Burlaki [back] on the Hudson

I don’t know what Meg Ryan felt – she was on the same flight with us, but on the lower deck, – but we were quite miffed with how America greeted us.

The plane departed on-time, and everything was going on swimmingly until after all preparations for landing were made. That was when the captain told us that thunderstorms in Newark area would require us to be in a holding pattern for some time.

Fifteen minutes later he cheerfully said, “It looks like the bad weather passed, and we will be landing in just a few minutes”.

Two minutes later, he made the standard call of “Cabin crew, please be seated for landing”.

Five more minutes later, he came on the speaker again with “I have bad news. The weather is back, preventing us from landing. Nothing we can do, Mother Nature at its worst, we’re back to the holding pattern.”

His next announcement, twenty minutes after that, was that we did not have enough fuel to wait out the storm, and would have to change course and land in JFK.

Oy!

It took us more than 40 minutes to get to the ground at JFK. And almost as soon as we landed, the thunderstorm gods decided that it was time to unload on that particular spot of land.

We actually felt rather fortunate at not being in the air. The plane shook and swayed, the wind howled over the engine noise, the rain battered the windows. That lasted for a good hour and a half.

All of that time, we were parked off-terminal. The plan was to re-fuel and, Newark weather permitting, make a short hop over. But no re-fueling could happen where lightning illuminated the skies every few seconds. We sat close to the cockpit and could hear through the open door that the pilots were concerned about the approaching end of their “flying window”, after which they would have to get off the plane regardless of the conditions. That would probably spell the end of any chance of getting to Newark that night.

At least, the girls slept through most of it on their flat Upper Class beds. Spending all this extra time in economy must have been much tougher.

Finally, the storm let up. Re-fueling commenced, lasting half an hour or so. As soon as it was done, we got clearance to take off for our hop to Newark, but another half hour passed before we managed to get in the air again.

And then, the actual trip from JFK to Newark by Boeing 747 took a good hour all by itself. I’m pretty sure I can drive the distance in about the same time.

We finally landed in Newark five hours after our scheduled arrival time. There were many flights coming in simultaneously after a severe weather disruption, which, of course, made border controls and baggage reclaim all that harder to navigate.

We got to bed at around 1am on Thursday, or 6am London time.

I’ve been paying for that all day long today.

Chronicles

My oldest and most devoted readers may recognize the symbolism of the title. It was the name of this post, written on my way to England.

I was in a bit of disarrayed feelings then and, as I surely well projected over the last couple of days, I am somewhat disconcerted. Instead of dwelling on it, though, let me describe for you our last hours in London.

Natasha and I spent a good portion of last night making sure that everything in the house was in the same place as when I first moved in. The “comprehensive inventory” performed on the day of my arrival in 2006 was both pretty anal in listing the exact number and color scheme of teacups, pillowcases and such as well as inexplicably lax in omitting some of the decorations and what-not. We managed to match pretty much everything of note on that inventory to an item remaining in the house. Not sure whether this exercise was truly needed, but I suppose it will ease the process of confirming that we did not pillage anything and are due the entire security deposit.

In the morning, we washed the last few dishes, packed the last few personal effects, and the “inventory specialist” and the cab arrived at about the same time. Since the check-out process does not result in any document produced on the spot – that will only come in a few days; yep, there is too much implied trust involved here for my taste, but I don’t make the rules, unfortunately, – there was no reason for us to stick around.

We are flying Virgin Atlantic, in their splendid Upper Class (for our previous experience with that, please see this post). The difference in cost between that and the economy tickets was small enough for us to absorb. But this time around, we even had a very special airport arrival procedure available to us.

We had to telephone ahead the registration plate, make and model of the car that we were riding in, and then had to figure out exactly which driveway to use at the terminal. It took us to the gate which “recognized” the car and almost immediately let us through. We then found ourselves in between a couple of bollards in the middle of the road which, after some hesitation, lowered to let us through. All without a single conversation or a manned checkpoint. In about a hundred yards, we came to a courtyard that would do proud any five-star hotel. Two people were waiting for us, one holding our boarding passes, the other with baggage tags. We left our bags in the care of the latter, were escorted to a no-queue security checkpoint, and roughly ten minutes after arriving at the airport were already settling ourselves in the lounge.

Livin’ it large, I’m telling you.

We availed ourselves to various amenities, I did a little bit of work remotely, Becky went online and wrote a farewell poem to Britain and her friends…

And then I bumped into Meg Ryan.

After which, Natasha went right up to her and said hello.

My last moments in England will now forever be linked with When Harry Met Sally. Not a bad association. I love that movie.

Chronicles

I can’t escape the feeling that I may never be back.

Come on, you say, this is London you are talking about, surely a restless traveler such as yourself will come to London as a tourist eventually.

Hmm… I don’t know. Except for Scotland, which we practically left aside, we explored all of the places in the UK that we cared for. And having lived in London for almost three years, I am not sure I will ever prefer coming back here to some other destination on tap.

Fine, you counter, but doesn’t your professional life demand occasional travel, which may bring you back to London some day?

Possibly. In the current economic climate, though, the possibility is fairly remote.

Ok, you point out, you stated yourself that you ultimately want to retire in Europe. When that happens, aren’t you bound to come to re-visit the place that was your home for a not-so-short period of life?

Eh… who knows?

In any case, this day, #1032, is the last full day of my British life. There is little left to do but get into a cab tomorrow morning for one last ride to Heathrow. These “very last” occasions for this or that keep following one another, startling me into sudden reflections.

I might even bore you with some of these in the future.

Chronicles

Our last weekend in London. Our last visit to Central London.

Do you think that London did its best to collaborate weather-wise on such an occasion? Nope. Could any more lines of National Rail and the Tube be suspended “for planned engineering works” on the only day that we had an opportunity to say a proper goodbye to the city? I doubt that.

Despite a highly inconvenient single option of getting to and from the city center available to us and despite the intermittent showers, we still went. We did a more or less standard circuit of Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus, Piccadilly, St James Park, Parliament Square. We stopped at the National Gallery for the current Impressionist exposition centered on Corot’s and Monet’s landscapes. We browsed through the Burlington Arcades. We waited out one of the showers at a big bookstore on Piccadilly. We threw coins into the lake at the St James Park. We even took a black cab ride to London Bridge – the very first for Kimmy, only the second for Becky.

As much as we are looking forward to resuming our American lives, we can’t help but be a bit sad leaving London behind. It is a great city in every aspect of the word. Will we ever come back as tourists? Who knows…

Becky talked me into experiencing one of the city’s attractions in the very end. We set Natasha and Kimmy on their way home, but ourselves went to the London Dungeons. Becky already been, I have not. The almost two hour wait to get in tested the limits of my patience and my sanity (unless you’re lucky to visit the place in the off-season mid-week, do yourself a favor and buy tickets in advance), but the place has some interesting points and tries to highlight some important historical bits. It is not too scary – although a couple of actors did their thing in trying to startle unsuspecting visitors. As grumpy as I was at having wasted a lot of time in the queue, Becky was thoroughly delighted with her return visit. At the very least, I can now always say that when I left London Dungeons, I left London…

Chronicles, London & Environs

Our last European holiday for the foreseeable future was by far the laziest of them all. We came to the place that we knew quite well from the previous year. We spent time alternating between the beach and the pool. We went to a few nearby picturesque locations for brief excursions, but not to a single place that we have not visited before. We dined out a reasonable amount of time, but not daily. The longest drive we took throughout the two weeks on Costa Brava (not counting getting there from Barcelona and back) was, actually, to one of the restaurants which specializes in suckling pig.

We had smashing time! I don’t cope well with the concept of a lazy, do-nothing holiday, but sharing it with friends makes such a vacation enjoyable, my personal desires to wander forth and about notwithstanding. And we had a grand company, meeting up with three families of our old friends from America, hosting a family of our friends from London, as well as hitting it off with a Muscovite family of friends-of-our-friends. Who are now our friends directly as well, we hope.

Great food, good wine, excellent weather, welcoming Mediterranean waters, striking vistas and beguiling little towns were a given. Add to that regular opportunities to engage people whom I like to talk to in discussions of topics that I care to discuss; or to park in a chair on a terrace with a sweeping view of majestic coastline with a good book in my hands… and it turns out, I can handle two weeks of doing-nothingness.

To be honest, Arthur, one of my oldest friends and the person who turned us on to L’Estartit (he and his family spend several weeks there every summer), did suggest a couple of “serious” excursions to interesting destinations during our stay. We declined, for various reasons, and, while I have these little pangs of regrets at having willingly passed opportunities to explore new locales, I don’t think our decision diminished our overall enjoyment in any way. More time for the girls to spend in the water, anyway.

We did spend several hours in Barcelona on our day of departure, but little of that could be called sightseeing. On children’s preferences, we first went to the Aquarium, and then hooked up with our vacationing friends from New Jersey, spending more time in a couple of cafés than walking.

And then, we were sad. It was – no doubt about that! – our very last family trip in Europe for probably years to come. The quantity of European vacationing that we did in the last three years is easily the biggest item in the “loss” column of our relocation ledger.

The return trip home was its usual worst part of the trip. The flight was ok, and the passport control wait was bearable, but the car company mishandled our reservation, nobody waited for us in the arrival hall, and the guy who showed up half an hour later was an obvious infrequent washer. Natasha, who sat in the front passenger seat for the hour-and-a-half ride home, suffered considerably. We used to recommend JustAirports.com to our acquaintances in London, but the last couple of occasions of using them were less than positive, to say the least. We’ll take our business elsewhere. Even if it is for one very last trip to Heathrow…

Travel

Another one of those huge Euro-hits of the late 80’s that were so popular in our discotheques. And another one of one-song performers for me…

The song obviously speaks to my wanderer inclinations. You could guess that even if your knowledge of French does not go far beyond the title…
 

 
Sergej Minaev (who was introduced in the Careless Whisper post) was sure to produce his own number to the same music, this time actually maintaining the theme.

Videos & Music

Continuing with Kimmy’s activity farewells, she had her last swimming lesson.

During which she had to pass an exam.

A 200 meters medley: Backstroke, butterfly, breaststroke, free style, 50 meters each.

In one go!

She passed with flying colors. The swim was not timed, but according to eyewitnesses – Natasha – the kid was motoring pretty effortlessly on the finishing lap.

She’s 9. I’m speechless!

————–
The title refers to this post of a year and a half ago.

Chronicles

I have been working from home quite regularly in the last ten years or so. Not having to suffer through the commute at least once every couple of weeks, if not more frequently, is both a perk and a fairly common arrangement in technology1.

I always had a dedicated “home office” that I could work out of. First, it was just one of the upstairs bedrooms converted into a study; at some point, we built an extension room specifically for the purposes of having a study away from the sleeping quarters. In London, we had to do with a bedroom again, but you would not mistake it for anything but a study.

Everything in the house is packed now, including my desk, chair, PC with all the peripherals, filing cabinets, etc. The only remaining pieces of furniture are the beds and the living room set that came with the house, plus the big TV that the movers graciously decided to pack tomorrow right before loading the stuff onto their truck.

I’m working from home all these days because the packing had to be supervised, and my lovely wife would not be able to manage it all by herself.

The kids are in the living room watching TV.

I am sitting on a bed with the laptop in my, well, lap, dealing with various work issues and typing this little post in between.

Always wanted to do that: Work while in bed2. Never had a proper impetus for that. A dream fulfilled!

What, you thought I meant something grander than that in the title?

—————–
1 Then, of course, there are many people in technology – especially individual contributors, whose work revolves around phone conversations, – who telecommute full-time. I’ve recently been in a couple of roles that would allow for that, but I never thought of making it a norm for myself.

2 Fine, I’m not technically in bed, but I’m afraid it is as close as I’m ever gonna get to that.

Chronicles

It is a bit eerie how fast a house full of assorted belongings and various junk becomes a house full of neatly stacked boxes.

Three guys showed up at our door this morning. I gave them a brief tour of the land and they went about their business. Just a few hours later, most of the rooms are already finished, and I’m starting to wonder if these guys plan for a nice day-off tomorrow under the pretenses of finishing up. On Thursday morning, they will load the lorry, and our household stuff will get a head start on its trip back to America. It’s not likely to arrive before the end of August under the best circumstances.

The car will be collected by the appropriate agency on that same Thursday, and we will have a few interesting days of living in a furnished, but empty-ish house and not having independent means of transport either.

Despite the fact that we do not have to pack anything ourselves, the task of sorting things between our stuff and that of the landlord’s, between air shipment, sea shipment and whatever we are keeping on us made for a few really tiring and frenetic days. All our best efforts aside, we already had to re-open one of the finished boxes to extract something that did not need to packed and also gave up on one other item that is not worth the effort of searching for.

Kids are gradually saying goodbye to their various activities. Kimmy’s had a tearful farewell with her skating coach. He was an excellent teacher and she enjoyed skating with him tremendously; he will be hard to replace, and it remains to be seen whether Kimmy will be up to continuing with figure skating when we get back.

She also had her final dancing school performance. She loves dancing (openly professing that when she’s dancing, she is happy), she moves very nicely, but she is not a very disciplined team performer. I suppose she gets immersed in the experience so much that she loses track of the synchrony required for the group dance. What set her apart from the other thirty-five girls (and two boys) during the performance was the smile. It must be the figure skating training: Hold your head high, look into the audience, smile. The rest of the girls danced with an expression of utmost concentration interrupted by grimaces of disgust when they felt they messed up. Even the most talented of them barely cracked a smile. Our favorite performer was like a ray of sunshine out there.

Not that it was not a great concert. It was, in fact, an outstanding one. The school is not very big, but they put on almost thirty numbers of ballet, jazz, tap and street-dance variety. Very nice choreography throughout, a pleasure to watch.

That was a nice diversion during an otherwise frenetic time. Only a few more days of this, though…

Chronicles

For the 4th of July, occasional British restaurants – and especially pubs – promote special deals, and even some shops end up having “Independence Day” sales. Nothing major, fairly sporadic, but it sticks out precisely because it is so uncommon.

And it always makes me wonder: You guys realize independence from who is being celebrated in America on this day, right?

Maybe, all of those places that advertise their 4th of July deals are owned by expats, and I’m just not aware of it…

That's England

I so infrequently write on expat-related topics lately that a chance visitor to my blog may be turned off by the preponderance of family news and assorted filler stuff. To rectify that just a bit, let me spend a few minutes on something that I did not get into much detail in the past: Specifics of an auto lease in England.

Anyone not interested in this bit of trivia is hereby excused from reading below the cut.
Read more…

Expat Topic

Busy at work, plus various relocation-related errands, phone calls and what-not. Less than frequent blogging, as the result.

The temperatures have been pretty high in London the last week or so. Not too hot. Warm-to-hot, cooling down nicely overnight. But in a house without any air conditioning, it gets quite noticeable in the afternoon, stuffy, especially on the upper floor. I seem to remember days like these here or there during summers past, but somehow not so many in a row. It must be the impending move to the States that has me pining for the wonders of A/C.

Becky, meanwhile, is out of the house one more time, this occasion being an immersion French study trip to, well, France. She already called us from there and left a message in French. So, I suppose I’m getting my money worth out of it…

We ascertained through various conversations with fellow parents that our daughter is likely the only student at the school to have participated in all various overseas trips this year: Iceland, China, France. Since all trips were at an additional cost to tuition, the misguided implication of our financial wealth available to be spent on our offspring gave us a definite boost in those parents’ eyes.

I suddenly stumbled upon a recently-added TV channel called “ESPN America” in my SkyTV lineup. It has Yankees on! I watched Mariano’s 500th save in a replay, and almost stayed up to watch the Mariners game last night… Common sense won, but I am cancelling the service in a week’s time, just when I discovered it… It would be a pity if not for the fact that there is much more Yankees where I’m going to. Not so much football, though.

A curious bit of British trivia that did not get much of direct mention in the past (although, I indirectly alluded to it in this old post). What happens when a police officer stops you and demands to see your documents, and you for some reason do not have either your license or your car registration, or both, on you? In the States, you’ll get an assortment of fines, if not arrested if the officer is too zealous. In England, as long as you have any form of identification on you – say, a credit card, – you are ok. The police officer will use any document that you can produce to check the database, verify that you are licensed to drive, verify your car ownership, and, of course, cite you for whenever offense you were stopped while committing. But you will not get separately fined for “driving without a license”.

On the one hand, such accommodation begets indiscipline. An acquaintance of ours was recently in a small car accident, and she had her purse with her, but neither her license nor the car registration paper. I am quite positive that she never bothers to check whether she has those documents with her.

On the other hand, a legislated fine for not carrying a specific document along in an age when your privilege to drive and your ownership of the specific vehicle can be easily verified on the fly is something that grates on my libertarian sensibilities. Or, maybe, having your information available for a police officer to check is a step towards complete control of the state over its citizens; Britain, with ubiquitous CCTV cameras and the national identity scheme, is quite far advanced on the path towards entrenched police state…

Finally, another acquaintance recently obtained a doctor’s recommendation to stay away from work because of fatigue. Four paid weeks of convalescence. The job will be his when he comes back. Can this ever happen in America? I’m sure a sabbatical can be arranged by a mutual agreement between a valued employee and an accommodating employer, but in general, I can’t imagine someone having the balls to unilaterally take time off for being fatigued and not paying some quick consequences with their job.

Maybe I’m a closet workaholic with little imagination.

Chronicles, That's England