For those of you, who know us well, feel free to skip this post.
For the uninitiated, here is the context: My wife and I are relocating to England. We have spent the last 15 years of our life in the great United States of America, became rather assimilated (I am a rare Russian-American who knows and likes baseball, if you catch my drift), borne kids here, built up a comfortable living, achieved the proverbial American Dream…
At the same time, we always expressed desire to experience living in Europe, and our numerous vacations to the Old World did nothing to dispel the notion. Quite the opposite, the more we traveled, the more we realized that even having 20 vacation days a year – not too bad by average American standards, right? – is not enough to experience and see all that we want. And, by the way, you may know it yourself, flying across the ocean is just too tedious and time-consuming to be attempted more than a couple of times a year, for those of us who cannot afford upper class arrangements…
My first opportunity came in 1999, with DLJ – as an aside, it was an awesome place to work at, – but we let it go by, as we were gearing up to having our second child (we were really set on maintaining a certain age difference between the kids, and going to Europe would have definitely interfered with that plan).
There was another opportunity in early 2004, with Bank of America – I even went to London for a couple of days on a professional reconnaissance – but it did not work out for a variety of reasons. That was a BIG downer. There were few other conversations over the next several years, but nothing really serious. We even started to cool to the idea and just last year spent obscene money on remodeling our house.
And – boom! – I got another opportunity. Well, “boom” is not entirely appropriate a description, as I got the first hint in March, was given firm assurances in May, but then spent half of the summer negotiating and signed the assignment intent only in August. But it is happening. The opportunity is too good professionally to pass by and it is a fulfillment of our dreams. A win-win. We are all excited and raring to go…