Posts tagged “expat life”

Visiting London after 15 months away reminded me how much I love it, and how much I prefer California. Friends are thriving, I have an adorable new niece, and I'm no longer the family baby. But British weather, hair-frizzing humidity and sad water pressure sent me happily home to sunshine.

Moving between continents means wrestling with global banks that are global in name only. Citibank's West Coast branches operate like a completely different bank because, until 2002, they were. Scale creates complexity, complexity kills efficiency, and globalization turns out to be naturally self-limiting. My banking nightmare proves it.

I'm falling hard for San Francisco. Between touring the Paramount Theatre, exploring the Mission, and marveling at Castro's gay hardware stores and the February sunshine, I'm overwhelmed in the best way. Huge portions, cheap taxis, hills with views. This city is my shiny new toy.

It's 3:30am after my leaving party, and London is finally sinking in. After nearly a decade, this city took a kid who makes things appear on screens and turned it into a life. Now I'm off to fool a whole new city. London's fingerprints are permanently under my skin.

I love London but Trinidad is home in a way Britain never quite will be. I daydream about returning, fixing the country's mess, raising kids in sunshine with room to roam. But I'm not ready yet, and being gay there is literally illegal. For now: undecided.

After five years in the UK, I thought I'd blended in well enough. Then I asked a colleague to use a "common letter" instead of a capital, and discovered that apparently only Trinidad still uses that term for lowercase letters. Makes me wonder what other oddities I've been casually deploying for years.