On old dogs and new tricks

The things you fallen love with about a person when you first meet them, are very often the things that end up driving you utterly mad about them. And vice versa. The same can be said of new countries.

Nooooooooooo................

I fell in love with the fact that you can buy anything you like whenever you want in the US – and now it drives me mad. Stuff stuff stuff…

When I moved here, I looked at 65 houses before we bought this one. Not because I hadn’t found the one I wanted. I had. I looked in them because I was overwhelmed, bewildered and various other adjectives by how much stuff they had and how they needed whole cupboards labelled Halloween, Christmas and other holidays just to keep all the decorations in.  And I just couldn’t stop looking at them. Don’t tell my real estate agent that…. One cupboard for each holiday in many households! How could people have so many decorations when the rest of the world got by on four pieces of tinsel and a few strands of Woolworth’s Christmas lights come December!

I also didn’t like soft ‘cookies’ (because biscuits are supposed to be hard), ‘biscuits’ (because they were pseudo-scones), and other strange food items masquerading as something they were not. And now, I do.

Never ever say never because as soon as you do, you have to eat your words (and cookies and biscuits…). The next time you go to a new place, take particular note of all of the things that look the weirdest, the funniest, the most out of place, the most talked about by expats and… hmm, the most sneered at. For those things dear reader, will be the things you come to love.

Now I must away and find a place to put my ENORMOUS pile of newly acquired Christmas decorations that I just had to buy in the New Year Sales, for this is the time of year, that one finds a dead tree in their living room and all those shiny things must be stored…. in a cupboard…marked ‘Christmas’.

Oh and….. Yes I do plan to write this year – just not every day… watch this space…..