In Tea We Trust

Vocaroooooo

Earlier today, a bunch of my internet friends were passing around this meme where you record yourself saying a list of words and then giggle at each other’s accents and occasionally beg each other to read bedtime stories with lovely voices.

Here’s the list (we do this relatively frequently, so if the list seems a bit random or incomplete, this is why):  http://tinypaste.com/022b8888

And here’s my recording of it:  http://vocaroo.com/?media=vzPHKJZDN5r93Q6Rn

My accent has changed SO much since I moved. From very early on, I noticed a change in the cadence of my speech, and later, I became aware of making very british choices in my vocabulary.  And lately, after over four years here, my accent is changing, too.  It’s some funky hybrid of Chicago, Southern Indiana and Northern England.  I get accused by friends in the states of having a fake british accent but am still stopped often here to talk about my strange foreign accent.

I have all my dictionaries set to British English now, too, so my spelling is slowly changing also.  I don’t expect that I will ever say H as “hayche”, though.  That’d be a stretch.

You’ll all be relieved to know that:

a) I still have teeth.

b) Morecambe is still a bit grim.

In the end, I complained that I think I have a cavity and requested an xray, which they did.  Then the dentist said I need to come back for a cleaning and filling, which they plan to charge me again for.  As I understand it, this is kind of BS, because the cleaning and minor filling should be part of the initial visit.  What a racket.

AND WHILE I AM RANTING

Danielle - Yes!  You know, since I moved here, my anxiety levels got to be really outrageous and eventually turned into a full blown panic disorder, and I can tell you that I found the options for mental health treatment on the NHS to be somewhat lacking.  The doctors in my practice were more than happy to throw pills at me, but to get any actual counseling it took SEVERAL very firm requests and even a change to a better doctor.  You can imagine, too, that in my condition, making firm requests of anyone was nearly impossible, so the entire process took much, much longer than it should have. 

The counseling offered was an 8 week course of cognitive behavioural therapy, which I found to be entirely useless as it only treated symptoms (what to do if you have a panic attack) and not causes (why are you having one anyway?)  When it became clear that this was all I was going to get, we bit the bullet and now I pay about £140 a month (that we really don’t have - it comes out of our savings) to see a private counselor for person-centric talk therapy.  (Which, thankfully, has been MASSIVELY helpful and I am getting my life back.)  

I have mentioned to my GP several times about the counseling and he’s said that the NHS only usually would pay for this kind of talk therapy when a person has been under depression treatment for several years.  I’ve been on anti-depressants now for nearly two years, and in counseling for the better part of a year.  What I’ve found now is that the NHS knows I’m paying it out of pocket and therefore they see no reason to pay for it themselves.  It’s kind of appalling.  I try only to think about how much better I feel, and also that if I still lived in the states, I wouldn’t have gotten help at all, having been uninsured.  It’s still no excuse for the way the system works, though.

urgh.. as suspected.  Thanks guys, for your fast responses.

I guess on the bright side, I can stop wasting my time driving all the way over to Morecambe for no real reason!  

I am definitely having some culture pains today, regarding the health care systems in america vs the UK.

After two years on a waiting list, we finally managed to secure an NHS dentist, which is great, as we’re squeaking by on one part time income for the last 12 months or so, and money is very tight.  When we went for our first appointment, we were in and out in five minutes.  They literally counted my teeth, declared me to be in excellent health and shuffled us out the door.  I was very surprised by this.  There were no xrays, no cleaning, no fluoride treatment.  Just, “yes, you have teeth, great.”   It especially surprised me because the private dentist I’d been seeing here until then had warned me half a year earlier that I was going to develop a cavity in one of my molars.

So today, I have another checkup, and I am extremely curious to see if they will actually DO anything while I am there.  From the NHS website, it appears that a standard band one appointment would cover the exam, the xrays, the cleaning, and the fluoride - but with the catch that they have to be necessary, which is where everything always goes kerflooey over here.  All the anecdotal evidence I find says that in general, the dentist will say that the cleaning isn’t strictly necessary, but that you’re welcome to see their stupidly expensive hygienist if you’d like to pay for it out of pocket.

Which is just kind of typical of the NHS.  Don’t get me wrong - I have used the medical end of the NHS a lot this year and overall, I am grateful to have them.  But at the same time, it took me AGES to realize exactly how pushy I had to be to get anything done with them, which is a shame and really, was a waste of everyone’s time, including theirs. The problem really is that where American medicine is highly focused on prevention, the British system is much more reactive, choosing to treat things when they become a problem, if they ever do.  There are good and bad things about each method, but I still can’t understand how it makes more sense to wait until a person has gum disease to scale and polish their teeth, when you could simply spend five minutes a year helping to prevent it.  Surely there has to be a logical middle ground here!

This reminds me of when, right after moving here, I asked my husband if maybe he should have a physical if he hadn’t in a while.  He went and came home and told me that all they did was sit at the desk and talk for a few minutes, and then had a good laugh about how I thought he’d get some bloodwork or something while he was there. 

The cultural exchange here is never ending.  

Anyway, does your NHS dentist scale and polish your teeth when you’re there?  If mine doesn’t, should I raise a ruckus?  (And then watch them shake their heads at this ridiculous american woman who obviously doesn’t understand how things work here?)

Radvent 7 - Travel

(The radvent series of blog posts are inspired by Princess Lasertron’s blog.)

Radvent 7 is a subject very close to many of my (mostly expat) readers’ hearts:  Travel.

What would you pack if you had only one bag to live out of?

I am having a hard time answering this because my instinct is to approach it from a survivalist perspective, with emergency blankets and a flashlight.  

I think that’s probably not the spirit it’s meant in, though, so let me try again:   Money?  Big stacks of money?  hahaha.. just kidding.  OK, last try!  

A ukulele.  A pair of pajama pants.  Seventeen hair elastics, since I can never find one and always want one.  My dog.  My phone, which would magically be big enough to hold my entire music library, and which would also serve to replace 357389 other gadgets I’d find useful, including a camera and a translator.  Good walking shoes. I guess not much else, though.  Have you ever tried to carry an overstuffed bag up three flights of stairs and down some cobblestone street in europe?  It sucks.  

Write about a place that taught you something unforgettable:

We cover England daily.  Moving on!

Before I lived in England, I had a job that meant I spent a lot of time in Spain one year. Among the ten or so people in our tiny office in Barcelona, we had people working from the US, Spain, Finland, Belgium and Germany.  Every single day was a crazy cultural mashup and experience in learning to navigate cultural differences, from an agreement about what languages to use when speaking in the office to disagreements about what is acceptable when it comes to holidays throughout the year.  

I always think of myself as being open minded, but that year was a real challenge to that idea.  I was constantly asked to explain things that I did or said, and had to think a lot about what I do thoughtfully and what I do just because it’s “just the people do things.”   The question became, “sure, but WHICH people?”  I also learned SO MUCH about listening to other people.  The language barriers meant you had to have a careful ear and a lot of patience, to give people time to express what they meant in a language that wasn’t their own.  But I also realized that I was surrounded by people who were really good at examining all sides of an issue without ever getting defensive, and it really highlighted for me where I *did* get defensive for no reason at all, just because someone’s ideas were not the same as mine.  I am really grateful for that experience, and honestly, without it, I think integrating into the UK would have been a lot harder for me.