Where are you from?

While travelling in the American southwest with my family last summer, I had an odd experience. We had been seated in a restaurant and were discussing the menu, in Italian. The waitress came over and asked if we had any questions, and my husband turned to her and spoke in perfect, albeit heavily accented English. When it came time to take the orders, she started speaking with my husband and asked him what the ‘children’ wanted (the children are teenagers).

Number one son started speaking in ‘the Queen’s English’, and once he finished, his brother immediately followed suit. I then started speaking in American English, and you could see the waitress needed a moment to process that each party in this seemingly normal family had a completely different accent when speaking in English. 

Curiosity got the better of her and she asked, ‘but where are you from?’  Ah, what is normally a simple question to answer for most people, for us becomes incredibly complicated.  I am American but have been living in England for more than 20 years, but I arrived via Brussels.

My husband is half Italian, half German and has
lived in more than six countries throughout his life. Our children, are relatively normal, having been born and raised in London. But then, they aren't really normal, are they?

They have parents from different nationalities, while being raised in a third. They have the major advantage of being brought up in a bilingual household, and as a result, find learning additional languages fairly easy compared to their monolingual friends. And if you ask them which nationality they most identify with, the answer depends on which set of grand parents they have most recently visited and which international sports competitions are currently taking place. 

The only thing that is certain, is that they don't
feel English. But then, we live in London, and if I look around at the friends that we have, our children are absolutely normal.  Many of our friends are mixed nationality couples, with interesting combinations such as Irish/Syrian, German/Chinese and Dutch/ Chilean. London is a multicultural melting pot and no one bats an eyelid when a family is made up of many different nationalities. In fact, it is often the norm.

Written by Eva Stock. Eva is Director of Sponsors Relations at FOCUS.



For more information about FOCUS visit:  www.focus-info.org

Should you wish to share your expat experiences in the UK, please contact us: office@focus-info.org

Queue or Kew? Redefining Hidden Gems

While leading a presentation last week on London’s Hidden Gems for parents at an international school I was reminded of just how familiar and unfamiliar this extraordinary city has become and continues to be since my arrival in 1996!

One of the reasons I have decided to make London my home is that I love that nearly every day I discover or experience something new - a small independent bookstore on Ebury Street, pink flamingos high above Kensington High Street, an extraordinary family run cheese shop on Tachbrook Street or a Rugby World Cup quarter final team training at my local gym. London is always full of surprises! For this same reason I love doing the research behind the Hidden Gems presentation. I, with the FOCUS team, have strived to curate a selection of truly unique London gems and pride ourselves on avoiding the ‘obvious.’

So it did indeed take me by surprise when, in the
middle of presenting, I had a moment of realisation that I had come a long way in becoming familiar with London and that ‘obvious’ was not always so. I was, at the time of this revelation, speaking about some of the lesser-known gardens in London- Embankment Garden, Mount St Garden, Postman’s Park, Inner Temple, Southwark ‘s Red Cross Garden... I could go on for at least another page but that is another blog altogether. The point is while one participant was granting me every presenters dream of audience participation by sharing an experience of being at Kew Gardens one of the other participants diligently taking notes interrupted wanting to know whether we were talking about Kew with ‘K’ or queue with a ‘Q’.


Inside I was laughing in a most sympathetic

manner, however it was at this stage that I was abruptly reminded of just how many different interpretations of ‘hidden gems’ there might be. I had wrongly taken for granted that the much treasured ‘better known’ cultural destinations now so familiar to me were already discovered by this well educated and well travelled audience of international parents.  However, in my drive to uncover the undiscovered I failed to remember just how daunting the multitude of cultural options can be for someone new to London. After all, I should know well that the possibilities, so vast in number, can be dizzying even for us longer-term expats.


In my hours of research and commitment to 
uncover the most hidden cultural gems I had forgotten what it was like to be so fresh in this great city. What was obvious to me was indeed hidden to many in the audience that day.

In some ways I was quite envious knowing the participant with the Kew/queue question was just embarking on a journey I have now been on for 19 years.  However, I will continue my quest to unearth new treasures daily and have complete faith that London will continue to deliver in spades!

If you like the sound of learning more about FOCUS’ favourite hidden gems keep an eye out for our seminar in early 2016 where we will reveal all!

If you want to hear what some of the parents at the ACS Egham, ICS and the audience at American Women’s Club had to say about this presentation please email office@focus-info.org.

Written by Nancy Dickinson.  Nancy is Deputy Executive Director at FOCUS.

For more information please visit www.focus-info.org

 

Should you wish to share your expat experiences in the UK, please contact us: office@focus-info.org