Wah heh

Wah heh may be a song chorus somewhere, it also is the involuntarily reaction to a major life threatening manouvre by a driver that does not speak your language, but understood to be a good driver by any local higway code test and worthy of taking a jolly foreigner around his city. And by decree nof the government it must involve hair raising events which is especially challenging if the passenger is bald.

Arriving early for a meeting takes second place to seeing the children once more in a life.

Eventually after arrival and survival, he smiles as if he has proven yet again that he is good, very good. Extreme taxi riding is the middle age equivalent of bungee jumping.

Teeth & Gums

Dental Health insurance ...yer pays yer money, the physical pain goes and yer ....eeergh still hurts from the financial pain, the lack of cash in the current account because of the deductions, excess, cost sharing, caps and what have you's.



First things first, Death by international dental hygiene should be a crimal offence in international criminal law. First degree near murder should be when placed in the hands of a foreign dental hygienist unable to say 'please', because she thinks you are stupid in her a language and unworthy of a smile, but plenty deserving a bit of GBH, delivered legally under the guise of nurse-patient privilege. She ungently grabs a mouth and squeezes it open as if popping a zit. The doctor urgently exercises his doctor-victim privilege with a needle delivery rate, one thinks if he has a stapler, it probably hasn't got staples.

A person with a drill who does not speak your language is a frightening thought. One's logic goes out of the window one wishes to forewan him that one's teeth are not meant to be pout in a cup overnight one cannot speak perhaps through fear perhaps because there is a big bloody drill in one's mouth and a collection of whirring dripping, flushing apparatus or is it apparati. To talk is a bit of a lottery So during the second stage of near death experiences ability to talk is secondary to waving your arms about.

So as near bloody certain death looms when you have the recall - the come back next week, with a whole week to think about the full-on horror of gum bleeding atrocities. Waving your arms may not be enough, its time for a grown man to cry over a cheek that feels as if it was transplanted from a 1950's B movie swamp monster. Where is the mirror.

I have experienced twice root canal treatment on foreign lands, I survived, there should be medals.


On the second occasion the dentist described the previous expensive aesthetically pleasing plastic filling treatment that the dentist of the first occasion had put in as a poison. YES POISON. Yes my incredibly overpaid first dentist had taken my near death theories a tad closer to reality than I would have wished. Why that made me happy.

Let me remind myself, I paid aswell. Where is the NHS when you want it.

I am in pain as I open wide -whammy one- aaaaaaand second things second, I have to pay - whammy two - dental treatment is not a happy ex-pat experience.

The South American locals have perfect teeth, gleaming white enamel of a life without boiled sweets, Cadbury's chocolate; a life without British 70's new wave dental treatment based on finding a hole, perhaps more a speck, making a speck bigger, a hole in fact, and filling it with metal. Its a wonder dentists in South America make money. Then there's the foreigners. A story............
In some posh restaurant in the better part of a South American city I crunch a rare medium steak, but....pero....why...por que....steaks are not crunched, from somewhere there is a metallic action-reaction bite, so unless the meat here is flavoured by pellets, I have to face death. I am not happy, a pleasant working day will now involve organising a visit to the local dentist. I do not know if local is local or satellite-to-local or indeed not-local.
Should I ignore it, the last time on foreign soil, I chose to ignore a failing tooth, which some weeks later resulted in excruciating pain and mega bucks root canal treatment.

One hour later with the kind help of a local secretary, one taxi ride with the paid help of a driver of slow speed and heavy traffic, moving up this street, down another, left at the traffic light and I am here less a large sum of local currency, that probably will feed his family for a week. In return I gain some shrapnel celebrating some unknown hero. Behind a hidden stairwell I find a hint of a door that may hide a dentist. I am speaking into a remote door intercom that opens the heavy duty barred doors, here a chance to practice the local lingo. Por favor ....Please....speak English. Barred door swings a little open on a lock clunk-click lock, sounding just like the local steak, nervously I push open the bars that have seen 'action'. . Not a good ambience.

The dentist is a first generation Latino with a German give-away name doctor - a local dentist speaks English, wah hey, the tools of his trade speak of a distant age, I am time warped into the 50's, I am grateful it looks a little 1950's and not 1850;s, the dental machines are coloured cream, I am back in in schoolboy memories. I have still a certain angst. Thankfully the tooth looks good, but an X-ray to double-check maybe, he needs the money, I wasted his time, he wants the dollar. I am charitable, I agree. I am wrong. I am a fool, I am taken to the fool's room, I am taken to the radioactive 'enter at your peril' room, the torture chamber epicentre, the bunker, a leaded apron is anchored on me, I am rooted to a position by post-WWII former-high tech stuff. The machine is of a size, of a metallic armed disposition to star in a 1950's B movie about aliens. I am rigidly stuck in an iron grip, they re-assuringly run out. and zapped as a Geiger Counter goes full-scale deflection. And my tooth is still good, but let's wait 10 years if my body has survived the dosing of the radiological effects.

And I paid half of it, and of that half that was within my financial cap limit. A grown man cries again. Twice in a life outside funerals.

So its back the metal flavoured meat. Mum would be proud of my iron diet. Not to mention a new superhero power of finding magnetic north without a compass.

Spreading the Word

Some musical pop combo band somewhere said lost in a supermarket. I am lost in the first day of school standing as the leper family at the local school. International schooling has been forsaken for cultural integration ~the official reason~ and monetary necessity ~the unofficial reason. I stand with a frightened child awaiting the isolation of a foreign language amongst her peers. This is not the best ex-pat moment of this global citizen shenanigans.

In six-nine months comes the better ex-pat moment as a child can embarrass me as I ask for help in explaining why some electrical kit does not work to the only non second langauge english speaker in third major city by population of the country's major shopping chain. Why me?

And one fall out, one result, as one language becomes second nature aswell as second tongue, the first tongue falls into speaking too properly, too logically, a return to toddler english logic; as in 'he spreaded'. And we dutiful parents are left correcting the irregular. Perhaps my child is right, or rite; as in not wrong or not rong, as the case or kase may be.

A shovel is a spade

Let us call a shovel a shovel so that the do-gooders and do-betters do not misinterpret my deck of cards. Cultural awareness can be a challenge. Sometimes in the wrong way.



Once in order to avoid embarassing Business cultural exchanges that may jeopardise a deal over a misplaced gesture, we undertook cultural training at the considerable expense of the Company. Negotiation skills, cultural awareness and communication skills, whatever.

As an aside if I recall once being taught negotiating skills by this large Brummie lady who had negotiated a big food deal in the West Midlands that may have been...ooo...worth hundreds of pence. Now her weekly shopping she was done, which probably included a large portion of Mars bars and your bum does look big in anything really, now she was training us, as an expert in negoptiation. Her CV writing skills were probably very good. Sometimes big companies spend money on the big idea, the big tick in the box and the net result is not quite value for money. But armed with course notes, knowledgeable on how to survive a plane crash in a desert with a varied team I was ready to venture into the real world.



Then fully trained in cultural awareness so that I could recognise a 'I do not understand' as a 'No'. We went into battle, a negotiation with the Chinese and a thousand of my bows of introduction later; my colleague across the table smiled a thousand times at my courtesy that he had not seen outside his London based posting for probably a few years. I was a looking a little niaive, methinks. I was a novice in international negotiation, and he was an old hand used to the non-culturally aware Brits.



On another tangent in the Middle East, at some ex-pat social club this nice Brit ex-pat fella who had been demonstrably respectul to our hosts, now here turned on the fellow ex-pat of sorts at our sides. An ex-pat Indian immigrant that served our food, after serving us drinks and probably later cleaned the floors of our drunken mishaps. My Brit colleague raised his voice to exort his colonial best digust at his speed of foot in serving us, or not yet serving us. He turned to berate this man in terms to leave the social status understood by all there. We sat in our confortable chairs, I lowering my eyes and my colleague tossing his eyes upwards, whilst our fellow less fortunate went to toss the salad hopefully without the spittle special sauce we may have deserved.



PS- A tip for increasing the odds of surviving a plane crash in a desert is to fly with a reputable Company.

New School Year Calender Begins Again

Wah-hey - another school year starts, another new school, another set of new friends for the kids to ingratiate themselves, I hope, we hope, they hope; with whilst trying to improve an education that that leads them to university, I hope, we hope, they do not care. My kids stand there, my kids' eyes wide open, a tad of nervousness, almost physical as I provide a whimsical commentary that things will be alright, my kids looking around, my kids being being looked at, this is a first day zoo. They will survive, they always do, but will they be hurt. Scarred after being scared by an ex-pat adventure, or will they be better persons, extroverts, kind souls, culturally aware - a socio non-experiment that my kids have no choice but to be part of and we buy another needlessly unwarranted cuddly toy, to add to the collection, to make up for the lack of stabilty, to prove we are really good parents.

See you in the Spring.

Good, Bad and Ugly Times

Ex-pat of now some years and some moves, but the world is a big place and my ex-pat view is coloured by my limited experiences. I have nor ex-patted in an english speaking country, but certainly mostly in English speaking offices, except one where even asking for a coffee was a challenge. It was a pretty thirstly secondment and de-toxing non caffeine cold turkey in a foreign office is not a way to endear oneself to the natives.


And I confess its easy for me to pick on the woes especially as they tend to illicit more humour, but there are and were good times, drinking Belgian beer with a fellow ex-pat in a non Belgian plaza at ridiculous hours of a morning, ridiculous for the UK, but there we were part of the native throng except for louder-than-yours shirts.

In the UK, other parents cricitised our parent-children behaviour because our 'toddlers+' were unaccountably awake beyond 8 o'clock in the evening and not even in bed. This was tant amount to admitting we belonged to the local evangelical chapter of 'Pagan Gods -R-Us'. One could see other parents downgrading us to trailer trash with a ear-to-ear wrinkling of the forehead. A forehead where potatoes could have successfully be grown in the furrow.
One month later in ex-pat land, we were now 'criticised' for cruelly suggesting our children were in bed by 10'clock which was behaviour akin to well British , such is cultural differences.

'Criticised' is an exaggeration or an interptation, as it was more a reading of body language, and regressive memories that some years later understood the nods, winks and chuckles of the natives to our early days as Brits abroad

I like to think step by step one learns, adopts and perhaps improves with cultural knowledge and also with age, a better man than that which I once was. I hope. Hard times becoming learning times becoming good times, but always uncertain times and so exciting times.

Pryce Thoery of Relativity

Without resorting to baffling the reader by using a fancy equation that E=m to the c dee sqaured off at the corner of 10 and 11 or something like that, because I am not that intelligent. Ex-pat life has a time relativity of its own. Arriving at a new place, a new environment, a new world, where the words on signs may use the same letters but do not spell the same words. Toilets should by Global Law be identified only in genetically correct symbols. Eating food is a matter of guesswork and mild food poisoning, shopping in a supermarket is a lottery until you find the ketchup bottles and Cornflakes section. Finding a good school for the kids is an endurance test of remote emotion and cash-flow problems. Time slows-mo, but you still can't believe its Friday. Anniversaries are counted in weeks , graduating to months, six months of survival earns a meal. An end of a school term is a Fast Food bonanza in food-if-you-like-and-it-looks-like and fingerpointing. A year is a jubilee deserving a banquet. Two years, three years is tour of duty. A Vet.

Not a holiday maker tourist and not an adventurer, but a traveller by a diff'rent road that is tied to an economic truism. Who pays the bills, sometimes facilitates the residency papers. And for the most part global citizenship is absorbed, or at least continental citizenship.

An Ex-pat life can have a certain excitement, a cowboy of latter-dat sorts permitted to wear loud shirts in public causing mirth to the locals without threatening your place in society; because you're just passing through and laughing at me is ephemeral and hides a jealousy of my freedom. But ne'er forget that cowboys sometimes walk on cowpats.

Shrapnel

I am aware the Euro is hated with a lust by some of my fellow citizens. But standing in a queue awaiting to buy the local-as-in-foreign equivalent of a Mars Bar and wondering what is the price in Liramarkpesos not easy to convert to sterling pounds and pence. Finally forced to stand before a lady demanding money with grimaces. Finally standing in front of a sudden queue of locals wanting nothing more than to reach the grimacing lady. Mental arithmetic sums are done, tried to be done, to convert a Mars Bar into sterling ..into Liramarkpeso equivalent that included dividing by 10,000, rounding to second decimal places, multplying by 3.5, or was it 3.7 and adding the first number I thought of. Eventually one parts with the largest note as signified by the number of '000's and the note is handed over with trepidation. Does humilation await.

Grimace turns to despair, words are spoken in tongues, is this an Evangelical Church and a note is waved, the Guidebook has told you to say 'I no speak', she hands over a ridiculous amount of notes and metal as a waiting queue bays for your blood, and still she calls for a treasury transfer with sovereign guaranteefor the cash to fund for my confectionary purpose.

And next day this is repeated as shrapnel is accumulated.

And to add injury to insult, the Mars bar doesn't quite taste like the Blighty Mars Bar.

Culture Shock

On my first posting abroad which was not in the deepest developing nation, but a European City. My colleagues, the veteran of ex-pat doom merchants forewarned me of a dreaded pariah of all things Ex-pat - "Culture Shock". Apparently, and it was told to me, and I cannot underestimate the seriousness of the message, it was said in whispered earnest as if I was being diagnosed by a doctor of some bearing studying a medical magnetic radiation scan that may show a shadow or two...be prepared. This drama ~the Culture Shock ~would be faced at some point, at some moment unkown to me, in the future. Be scared.
He forecasted that often it ~ the culture shock~occurred after the excitement, headless chicken runaround of early months as one collapsed at one point happy to have survived the settling in and then as one sat in congratulatory Zietgeist, as one sat on the sofa, repeating the moment of successful settling-in, the effort made, the heart attack risked, the new home here..... starting slowly dreaming of, perhaps, a Rich Tea bicky dipped in a PG Tips tea, the old home, whereupon you would become a blithering blubbering idiot because the local muck was no good and, by the way, coincidentally at 30Degrees C local temperature not really wanted. But that was not the point, it was a rich Tea Bicky that was not sold in this God forsaken hell hole of greasy green things and stuff. It was stated, this phenomemon ~the Culture Shock~, in hushed reverential tones, as if a not talked about disease, that he was doing me a favour, breaking a vow of revereance, by even mentioning it in whispered tones. Keep the defribillator, my friend, handy in case the "Shock" gets you or your family. Be prepared. Be scared.


I admit, I indeed suffered from headless chicken-ness and stress that should have brought on ulcers, if I had time to organise my yearly medical and diagnose an ulcer. But priorities went to residency papers, translations, school registrations, understanding the house wiring, electrocuting a finger or two, finding the local doctor as a daughter coughed a tad too heavily, a doctor reached by phone, by car, by illegal parking, by hand gestures to a receptionst by a tingling finger; and all sorts of other melodramas that would not have happened in Blighty. But I accepted I was in a different culture, perhaps cursed it sometimes, looked at my brand new pay -check, saw the kids loving it, felt a certain sense-of-worth, meeting-the-challenge and bought a satellite TV dish at exorbitant prices.


A kind of reverse Culture shock of sorts was that the brand new pay check whilst making economy savings....mmmmmm...come again? was I not earning more?...... this savings concept was a kind of culture shock that the salary I had been promised and lovingly adored, became eaten as Health Insurance, school fees, special bag for school to match the other kids, residence fees, big birthday presents for the the rich kids at the new school, car registrations, house finder's fee, house deposit fee; all ate into my pocket whilst I started to appreciate a bread and dripping diet again. Woe is me.

And by modern science of webcams, satellite, to some extent I needed to start getting in touch with local culture a tad more ~ reverse Culture Shock~.


But to admit another type of culture shock, in another culture of a later move that did shock, but it was I think forgivable. On one ex-pat posting to a non European city , I took the doom merchant of the incumbent ex-pat message a tad more seriously, because it involved bullets and the art of aviding bullets. A lesson in the skills of trying not to be shot and integrating into the background, not not too stand out as Johnny Foreigner. Look like the locals...hmmm...pinky white skin....immediately my shirt was unbuttoned, sun was generously allowed to burn my skin to fast track my tanning credits. I ended up a tomato-head with an arrow on my chest pointing to where I was about to wet himself at the nearest hint of a gun waving boy from the "Barrios" with a bullet with my name on it. This was not so much culture shock as scaredy pants, man happily prepared to buy a nappy, but did not want to buy a body bag. I survived without any real nappy soiling incident, did he exaggerate, I think not.
My doom merchant ultimately was kidnapped at gunpoint divested of all but his pants for not following his own rules. He lived and the adult nappy buying statistics has risen exponentially. Mafia links top Adult diper manufacturers should be investigated, methinks.

Autumn leaves to fall

A famous song once said 'I am a passenger' and in life, sometimes more often than I probably care to admit; I have allowed the water flow to take me to new pastures part of the flotsam of the undertow. And when I say me, I should say us, chasing the euro dollar with a family in tow. Sometimes the relocations, career moves were unavoidable in a cycle of promised career opportunity, a tour of duty completed and freelance contract ended.

Once I was made redundant and I was set adrift with visions of bread and dripping for dinners if I did not get ...... . Whilst in the old home office of my old Company in Blighty, where I could have stayed, my seat by the window for years of service, my associated professional status confirmed with hierarchy trinkets of my personal printer, a wood trimmed desk, a first copy in the 'cc list', there my seat had passed on to 'his seat'- the cuckoo home office nest had new ownership. I was no longer an employee. And in part of life's rich tapestry, on this occasion, all things being equal and all that, the economic bottom line was unequal and my foreign-based promised career accelerator position was no longer tenable. Not so funny with a family to feed, I felt like a weed in the garden competing for a drop of water, but afraid the gardener liked the flowers more, hell he liked the grass more than my redundant weed. An ego bruised, made humble.

Down-sizing, re-sizing, called to the cull. A plan of life gone lost, and who the fff.. put f in life. A mid-life in review to which I have bobbed, floated in the maelstrom of the flow. A career plan now in disrepute as a white lie going grey, like the hair that has survived the years.

Let me roll over in my grave, I am not only a passenger ~ I am a mushroom.

~ but I am here, I am a survivor.

T'office

Without wishing to wear my heart on a sleeve, besides the shirt might need washing, I might die. Or pretend to have a stutter and call my office “t’office” because I was once working class. But it was not so many years ago that travelling by aeroplane was what others did, at best I travelled by a bus and was thankful for it. But eventually with a degree under my arm, a chip on my shoulder, one day in young executive land the Company paid for me to explore some industrial facility and, bless them, to return me on the same day and double bless them again I travelled by air. My family in their valley home expressed surprise I had achieved this feat of travel without a sledge, huskies and a first aid pack; yet I was telephoning home without a nose bleed, after travelling further than they had ever holidayed. I was living in a different world to my kin, I had become irrefutably a different generation.

Working class boy makes good or it may seem so, but here is the crux, the cross to bear, the albatross of history, the burden of social placing. To embellish, to paint a picture,.......a story.


The multi-course Business evening meals that I found more challenging than psychrometric multiple choice, more demanding than multi tasking. As a young graduate, I was losing battles to be served last during a team building seminar evening dinner. Why? ....Because.... I could follow the example of some-middle-class-body in the art of choosing which fork to use, or which sperm-of-satan spoon-fork I should pick-up, let alone use it to pivck-up some fruit hiding under a fashioanble looking leaf. Where was I to place a napkin, and bless my cotton socks I resisted raising it to my nose, just. What cellar was for salt and how come it was on the table and not the basement. I was a working class boy whose academic achievements may be rooted in straight B+’s, but I was a working class boy making bad. As noses were turned up, as my nose managed only sniffles, where was that napkin.
I was new in this strata of society, I was second place, destined to be brought on board when the job was behind, when brains counted for more than etiquette. Like a mad dog under cover of darkness released to bark at the moon and the poachers.


A true story as I confess to a tad of exaggeration:
I was asked once to pass the 'cruet stand', I was dumbfounded, had we moved onto the after dinner Trvial Pursuits entertainment and I hadn't finished my soup, come to think of it no-one else had. I was rescued by a kindly fellow who hid my fallibility by quickly pointing to the offending table tools of a evening meal. Phew for WC-boy.

As an analogy of sorts:
Ladies call for the breaking of the glass ceiling barring them from the top jobs and there is a truth in it - a transparent bias; but where as beyond this glass ceiling there are some females admitted-by-token. Here the glass ceiling is seen in its transparent notoriety, in its Board room male only 'toilet-ness'. It is visible enough, it is talked about on the satellite news channels to spend whole minutes between adverts and football to launch, the ladies can launch a critical campaign for justice. But here I am in my working class bubble, here I am where academia, work ethic compensates little against the glass ceiling . This transparent ceiling is not transparent to the social eye. No entry here not even by token.


Am I still uncool spelt uncouth in my no-WC-man's land. I hope I exaggerate for effect.