Burlaki on the Thames

It seems a bit premature to start ruminating on this subject - after all, we are not going back to the US as yet. But Jeri asked the question, and I figured I’d give it a try.

So, what will I miss of England and Europe once I eventually repatriate?

Would I be too predictable if I started with ease of European travel? I mentioned on many occasions that one of the primary reasons for our relocation to the UK was our desire for active exploration of Europe, a proposition that is not exactly viable when living Stateside, for obvious reasons of distances and expenses. We’ve done a large amount of traveling in the last couple of years and we’ve left tons of destinations still undiscovered. I don’t want to get into an analysis of whether the exploited our situation to the fullest. What I do know is that there have been periods of time when we were going on one trip or another literally every other week. And we made weekend-long jaunts to places in Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, France, UK proper in a fairly painless manner in terms of time and expense. Back in the States, I will again be restricted to at most two trips to Europe every year. Oh, well.

Can I now appear completely wacky in stating that I will miss British weather? Yes, yes, I know, “the weather is dreadful” is a constant refrain in my narratives throughout this blog. Yet, of all the basic unpleasantness the weather can throw at me, I probably tolerate extreme heat the least. Despite the fact that British summer did not seem to happen at all for the last couple of years (not counting a couple of really nice weeks each April, as it were), I’d take the intermittently rainy and mostly cool summer months in London over scorching summer temperatures in New Jersey every day of the week - and twice on weekends.

Sometime a year ago, I posted a quick-hit list of what I thought England did better than the US. The handful of things on that list will undoubtedly be missed. Especially, I think, the pin-and-chip credit card approach.

And… I can’t really think of much else.

Foodstuffs? Maybe if we lived in France or Italy or Spain or Belgium, but not very much in England. You can get an excellent choice of continental delicacies at select markets, but it isn’t an everyday happenstance.

Café culture? Yes, I truly enjoy it. But, again, it’s not exactly a British phenomenon - Brits enjoy pubs much more, - so I cannot claim it to be part of my everyday life.

Less politicized society? Er… let’s leave it at that - maybe a topic for another post. Maybe.

An incomprehensible rarity of a police car waiting around the bend to catch you in the act of going over the speed limit? Should I be admitting that I’ll miss that? Especially, since the alternative is the evil speed cameras.

Top-flight live football on TV several times a week?

I’m afraid I’m reaching again…

There was still one question from Jeri - who graciously saved me from an embarrassment of having an “ask me a question” day without hearing a single question - that I neglected to address thus far.

What were the hardest cultural adjustments for you and your family when you moved to the UK?

The quick answer for this is I don’t think that British and Americans are drastically different culturally. Nor were we entirely new to some of the European features of living when we came over. There was hardly anything that can be pinpointed as a big cultural adjustment.

There were plenty of things that I would call everyday trifles that were - and still are - inconvenient to bear with. I explored quite a few of them in the past, in articles filed under That’s England category, starting with the things we take for granted in the US. They bother us occasionally - or provide reasons for ridicule. We learned to accept them and pay them little mind.

A few examples are below the fold.
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Two years ago I landed in Heathrow to start my life in England.

I used to subscribe to the notion that an émigré should spend 3 years establishing himself in his new life before making any pronouncements on his overall successes or failures. This period of our life is not an emigration, but I will stick to the rule nonetheless.

Instead, I’m going to extemporize on what lessons I have learned in two years of living abroad.

I’ve learned that it is much harder to establish your life anew when you are an adult and a parent, than when you are a young person. The stress is much greater. The sense of wonderment is considerably tempered by the multitude of worries. All the conveniences and habits that you spent getting used to for years of your life get shred to pieces.

I’ve learned that you find new and wonderful friends no matter where you end up. And thankfully, old friends tug at your heart no matter how far away from them you find yourself.

I’ve learned that a stay-at-home spouse has the hardest time of all adjusting to the new environment. Kids quickly make friends at school; work keeps you busy enough to somewhat blur the edges of where you were before and where you are now. It’s someone who needs to search for things to do day in and day out that ends up feeling the weight of the change the sharpest.

I’ve learned that my oft-professed love of travels and of seeing new places was not an idle desire, but a true affliction. We’ve done as much recreational travel as work and school would allow during these last 24 months, and still nothing gets me as excited as the prospect of a new voyage.

I’ve learned, conversely, that there is a limit of how much a family can take of family travels. The logistics, the harassment and delays of air travel, the duration of travel by other modes of transport, the frequent packing and unpacking, the continuous search for compromises between interests of adults and kids - it all wearies even the most dedicated explorers after time.

I’ve learned - very quickly - that London is far from an ideal base for European forays. Getting across the strip of water known as the English Channel is fraught with hassle, no matter whether you use roads, railways or air.

I’ve learned that there are many things besides ease of travel that appeal to me in Europe. Many of them have to do with political issues, religion or other aspects of life that I am reluctant to discuss in a written form.

I’ve learned that life-long dreams do come true if you pursue them hard enough.

I’ve learned that fulfilling a life-long dream is not all that it’s cracked up to be, especially when events out of your control start wrecking some of your plans.

I’ve learned that I occasionally have regrets about having done it. Mostly, from purely materialistic perspective. As counter-intuitive as it sounds on the surface, we are likely worse off financially right now than we would be had we stayed in America and not sold our house.

I’ve learned that I have no doubts that it was a good thing that we took this plunge.

What?! You thought otherwise?!

Continuing our Q&A exercise, in which I successfully engaged one single person to ask me questions, let’s address another one of Jeri’s queries. (Part 1 is here.)

I’m assuming your children are in British schools - what are the advantages and disadvantages of American vs. British school systems?

I did, in fact, produce a rambling essay on this very subject more than a year ago. It is worth to briefly restate it here.

Becky attends an independent - British equivalent for private; in other words, fee-paying - girls-only school that is reportedly one of the top schools in the country. Kimmy goes to a regular co-ed state school, one that is rated as “good” - but not exceptional - by the Ofsted.

After close to two years of experience with British schooling, I firmly hold that, if taught right, British approach to school education is both wider in its range and deeper in its substance than American schooling approach. The simplest example of greater depth is the fact that pupils actually learn how to prove mathematical theorems as opposed to just checking them off as “facts”; the former trains the mind, while the latter is pretty useless on its own merits, in my humble opinion.

The greater width is best characterized by the existence of more diverse subjects, as well as the social sciences curriculum that is balanced enough to teach children about the world, not just the country that they live in.

If taught right is a very important qualifier, though. The quality of schooling varies from area to area and, as you might experience in the US as well, tends to be worse in urban areas and better in more affluent suburban ones. Moreover, state schools are unflinchingly egalitarian, in that children with different abilities and attitudes are taught in the same classroom; the pressure on even the best teachers to dumb down the instruction to the lowest common denominator is too great - the student mix becomes a dominant factor in the level of schooling that your children obtain.

Having said all that, I have no doubt that, all other things being equal, my kids will end up more well-rounded and open-minded individuals than their American peers because of the years they will have spent in British schools.

London’s Metropolitan Police (taking after the NYPD, unless I’m seriously mistaken) is testing a website that would map certain types of crime for all areas of Greater London. The crimes accounted for so far are only robberies, burglaries and vehicle crimes, but it still could be useful for any prospective expat to ascertain crime levels in their target neighborhoods. Type in your exact post code to zoom in.

The data displayed is scarce and possibly not “live”, but according to it, we live in an “average” area, bordered by both “above” and “below average” slices.

I have just finished reading Merde Happens, which is the third installment in Stephen Clarke’s series about a young Englishman’s experiences with foreign cultures. Unlike the first two installments, A Year in the Merde and Merde Actually (I skipped over the latter by pure coincidence of it not being sold at the Eurostar terminal bookshop when I was in need of a new book), this book is not about France, but about good ol’ U. S. of A. instead.

Our protagonist, Paul West, an Englishman who now permanently lives in Paris, finds himself in a dire financial situation related to his tearoom business. In order to get the money he needs, he signs up for a wackily-organized campaign in the States to promote UK as a tourist destination. He takes his French girlfriend along for the trip, and proceeds by car, train and plane from New York to Boston and back, then to Miami, New Orleans and Las Vegas, ending up in Los Angeles, all the while getting in and out of silly, sticky, and occasionally downright dangerous, circumstance.

I wasn’t planning to write a review at all. While the author continues to exhibit considerable wit and mastery of comical situations, the plot gets too ludicrous for my taste, the situations too grotesque and the jabs towards American culture too gratuitous. The latter, however, are based on outsider observations that echo my own “reverse” observations of Britain through the eyes of an American.

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In America, SATs are used as one of - and, occasionally, determining - criteria for gaining admission to a higher education institution. In England, the functional equivalent is called A-levels, and they carry enough social recognition, so that college graduates habitually list which of these examinations they passed on their CVs.

The main obvious difference between SATs and A-levels is that the former do not examine proficiency in specific subjects, while the latter are discipline-specific. The less noticeable difference is that SATs are open for all schoolchildren of a certain age, while eligibility for attempting A-levels at the final stages of your secondary education depends on doing well in earlier examinations called GCSEs.

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Basic medical help is free in the UK, we have already talked about that. You don’t need any identification to walk into a hospital emergency room or an NHS Walk-in Centre to get assistance. You may even be able to arrange an appointment with a local doctor when you need it, on availability basis. If you live in the UK, though, you are expected to be registered with a GP (which means “general practitioner” and conversationally universally used in the abbreviated form). The idea is very similar to the primary care physician concept: Not only is your GP a doctor who knows you well and who possibly has been your physician for many years, but (s)he also guards the strings of the purse that holds the public money that might be spent on your treatment, having an important say on whether you need any, and what.

So, a Brit with a medical problem is likely to go see his/her GP for an initial consultation, and then, if needed, be referred to a specialist. The physicians’ pay - whether GPs, or specialists within NHS, - is mostly the function of the size of the practice, and the margin earnings rate for each additional visit is puny enough so that there is little incentive to see the patient more than minimally necessary. Plus, no doubt, every GP is incentivized to expend as little money as possible on treatments.

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If your income consists of solely salary and wages, then filing a tax return in England is a very simple self-assessment process. Online or on paper, you literally need to provide just a handful of numbers from your W-2 equivalent (called P60), tick off a bunch of boxes, sign, and voilà, you’re done. It does get slightly more complicated if you have taxable interest earnings or capital gains (in the case of a non-ordinary non-domiciled alien who keeps all accounts offshore, those gains are non-taxable unless they are “remitted” onshore). More work comes with figuring out what you can exclude from your salary income based on having spent workdays abroad, if you are a non-dom, but in general, filing the return is a fairly quick and straightforward process. Accounting firms inexplicably charge hundreds of pounds for the privilege of doing your UK taxes. Professional accounting help - for at least the first year, sometimes longer, - is a never-disputed component of any relocation package. Both of the facts above leave me scratching my head in confusion after my own first experience with UK returns.

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The indefatigable London mayor, Ken Livingstone, has just inaugurated a low emission zone (LEZ) scheme. It establishes stinging fees - £200 per trip - for high-polluting vehicles’ privilege of driving within Greater London. The heaviest lorries are subject to restrictions effective today, while other lorries, buses, coaches, minibuses and large vans will be phased in over the next four years.

For newer vehicles that satisfy Euro III emission standards the fees are waived (the standard goes to Euro IV in January 2012). The owners of older vehicles will have to clean their engines if they want to avoid the penalties.

For any expatriate that may be concerned with this, cars and motorcycles are exempt. Although, if you are relocating, you may be on the hook from your moving company for the extra couple of hundred quid if their lorry does not meet emission standards.

Information about LEZ can be found on Transport for London website.

I have written before (say, here) about the calling plan that we have in the UK. The name of the plan is TalkTalk and it is with the company called Carphone Warehouse. For a basic monthly charge of £20, we do not pay anything at all for landline calls. And not only within the UK, but also within 35 other countries (pretty much all of Europe, plus Canada, Australia, New Zealand and, most importantly, the US). Calls to mobiles and to toll service lines are extra, but that amounts to a minuscule amount, while allowing us practically unlimited phone time with friends and family. (There is a 69-minute limit, after which the charges start accruing, but simply hang up, redial, and you have yourself another hour-plus of free talk).

Except, Russia is not one of the 35 countries covered by the free service and is quite costly to call. Natasha, obviously, regularly calls her family there, and the frequency of her calls has understandably increased of late. At something around 60p a minute, though, lengthy frequent calls would run us huge charges…

The solution? Easy. Buy an American calling card that gives you 400 minutes for $5, and dial through its US-based access number. Since calling the US is free for us, the cost of the call is exactly what it would be by using the calling card from, say, a New Jersey landline. Ingenious!

Of course, these calling cards never deliver on their promise, and with hidden charges and what not, you probably only get 100 minutes or so, but the difference between 5¢ and 60p per minute is quite considerable, wouldn’t you say?

The other day, I was approached by an American tax lawyer who resides in Europe and specializes in expatriate taxation. He came across my blog and, having formed a largely valid impression of me as a person who is interested in the matters of taxation, contacted me with an offer to discuss something that he feels is largely unknown to the US expatriate population: the Additional Child Tax Credit (ACTC), which provides an opportunity to certain overseas American parents to obtain IRS refunds even when US tax liability is zero and no US tax payments have been made.
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A leisurely perambulation along neighborhood streets on Sunday has provoked additional reflections on the topic that I started to scratch earlier and also cursorily mentioned towards the end of this recent post: Living in city versus living in suburbs.

Coincidentally, a fellow American [prospective] expat has emailed me earlier today asking for an advice on this precise topic. That was more than enough for me to realize that I was long overdue to expound my theories on selection of residential area.
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I wrote in the past about tax situation that a humble expat family is stuck in. Now, there is a little twist to ours.
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Another day, another momentous anniversary to celebrate! Yes, exactly a year ago, I landed for good in this country that I currently call home.

Has it really been this long?
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I have long planned to write an entry on the cost of living comparison between London and New York/New Jersey area. Such an endeavor, being of questionable value from the start, is certainly hard to make compelling. Or exhaustive. At long last, I decided to still do it, but in a limited form…
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My last entry has reminded me of a topic that I wanted to dedicate a separate post to, along the lines of Things You Tend To Not Spend Time Thinking Seriously About When In The Process Of Relocating Abroad. The previous article in this series discussed finer points of relocating with kids. This entry is about passport renewals.

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I frequently rant about things that we do not like in England (the last obvious example of that was the driving license treatise), and even wrote a post once about things that we took for granted in the States. But occasionally, we come across a concept that makes us think, Why don’t they do it in the US? It’s long overdue on my part to collate some of those into a post. So, here goes a list of some things that we like on this side of the pond.
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On our excursions with cousins to the central London over the weekend, we have been talking about the advantages of living in a big city. Now, it should be noted that they live in a small town well north of Los Angeles, while we spent the last seven years before our relocation in the bliss of New Jerseyan suburbia. Furthermore, I always avowedly subscribed to the pleasures of peace and quiet that you can only achieve in the countryside.

But we all agree that dwelling in a big city has its advantages, as many of you undoubtedly know. It can all be summed up in one contraposition: walking vs driving.
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In my posts, I occasionally touch upon subjects that could be collectively described as Things You Tend To Not Spend Time Thinking Seriously About When Making Decision To Relocate. Since I’ve gathered a few of those after all these months, I figure I can devote an occasional post to such a topic exclusively.

So, what about relocating with your kids?
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