The weirdness that is my life

I returned from Germany early Sunday morning. Lovely trip that I will blog about. Bach in the Dresden Cathedral. Ghosts of Nazis past. City sidewalks, busy sidewalks, dressed in holiday style...all of it was a much needed respite from the rat race that is Moscow. But this isn't where my head is this morning. I realized after I'd woken up that will have been in 7 countries between October 1 and the end of the New Year's holidays. Most of those countries are places I've never visited until this year. I don't even dream about the US anymore. There was a time when I'd wake up and took a moment to remember that I lived in Russia. Now if anyone speaks to me in English I nearly pass out with shock. My daughter's high school has enough in common with "Gossip Girl" that sometimes I don't find that show very fun. Case in point: one of the twins was assigned a Russian glam princess as her biology lab partner. "Where are you going for the break," the princess cooed. "Switzerland. Where are you going?" said the twin. "You'll love Switzerland. I'm going to Paris." "For the fashion?" "No. To ski. Like you." "I travel to eat," the twin said, visions of fondue and chocolate filling her head. It's like when Brenda and Brandon Walsh came to Beverly Hills 90210 from the Midwest. Or when Little J tries to connive her way into the White Party or whatever other weird excuse for an exclusive get-together that rich people come up prance around in designer clothes. We are living in a TV show when it comes to school. For her part, Abby is in "Lizzie McGuire." I bought all my Christmas online except for the candy--which came from Germany--and a few items from H&M--also from Germany. The online Christmas isn't coming in Santa's sack, it's arriving via Delta 30 from JFK to Sheremetevo packed, tetris-style, by my mom, brought by my personal sherpa, daughter Sara, who spends various parts of her Christmas break in three countries and five airports. At least she will spend New Year's Eve on the Champs Elysees. When we sit around with friends, sometimes we talk about favorite airports the way other people talk about favorite shopping malls. Hate: Frankfurt, Charles DeGaulle, Heathrow Love: Berlin Schoenfeld, Athens, Milan. The groceries in my kitchen have information labels in at least 15 languages including some odd ones like Uzbek, Kazakh, and Estonian. I cook in milliliters, grams and deciliters--a conversion I have to look up every single time I see in on the cereal box. We eat porridge, not hot cereal and my children get hot chocolate croissants for snack time at school. My kids take "assessments" not "tests." They have "marks" not "grades." When someone says "football," I think of Christiano Ronaldo, not the Super Bowl. We have half-term break, not school vacation. My children take school field trips to Croatia, Siberia and Thailand. The majority of their friends have parents from two different countries. My daughters won't obtain their driver's licenses until they graduate from high school. At any given moment, I know the dollar currency conversions for pounds, euros and rubles. From start to finish, it takes between 5-6 hours to do church on Sunday. At least half of that time is in the car inhaling exhaust fumes from bumper to bumper traffic. I can order from McDonalds in at least three languages at any given moment in time, depending on where my last vacation was. "McNugget," however, is still "McNugget," even in Greek, German and Estonian. When we talk about "food storage," we mean "how much food will we need when the rioting in the outlying regions starts and trucks can't get to Moscow for weeks at a time." When we talk about "Emergency preparedness" it is code for "have enough money and a strategy to get to the Finnish or Estonian borders as fast as possible in the event of coup--via plane, train or automobile." We watch James Bond or the Bourne movies and say "Hey! I remember that street corner!" In contrast, when movies try to "fake" a country, we're prone to say, "Hey! That's not London!" the same way we used to when Hollywood tried to substitute Vancouver, Canada for Seattle. My girls watched the latest Hollywood blockbuster, "Twilight" on You-Tube, not in a theater. I watch US TV via iTunes or on DVD disks burned on my Los Angeles friend's TiVo and sent through the mail. A weekend trip is to Berlin, Tallinn, Vilinus, Riga or Helsinki--not St. George, Utah, Vegas or Seattle. The primary airline I fly is "Aeroflot." I could probably come up with ten more weird things about my life. Sometimes weird=novel. Who wants to be ordinary? Sometimes weird=get me out already. Sometimes I think that a lot more people should have the experiences I'm having living in this alien world, being generally disliked by our host country and having to figure out what really matters. Sometimes I will read these group blogs of people in the US and part of me snorts derisively thinking, "You call *that* a problem?" I confess as I was reading an entry about charity for the holidays and how people were trying to serve the less fortunate in their neighborhoods, I thought about the stark contrast between what is "needy" in the US vs. what is needy elsewhere in the world. I doubt there is anywhere else in the world where obesity is a huge problem of the lower classes. Where people have the time and energy to whine about not having access to organic food or spending a significant percentage of their income on expensive nutritional supplements or chasing fad diets to combat "toxins" and "evil FDA conspiracies where business is determined to poison us for profit." If your biggest problem is that you're stressed about whether the plastics you put in your microwave are emitting toxins, I'd say that's a great problem to have. I'm sure there are lots of starving people in Russia who will be happy to take your toxin ridden Mac&Cheese and your Costco vitamins so you can spend your $500 on the probiotic powder that really works. The poor in rich nations like Western Europe and the US get better health care, better nutrition and have safer homes than many of the middle classes do in Eastern Europe and Asia. What they would give for the vaccinations that the Western world is so quick to toss aside. It is tempting, from time to time, to say "Get a real problem" but then I realize how uncharitable that sounds. I'm not talking about my friends who face serious challenges of unemployment, health issues and financial disaster, but more the sense that perhaps these things would seem less dire if they could see the poverty and desperation in Eastern Europe, particularly Romania, Ukraine and Russia. Figure in the Central Asian countries and the contrast between the West and East becomes more stark. What I wish for is that some of these people could gain some perspective--not because I have that perspective (I wake up many a morning craving PF Chang's chicken lettuce wraps and Hershey's kisses)--but because it might help people feel more content, more grateful, more satisfied with what they have. It's so much easier to be satisfied and content when you are constantly reminded how little you actually *need* to get by. I need a smackdown from time to time so that I remember how blessed I am. As much as the stories of orphans and the starving elderly break my heart, sometimes I need to hear those stories because it reminds me that I have enough food, I have heat, my husband is getting regular paycheckes, my children are in an amazing (however socially obnoxious) private school and I have the resources to solve my problems. Hearing those stories spurs me on to want to do better, to try harder, to be a better citizen of the world. I live a weird life. I hope that this weird life changes me in a way that will matter in the long run. In the meantime, I'm going to go to the gym and use a treadmill that is labeled entirely in Russian and hope that the sound is working on the Discovery Travel and Living channel so I can watch three year old episodes of "Flip That House." I'm happy with the small stuff.