  And what was even more interesting was that they stuck it out, learned, and grew through it all.

It didn’t sound like Guam was the dream South Pacific location we all imagined.  It actually sounded pretty challenging.  But they worked through it and learned a lot.  That made their next posting to Singapore a bit easier.   Of course Singapore was probably not a hardship posting. But they were still half way around the world from family and friends in a place with a different culture.  They seemed to breeze through that one.

By the time the got to Ghana they were seasoned travelers.  Although, having lived in Nigeria myself, I know that Ghana was probably not paradise either.  But as they came to understand, there are wonderful things all over the world.  You just have to be open to them.  Jill and her family discovered the joy, frustration, sorrow, and unending surprises one finds when traveling.

I might be reading something into this but it seemed to me they decided to return to the USA for the sake of the children.  Their children spent their high school years (or most of them) in the USA learning to be US citizens.  This probably made it a much easier transition for them in the long run.  It might have given them a clear identity at a young age.  However, from my experience, it doesn’t work.  My son returned to the USA when he was six and now that he is about to enter college all he dreams about is going overseas.  And it seems their children were the same.  They were happy to continue traveling.

Returning to the USA was a difficult transition for all of them.  Jill says she realized people were not interested in her stories and could not relate.  I know exactly what she means.  It is so far from what people know, it is difficult to imagine and therefore not interesting.  Re-entry is a challenge for all expats but travelers know how to adjust and tweak and adapt.  Jill and her family were no exception.  They had a good few years back home with friends and family but the itch was still there.

At the end of the book they leave the USA again for distant lands and new experiences.  I think Jill has more to tell.  Perhaps she will write part two some day!

Check it out, it is worth the read!!

70 years together

Posted on by

2

img273

I am re-posting this from my other blog – Eclectic Global Nomad.

My parents were married at 2:00 in the afternoon.  My father was on medical leave from the US Navy after having his appendix out.  The year was 1943.

My mother remembers driving with her father to the church. They lived in a small town in Iowa.  As they drove through downtown my mother noticed the bank clock said 1:55.  When she and her new husband drove back the same route to her house for a small reception, she again noticed the clock.  It now said 2:15.  The minister had married them under the wrong name.  Nobody mentioned it.

My father’s father ran the family farm so he had petrol coupons.  He filled the car with gas and gave them coupons so they could go to Kansas City for a two day honeymoon before my father returned to his post at Lakehurst, New Jersey.  He was training to fly blimps.  My mother was teaching school and had to finish out the year before joining him.

They were separated again when my father went to fly blimps off the coast of Brazil searching for German submarines.  He remembers Christmas Day, 1944.  He and his buddies drove through the Brazilian countryside on their way to find a beach to play volleyball.  It was the first time he had ever seen that kind of poverty.  He noticed the crops in the fields and decided that very day he could help people by teaching agriculture.

He had planned to be a vocational agriculture instructor when he returned to civilian life but this gave it a whole new dimension.  He wanted to work overseas.  His mother had always told him he could do what ever he wanted if he set his mind to it.

Continue Reading

 

My Day at the FIGT Conference

Posted on by

4

Downtown Silver Spring, Maryland

Downtown Silver Spring, Maryland

 

Yesterday I went to the FIGT (Families in Global Transition) Conference.  I had been looking forward to it for a while.  It is a support group for expat families and third culture kids and they have a conference every year where people come together to share their work and ideas and provide information on resources available.

Anyway, I woke up very early because I had about a 45 minute drive and it started at 8 am.  I felt awful.  I had a scratchy throat, I was achy, I was spaced out.  How could this be?  A cold?  I hadn’t been sick in years.  Great!  Well, that wasn’t going to stop me.  I dragged myself out of bed, dosed myself up with pain killers and hit the road.

The conference was non stop, session to session, from 8 am to 5:30 pm.  By the time I got out of there I was exhausted.  I left right after the last session and while trying to maneuver downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, I must have take a wrong turn or not taken a turn or something because I was totally lost.  I don’t have a GPS in my car but I do have an iPhone.  I pulled over and tried to figure out where I was.  For some reason I couldn’t get it to find my location.  I must have been in a bad area because the maps were loading really slowly and I was not getting results.

So in a panic I called my son.  Help!  Luckily he was home and guided me to a place I recognized and I made it home an hour later.  Needless to say, I went to bed early.

In spike of my set backs and panic attacks, I did have a great day.  I met interesting people, attended sessions where I learned new things, and had that warm fuzzy feeling I always get when I’m around my fellow TCK’s.

Here are a few highlights.

P1140221

The first session I attended was called:

Living Whilst Surviving – an Anatomy of Hope and of What Kept Them Going

Presented by Eva Laszlo-Herbert

This was a story of a family who faced great adversity during war in Europe, were separated, deported, jailed, sent to camps, and yet they had great resilience and managed to keep going during all of it, finding small things to make them happy.  “They did not forget, they forgave.  They did not say ‘Why me?’, they said ‘What can I do’?”  They found ways to make things better.

She transitioned this to her current life as an expat in the Netherlands.  The take away I got from this session was about the children.  She commented on the expat children in The Hague.  They are privileged, with nannies, good schools, all kinds of gadgets – iPods, iPhones, they have drivers, and travel the world.  Yet, many of them feel isolated and unhappy.  In some cases their mother is unhappy with her situation, living abroad, feeling isolated.  This transfers to the children.  Often her coping mechanism is to keep the children busy and away from her.

There should be more of a support group for both the wives and the children but nobody wants to talk about it.  They feel guilty because they know they are privileged and don’t really have anything to complain about.

A friend of mine refers to these problems as “first world problems”.  And she is right.

One thing Eva emphasized more than once was how damaging it is to over book a child.  They are constantly busy with dance lessons, soccer practice, piano lessons, French lessons.  They don’t have time to themselves.  Time to think.  Time to dream.  Time to imagine.  Time to just be.

I wanted to tell her about my son.  Many years ago he took a pen that didn’t work and it became his weapon, his gun, his rocket launcher, his airplane, his truck.  And all these years, he has spent hours with that pen.  It is a joke now because if he loses his pen, we all have to panic and look for it.   But it really doesn’t matter, because we can always find another pen that doesn’t work.  He has had several.

Let them just be.

P1140267

The second session I went to was:

In Search of Identity: Awakening your Authentic Self

Presented by John Grant Hill

This was about communication and specifically Neuro Linguistic Programming.  Something I had never heard of.  What I got out of it was that most of the things we do, we do out of habit.   But we can choose to do things differently.  So if we look at two different types of people who are trying to communicate with each other, oftentimes there is conflict because they are not communicating on an equal level.

For example, one person is “introverted” and one is “extroverted”.  The introvert takes his cues internally.  He is very sure of himself and knows what he likes and wants and doesn’t need a lot of external input – i.e. advice, terms of endearment, hugs.  While the extrovert takes his cues from the outside and needs a lot of input in order to make a decision or feel good about himself.

If people understand these differences, they can learn to communicate with each other in different ways that reduce conflict.

A very interesting topic but it would take a while to fully understand it (in my opinion).

P1140331

The third session was:

Unpacking Our Global Baggage for Creative Expression: Writing your TCK Memoir, Solo Show, or Essay

Presented by Elizabeth Liang

Elizabeth is an actress and writer.  She performed a segment of her one-woman multi-character show about growing up as a dual citizen of mixed heritage in Central America, North Africa, the Middle East, and New England.  If you live in the LA area, I suggest you go see her (see link).  I could identify with most of what she said.

 

So that gives you an idea of my day.

Maybe more will come to me later…..

 

 

 

Famous Expat Women

Posted on by

23

I have added a few to this post which first appeared last year.

 

 

Karen Blixen’s farm in Kenya

I watched Out of Africa last night for the umpteenth time and it got me thinking about all the amazing expat women through the ages.  Here are a few of my favorites.

Karen Blixen was Danish.  She married Baron Bror von Blixen and they moved to Kenya in 1914.  He was kind enough to give her syphilis and she returned to Denmark after one year for arsenic treatment.  She lived through it and returned to Kenya for another 16 years. She ran a successful coffee farm for a while but always struggled with it and eventually was forced to sell the land.  Her lover, Denys Finch Hatton, was a big game hunter who died in a plane crash just as she was dealing with the loss of her farm.  She returned to Denmark and lived there for the rest of her life.  She wrote under the name Isak Dineson as well as a few others and a couple of her more famous books are:

Out of Africa  (1937)

Anexdotes of Destiny  (1958) – includes Babette’s Feast which was made into a movie

Letters from Africa 1914-1931  (1981 – posthumous)

 

Beryl Markam was English.  Her family moved to Kenya when she was 4 years old in 1906.   She became friends with Karen Blixen even though there was an 18 year gap in age.  Beryl also had a brief affair with Denys Finch Hatton and was due to fly with him the day he crashed.  She had some kind of premonition and did not go.  However she did go on to fly extensively in the African bush and was the first women to fly across the Atlantic from East to West.  She briefly lived in California married to an avocado farmer but eventually retuned to Kenya and became a well known horse trainer.  Her memoir (a very good read) is:

West with the Night  (1942, re-released in 1983)

 

Alexandra David-Neel was French.  She became an explorer at a young age running away from home at the age of 18 to ride her bicycle to Spain and back.  In 1904 at the age of 36 she was traveling in Tunis and married a railway engineer.  That didn’t last long since she immediately had itchy feet and set off for India.  She told her husband she would be back in 18 months but did not return for 14 years.  Her goal was Sikkim in the northern mountains.  She spent years studying with the hermits and monks of the region and eventually, dressed as a man, snuck into the forbidden city of Lhasa.  Her travels were extensive and you can read more about her here:

http://www.alexandra-david-neel.org/anglais/biog.htm

Her account of her trip to Lhasa is:

My Journey to Lhasa (1927)

 

Gertrude Stein was an American Jewish lesbian writer who moved to Paris in 1904.  She held “Salons” promoting modern unknown artists such as Picasso, Matisse and Cezanne.  During World War 1 she learned to drive a car and drove a supply truck for the American Fund for French Wounded supplying hospitals in France with her life long companion Alice B Toklas.  Her writing was revolutionary and influenced many modern writers including Hemmingway.  She was a strong minded woman with strong opinions and a copious writer with a great sense of humor.  She was a real character as all these women were.  One of the easiest books of hers to read is:

The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas  (1933)

Another one I like very much is:

Ida, A Novel (1941)

 

Sylvia Beach, 1927

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sylvia Beach was a contemporary of Gertrude Stein and also lived in Paris.  She was born in Baltimore, Maryland.  Her father was a minister and she grew up in Europe.  She owned the bookstore Shakespeare and Company and published James Joyce’s Ulysses when nobody else would touch it, even though she had no money herself.  She lived in Paris most of her adult life.  Her memoir is:

Shakespeare & Company (1959)

 

220px-Johann-Baptist_Lampi_d._Ä._007

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And just for fun… Catherine the Great.  She was born in Stettin, Prussia (now Szczecin, Poland), and traveled to Russia in 1744.  In 1745, at age 16, she married Grand Duke Peter of Russia and became the Russian empress in 1762.  She did not get on well with her husband and managed to “convince” him to abdicate.  Soon afterwards he was mysteriously killed.  She continued to rule Russia on her own until her death at age 67.  I visited her palace outside St Petersburg a couple of times when I was living in Russia.  There was one room I particularly liked was the Amber Room.  The walls are covered in amber and other precious jewels.  A recently published book about her life:

Catherine the Great by Robert K Massie (2011)

 

Who are your favorites??

 

 

It’s always something

Posted on by

32

snl-10

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first year Saturday Night Live aired on TV in the USA, Gilda Radner was part of the cast. She played several different characters, but my favorite was Rosanne Roseannadanna. This character did a “commentary” on the nightly “news” show. She would go on and on about some stupidity somebody had done and then focus on some very disgusting detail and Jane Curtain would put an end to it all saying it was making her want to throw up. Rosanna would end the skit by saying Well, Jane, it just goes to show you, it’s always something! If it’s not one thing, it’s another!

About 10 years later Gilda was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and died three years later in 1989.

My ex-husband, Nicholas, always had a great sense of humor and loved Saturday Night Live. Rosanna was one of his favorites, too. As well as John Belushi, Samurai Delicatessen.

I met Nicholas when I was living in Minneapolis, MN. He was a left radical who passionately believed in living green before anybody thought about it much. He wanted to be a writer. He grew up speaking Russian at home and had just returned from Nicaragua where he was learning Spanish and following the Sandanistas around taking photos. He was anything but boring. We dated for four years and then married in December of 1988. We went to Cancun for our honeymoon but also visited Chichen Itza, Merida, and Uxmal. About a week after we returned, he left for a month in Russia. His first trip to the motherland. He met most of his relatives for the first time. He always wanted to live and work in Russia and it looked like it might be possible with all the changes coming about.

Nicholas started out his career as a journalist working for the Tampa Tribune and we moved to Clearwater, Florida, in 1989. That only lasted about a year. He was bored to death. He was supposed to be writing about environmental issues but they kept assigning him to local festivals and tourist attractions. Due to a strange set of circumstances we ended up in Washington DC and in 1991 he left for Moscow as a freelance journalist. He witnessed and reported on the coup of August 1991 when the Soviet Union fell. I heard him on NPR the day the tanks rolled into Moscow. He liked to live large, work hard and play hard. He loved to get out there in the thick of it. When Yeltsin was bombing the Parliament House in Moscow in 1993, Nicholas was out there in the crowd spotting snipers and running around the “war zone”.

During the 10 years that Nicholas lived in Moscow, he started an Expat List and and Expat Site. Both were forums and information hubs for expats living in Moscow. It was fun to see it grow over the years and to realize it filled a niche for much needed information. Although it has changed a lot since those days and Nicholas is no longer involved, it does still exist and people continue to use it.

Our son was born during this time and he spent the first six years of his life living in Moscow. After returning to the USA in 2002, Nicholas ran a program for exchange students and professionals from Russia and Ukraine. He enjoyed it but I don’t think he found it especially challenging.

Then somehow it all fell into place and he landed a great job. He developed, coordinated, and edited a news website for a Defense Department contract covering all the news for Central Asia. This website has been instrumental in counter terrorism activities in the area. The website is Central Asia Online.

He and I had our differences but we were married for 16 years and had some very good times traveling around Europe and dealing with the challenges of living in Russia. He tried to be a good father and stayed close to his son.

In April of 2011, Nicholas, had a seizure at work. They found a tumor in his brain and after it was removed they determined it was an aggressive form of brain cancer, stage 4. With the help of chemo he lived a pretty normal life for the next year. He had a very positive outlook throughout his illness and he added the  following signature to his emails:

Life’s journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in
a well preserved body, but rather, to skid in
sideways, totally worn out, shouting … “Holy
shit…what a ride!”

Then the chemo stopped working.

He and our son had planned a trip back to Russia for the spring of 2013. In August, 2012, the trip was moved up and they went for a two week visit. They saw relatives, friends, and many of their old stomping grounds. It was a dream come true for both of them.

A few weeks after they returned, Nicholas was in the hospital with rolling seizures. They tried several drugs and he was able to recover to a point. They gave him several different treatments to shrink the tumors but they just kept spreading. In December he was told to seek hospice.

Both Nicholas and Gilda had cancers that are difficult if not impossible to test for or discover early on. Because of Gilda’s high profile, there has been progress in ovarian cancer and a lot of money has poured into research in that area. They are even testing a vaccine that could help stop the recurrence after treatment.

Brain tumors and brain cancer have a long way to go, however. More research is needed.

Please help by donating to the cancer research fund. For more information and to donate click HERE.

It’s always something…..if it’s not one thing it’s another.

Nicholas Pilugin, August 17, 1955 – January 17, 2013

An Unexpected Exit

Posted on by

5

At the Airport in Moscow

 

This week it is the anniversary of my return to America.  We had lived in Russia almost nine years.  On Monday, October 24, 2001, a little over a month after 9/11, we were told by the Russian Government it was time to leave.  We had until the 28th to get out of town, 4 days.

I spent the next three days frantically sorting through nine years of accumulated stuff. What to take with us, what to leave behind, what to ship later if it was possible.  Yes, no, maybe.  I boiled it down to six suitcases.

We borrowed money for plane tickets and spent the night of the 28th in Amsterdam.  Our favorite city.  We ate at Casa di David, and my six year old son fell asleep with his head on the table.  We barely noticed.  A couple sitting next to us asked us if our son always slept in restaurants.  We laughed.

The next day we arrived in Chicago.

“Welcome home!”

That’s what the customs official always says and it sounded good.

My parents met us at a bus stop in Wisconsin and took us to their two bedroom apartment.  We were refugees in our own country.  No place to go, no job, no money, no belongings.

Life begins again.

As a TCK, I was used to re-inventing myself and starting over.  I knew it wasn’t the end of the world.

I spent the first six months in shock on auto pilot just getting through the day.  I put my son in first grade since he was six.  He had been going to a Russian school and his language was a bit mixed up.  They told him he wasn’t ready for first grade.  My mother says flunking kindergarten was the best thing that ever happened to him.

I gained about 20 pounds.  But I picked myself up and eventually made some serious decisions and got on with my life.  After wasting away in a small town in Minnesota for 9 months licking our wounds, we broadened our horizons and looked for work on the coast.  My husband found a job in Washington DC and moved immediately.  I waited for my son to finish out the school year and then joined him.  We arrived in Northern Virginia on the hottest day of the year.  Ugh.  About six weeks later I had a job of my own.

Every once in a while I think about a book I used to have or a dress I really liked but for the most part the stuff we left behind was quickly forgotten.  I chose well when I packed my six suitcases.  It was enough.

A few years later, I divorced and became a single parent.  I had come to the fork in the road.  It was time and it was okay.  A couple years later I bought my own home.  I have come a long way since that gloomy October day 11 years ago.

You can read more about my story in my book Expat Alien.

Power of We: Llamas

Posted on by

0

Last Christmas I decided to do something different. I gave my family two llamas. Well, not really, I gave two llamas in their name.

Heifer International is an organization that helps people help themselves. By donating llamas we were able to help a Bolivian family lift themselves out of poverty. Here is the letter we received from Heifer about our llamas.

For Matilde and Mario, the gift of a llama – which provides some of the finest wool in the world – has become a dependable source of income they can use for food, medicine and to send their daughter, Delia, to school. Thank you for recently helping us empower another family with the livestock and training it needs to become self-reliant.

Delia is a lucky little girl because she has a very bright future in front of her thanks to a Heifer International project her parents joined.

Before Heifer, Delia’s family seldom had enough to eat and could never depend on income from the crops because of year-round frosts and hailstorms in the mountains of Bolivia.

There was really only one solution: llamas.

Delia’s parents had wanted to raise llamas for such a long time, but they could never save up enough to buy any animals. But with the help of Heifer supporters, we were able to provide llamas and training in their care.

Llamas, and their cousins, the alpaca, are very often the only solution for many of the poorest families in South America. There just aren’t many animals that can thrive at 14,000 feet above sea level where Matilde, Mario and Delia live.

For instance, If we were to give cows to a family in the high Andes, not only could the altitude and cold be dangerous for the cow, the cattle would damage the fragile high alpine meadows beyond repair. That’s not sustainable. And therefore, it’s not the Heifer solution.

But llamas are native to Bolivia and well suited to this unique environment. Like sheep wool, llama wool can be sheared and made into products that families can sell for income. Selling their woolen goods means a steady income that Mario, Matilde, and other Heifer families can use for everything from school fees for their children to building fences to protect their crops and animals.

They are especially proud to be able to send Delia to school.

“My father only let me go to school up until the 2nd grade,” Matilde says. “I didn’t know how to read. I don’t want my children to be like me. I’m very happy for them to study.”

This year’s Blog Acton Day theme is the Power of We. Together we can all make a difference!

Heifer International is a partner of Blog Action DAy 2012

Heifer International’s mission is to work with communities to end hunger and poverty and care for the Earth and started 67 years ago when a group of people from Indiana, USA came together and donated livestock to communities in Spain who were going hungry after the devastation of the Spanish Civil War, showing they have the Power of We at their core.

Global Nomads at the Spanish Steps

Posted on by

4

 

In high school I spent a long weekend in Rome with my best friend, Pearl.  We hopped a train in Lugano and arrived in Rome after dark.  Pearl had grown up in Rome and her godmother was going to put us up.  We had to wait a while before our ride showed up and the Italians were swarming us trying to fix us up with a cheap hotel.  A woman who was traveling with us went off with one of them.  We wondered if we would see her again.

We wandered around Rome for a couple of days seeing the sights.  St Peter’s, the Pieta, the Vatican museum, the Sistine Chapel, the Coliseum.  But our most favorite thing to do was walk down the Via Veneto and eat gelato.

On one occasion we ended up at the Spanish Steps.  We were thinking about climbing them when this guy came up to us and said,

“Where are you from?”

Not a good question to ask us.  We were both Third Culture Kids who had lived our entire lives moving from one country to the next.  Pearl had grown up in Rome, was half Japanese, and currently called Tokyo home.  I had already lived on five continents and currently called Nigeria home.

“We’re not from anywhere”

“Come on, you have to be from somewhere.  Where are you from?”

“I’m from Tokyo”

“I’m from Nigeria”

“Okay…. Hey I’m from California!!  The greatest place on Earth!  California is the best!”

Um-hmmm

Pearl and I looked at each other, turned, and walked away.  The last place we wanted to be was with a loud American who though he was great.

So we didn’t climb the Spanish Steps.

But we did enjoy an amazing 5 course meal in a packed restaurant where we never heard a word of English. I remember the tortellini soup to this day.

Now that was Roma!!

Moscow Days

Posted on by

5

 

 

When I lived in Moscow in the 1990′s, I relied on the Metro and buses for transportation.  Everybody carried their own cloth bags for shopping and I always took my backpack when doing the grocery shopping.  One wet snowy day I slogged to the store with my backpack and cloth bags looking for some choice items to feed my dinner guests.

I went on the Metro and I found pretty much everything I was looking for and the store wasn’t too crowded so everything was looking pretty good.  I was thinking how great it was that so much stuff fit into the backpack and I only had to carry a couple of light things in my hands.  As I approached the entrance to the Metro, I felt the pack shifting as if something was not quite right.  I made it into the station, pushed my way through a huge crowd at the turnstiles and decided I should take the pack off and check it before getting onto the escalator.  As I was taking off the backpack, it opened up wide and everything fell out onto the muddy wet floor of the station.  Did I mention it was winter?  I dropped everything and chased a can as it rolled away from me.

I managed to gather everything into a pile and hurriedly crammed my sugar, flour, juice and tomato sauce back into the backpack.  The cheese and sour cream had been in a separate plastic bag so I just shoved that into my cloth bag and proceeded to the escalator.  Through all of this people were stepping over me and around me and somebody had actually stepped on my sour cream so it was all over the inside of the plastic bag.  Nobody had missed a step to even think about offering me any help.  All of my bags were filthy from lying in the muck on the floor and my hands were also filthy from gathering everything up off the floor.  I was cursing the Metro, the Russian people, the Russian Federation, my husband, and anybody else I could think of and I plotted all the way home that I would just pack my bags and get the next flight out of town.  Plus by this time I was sweating from having too many clothes on in the crowded Metro.

When I reached my apartment building and entered the elevator that rarely worked properly, a woman followed me in.  She had been out walking her dog.

Woman:  Which floor do you need?

Me:  14

Woman:  I am on the 8th floor.  The lift has been in such poor working order.

Me:  I couldn’t agree more.  I was stuck in it recently and waited over an hour to get out.

Woman:  It is not reliable.

Woman:  You should really wear a hat.  You might catch the flu in this cold weather.

Me:  It really isn’t that cold out.

Woman getting off the lift:  Good bye.  All the best!

Me:  Thank you. Good Bye

Continuing up the elevator all I could think of was what a country filled with contradictions it was!

I managed to salvage everything but the sour cream by transferring things into non-muddy containers.  I cleaned my apartment from top to bottom and washed all the floors and I felt much better when I was done.  By the time my guests arrived for dinner, I welcomed them with open arms without any thoughts of fleeing the country.

Life as an expat can be challenging anywhere but the people you meet along the way make it worth it.