I put up with this sort of malarkey because I had let him convince me that being an ex-pat was a life that was filled with longing: for home, for friends and most of all, for food. How hard it must be, I thought, to move so far away from home and in an entirely different country. So I agreed to eat disgusting Swedish meatballs at Ikea, and in my heart, truly felt for the poor guy. I'd go to the Swedish store in Oakland and buy him funny little Swedish candies like Plopps, and just generally try and humor his reminiscences of how perfect life in Sweden was.

Having been an ex-pat now for coming up on three years, and having tried a lot of Swedish food, I now realize what a sap he was. Moving away from Sweden and missing Swedish food is like recovering from depression and missing that feeling of emptiness.

I can't say that there's not a lot of food from California that I miss--the burritos and Korean food particularly. When I was in Dublin, I missed them badly. But once I moved to London, which is a major city (much like San Francisco) I didn't walk around like missing the food of my home country was this cross I had to bear, and one that everyone else in the world should sympathize with. (Of course that doesn't stop me from shoveling as many super burritos down my gullet as I can possible stand every time I go back home.) I've learned that these things are manageable. I will probably change my tune once I move to Asia and can't find pancetta to put in my homemade tomato sauce, but for now, I'm surviving.

But since moving here, I've stopped noticing or liking the accents (except when they say literally, that's still hilarious) and tend to focus on the more irritating aspects of the culture. Case in point, the daily free papers that are strewn all over the train and the drivel found within.

Britons on the Titanic had less chance of surviving than their brasher American counterparts because of their good manners, according to research. While most of the British followed queuing etiquette, allowing women and children to get to the lifeboats first, American passengers pushed their way to the front. (Article, Article)

Luckily for the British, they've learned a thing or two since 1912. I've often found that a refreshing way to start the day is to be elbowed in the stomach by a banker in a bowler attempting to get a seat on the Tube. I try and pretend that this is indicative of a truly equal society--there's no evidence of the British "stiff upper lip" in play when they're pushing aside old ladies and pregnant girls in hopes of finding a place to sit. So go on, United Kingdom! You've nearly caught up with us--maybe the next time an ocean liner sinks you'll fare a little better.

"Why is this happening to me?" I asked my mother in tears the other day. My housing situation had taken a turn for the (even) worse and I was about to move to a hotel rather than sleep in the gutter. I suppose it bears pointing out that I have no friends to speak of, and my letting agent had ripped up my lease in a fit of letting agent-ness.

My mother then made loud, angry regurgitation noises over the phone and said sagely, "that's what London's doing to you." I'm not sure if she meant that London was just trying to evacuate me, or if it was actually chewing me up and spitting me out, but either way she's not far off.

Since then, I blackmailed my new landlord and moved into a flat that is an active construction site. On Sunday morning I woke up to three builders staring into my bedroom. Right now I'm sitting here, under the covers typing and I have goosebumps. Tomorrow, I've been told, they are planning on putting a hole in my wall to the outside. It snowed today. I asked if they could maybe finish it the same day as I wasn't particularly fond of camping. "Don't worry, love. The 'ole will only be about as big as this 'ere," the 'ead builder said, pointing to a packing box that was two feet tall.

But all that said, I get a kick out of the East End. I went to the Brick Lane market on Sunday and was pleased as punch to find a Japanese deep fried street food stand set up. Last night I had a curry with my new flatmate who seems remarkably sane and visited my new local (that means: the closest pub to my home) and found that they have a pretty decent jukebox. My flat is just above a Thai restaurant so no one is going to blame me for the stink this time, and I'm just a few minutes away from about fifteen Vietnamese restaurants. 'appy days.

I've become citified again. No longer do I cross the street with mouth agape, staring in wonder at buildings more than four stories high. Already I sneer at those people, and know that stories is spelled storeys in this neck of the woods.

Living in a huge city is like having a big, fat scab. When I first arrived, I was like a raw nerve, the twitching whiskers of a mouse waiting to get trapped. (Incidentally, I know a lot about mice after living on Piccadilly Circus for the last few weeks.) The only way you can survive in a large city is with a substantial layer of scar tissue and a heavy set of blinders. If you ever stopped for even a second and thought about how you practically have your head in someone's armpit on your morning tube commute, you'd grow hysterical. If you admitted to yourself that a man less than 7 inches from you was picking his nose at 8:15 in the morning, or that you just stepped over a bloody pigeon carcass, or that you spend $10 a day to take the subway, or that your housing crisis has left you living in a room with no windows, you might just have to die in response.

By keeping quiet and not acknowledging that there's anything wrong, you become a member of the secret society of city dwellers. This gives you access to pissing away 40% of your pay on rent, but also a plethora of delivery food options. I think it's worth it.

"What are we all doing here?" my friend Jenn would ask dramatically when we lived in New York City. "Why are we doing this to ourselves?" It was her theory that living in New York was a form of masochism--we only did it because we felt that on some level, we deserved to be punished. Combined with a healthy dose of something to prove, and that's half of New York summed up. Otherwise, why would we have moved from our great suburbs, our roomy, new homes with affordable groceries and warehouse stores?

First, I learned that in my flatshare queries, there were certain things I should leave out of my emails. Like the fact that I'm an American. Like my grossly semetic last name. These are things that my housemates don't need to know until after I move in. Once they cop on to my accent and maztoh balls, they're going to be in for a surprise.

I had a relocation company ostensibly helping me with my home search. They were very eager for me to live in either Clapham or Islington, but not the place that my I had my heart and wallet set on, the East End. They finally agreed to take me on a tour of different neighborhoods to help me better decide where I wanted to live. As part of the deal, I was given an unrepentant racist as a tour guide.

Immediately after we started off on our tour, Stephanie said, "So you've been living in Ireland...how did you find the Irish? Are they as bad as everyone says?"

I wasn't really listening, so just assumed she was asking what everyone always asks "Are the Irish as friendly as everyone says they are?"

I started my usual response, "Yeah, yeah, they're real friendly" and Stephanie interrupted me.

"They're sort like how you feel about Mexicans in the States, aren't they?"

I still couldn't fathom that this woman would be saying something so beyond acceptable to a complete stranger, and assumed she must mean that both the Irish and the Mexicans have had a positive effect on the nearby dominating super power.

But later, when she started complaining about the blacks, muslims and Jews, I started to realize that Martin Amis was right, pussies are bullshit.

I spent four hours with this woman, getting driven around London hearing about how to best avoid anyone with a skintone darker than myself, and how immigrants were ruining the country. Probably not the best person to be doing orientation tours for a relocation company, eh. She complained about how Labour had put housing projects in nice neighborhoods, forcing real English people to live side-by-side with animals. (Her words, not mine.) "You can get a good sense of a neighborhood by seeing who lives there," she said, driving me through Bethnal Green. "Look! Blacks!" she said, pointing.

My favorite bit, which I actually recorded with my new snazzy phone, was when she did an impersonation of someone who might shop at Banglatown (crazy accent and all!). I kindly suggested to her that perhaps if Englishwomen were doing their part to keep up the British birthrate, perhaps her country wouldn't have to rely so much on those dirty immigrants, like me.

She wailed, at one point, "Where have all the English people gone?" as we drove down the main thoroughfare of Whitechapel.

"There are loads of them in New York," I kindly suggested.

Later, when I had nearly reached the limit of what I could tolerate and Stephanie was complaining about how dirty Africans are, she admitted to me that her husband is a UK immigration judge. God help this country.

I'm still confused as to which way to look when crossing streets, and the added traffic of a major metropolitan city has me completely befuddled. I'm not yet familiar with the coins yet, so rather than holding up lines of people, I've been paying only with bills. After two days, already, I have a huge pile of useless change. I went to the store today to buy sugar and stood at the counter for a few minutes, desperately trying to figure out which coins to hand the woman behind counter. I was embarrassed and sweating, and finally the woman took pity on me and grabbing my hand, took the appropriate change out of it, and handed me the remains. Awkwardly I thanked her, trying to neutralize my accent, and trotted out the door.

Then yesterday, I decided to explore the cities Korean restaurants. My first stop (Korean Kitchen. 32 Windmill Street, Picadilly Circus, London, W1D 7LR) served me a bowl of soup with a hair in it. I showed the waitress, and she sent it back. I waited 10 minutes for another soup, and when it arrived, it had a black hair delicately balanced on top of a piece of tofu. Interestingly, I was not offered a free meal or anyone's firstborn, but they did suggest I wait for a third bowl of hairy soup. I left, and made my way to Jin Korean Restaurant, 16 Bateman Street London W1D 3A. As I was eating my lunch, a cockroach crawled out from the in-table bbq equipment and pranced across the table. He finally crawled back in, and I attempted to ignore the situation until a pair of antennae poked out and waggled at me, as if laughing. I put an upside-down plate over the hole, and mentally teleported to my safe space.

Last night I went to visit some friends in Whitechapel, in London's East End. When I left, I didn't take directions, confident that with the help of my A-Z I'd make it to the tube station. "It's Ay to ZED not Ay to ZEE, Lina. Yank."

Of course my ingrained sense of direction--my father calls me a topographical cretin--got me completely lost and as I wandered the streets of Whitechapel at midnight, I grew increasingly more terrified.

Lina stream of conciousness: I'm going to get mugged. That will be so humiliating. Wait, I know this street name. This is exactly where the serial killer Jack the Ripper stalked his prey! I'm going to get murdered here. Hang on, Jack the Ripper only killed prostitutes. I'm not a prostitute. I'm going to be fine. Oh shit. Everyone here thinks all Americans are whores. I'm so dead. I'm so dead. I'm so dead. Oh wait, there's the tube station. Yeah, I'm street smart. Phew.

So my first 48 hours left me feeling less cosmopolitan than I had hoped.

But then this morning, after having a crumpet and a cup of tea (seriously), I hit the streets and found a Chinese market, a Japanese market and a Korean market all within 7 minutes of my flat and I perked up. Even the local Spar (it's like 7-11) carries strange Asian snacks. After stuffing myself with a half-dozen Korean delicacies, I sat back, content with my new geographic position. I know that going to a couple of Asian markets and eating a little banchan doesn't sound like a big deal, but to me, it is. I'm so delighted to be back in a big city and to have access to all of the funny little things that one can't find anywhere else.

...

"Wait til they get a load of you in London with that big American accent on top of all of that Irish slang." Andrew, paraphrased.

...

Me, trying to understand Londoners: "Will they know what I mean when I declare myself sound?"
Aoife: "Yes, but they don't say 'deadly' which is a bit shit."

Then, during this daydream, I try and sum up Dublin in a single, crisp anecdote. It's a game I like to play when I'm walking to work. I love to sum things up. I'm the sort of person who, when ending a relationship, replies to some moronic thing he's just said by saying "Well that just sums it all up, doesn't it?" and then slams out of the room.

If someone put a gun to my head and told me to sum up Dublin at this very moment, I'd go with this:

Imagine that an Irish person was telling you this. Insert brogue. "So I was on the bus, like, going past Grafton Street. Absolutely gorgeous day, but the sun was just after going behind a cloud, and it was starting to get grey. There was this group of knackers on the bus, probably just past their Junior Certs, absolute jonners. They start commenting on the sun going down and then one of then raises her fat little fist in the air, extends her middle finger, and to the sun says in her little skanger voice 'faggot.' Like, she called the sun a faggot for going behind a cloud. It's the sun! It's what the sun does! Ah, jonners."

So if someone asks me to sum up Dublin, it will be the time that a teenage girl wearing a tracksuit with overly straight hair and too much eyeliner raises her middle finger to the sky and calls the sun a faggot.

Yesterday, one of my co-workers asked me if Jews celebrate Easter. I looked at him skeptically. He couldn't be serious, but of course, he was. They don't actually have Jews in Ireland, I've realized.

"We don't. We sort of see it as the nullification of all of our hard work." Now it was his turn to look confused. "Well, we had just gone through the trouble of killing Jesus and all," I explained.

Most days now, I forget I'm in Ireland. I don't even hear the accent a lot of the time, which saddens me. Days like today, though, remind me of what a strange, religious country I've landed in. The other night one of my close friends admitted to me (after marinating herself in wine) that her parents had met under unusual circumstances; her father had been a priest and her mother, a nun. I suspect that even by Ireland standards, it's a noteworthy "how we met" tale, but I was flabbergasted. These are not the kind of stories I would hear in America.

I love Dublin

I guess it's finally hit me, but I'm pretty sure I'm having a love affair with Dublin. I've been saying that I love Dublin for a long time. Every time I get in a cab, which is often (I'm still a lazy American, after all), the driver asks me where I'm from after hearing my accent, and then asks me what I think of Dublin. This is not the time you want to complain about how you have to go sit in the immigration office for 4 hours every six months or point out that in America you can call other mobile phones for free rather than paying 20 cents a minute to call someone a mile km away. So I always say "Other than the weather, I love it here!"

And now I'm not lying anymore--other than the weather, I love Dublin. I love the people here. They're hilarious without seeming snotty in that particularly British way. I love how nice everyone is, it constantly surprises me. I love the way people talk and their accents and the language they use. I love the buildings and the brightly painted doors and the way things here are so old and beautiful. I love the countryside; it looks like a poster of what Ireland is supposed to look like, except it's completely real. I love how everyone here has been forced to take Irish dance--Riverdance, to you and me--lessons. I love the knackers. I love the taxi drivers. I love that people from all of the world are moving here in droves because they love it too. I love my friends. I love the Asian grocery stores. I love the way people are so old-fashioned about really silly things and don't even realize it. I love the way boys drink tea. I love that I live in a cottage next to a canal with swans and ducks. I love the history. I love the perpetual feeling of oppression. I love the way all of the good stereotypes are true. I love the scene most of all--there's more going in the disco/italo/electro scene than in places like New York or San Francisco. I love going out here. Parties here aren't over by 3am, they last at least two days, minimum. I love the fun, there's loads of it.

Then today I get to work, and they have pancakes in the canteen being made fresh right there on the spot for us. And there was fresh fruit. I haven't had decent fruit in nearly a year, but today I had at least a full cup of blueberries. (The other day I almost bought some raspberries, but at $9 for under a cup, I just couldn't do it.) It was amazing. Apparently this is somehow related to Lent and Jesus and suffering, but the only suffering I could see is the result of these crazy people only eating pancakes one day a year.

Living in a Catholic country is a strange thing. One day I saw a man ride his bike past a the church near my house and do the sign of the cross while still on the bicycle. Look Ma, no hands! He's probably got a stack of pancakes today.

The above is a picture I took yesterday. For my non-sighted readers, it is a single bag of Double Stuf Oreos, priced at 8.95 Euro. For those of you not hip to the exchange rate, that's about $13, or about $0.75 for a single Double Stuf Oreo. Don't get me wrong, they are well worth it (and severely undervalued in the States), but it was still sort of a heart-stopping surprise. Then I got kicked out of the store for taking the picture.

Somehow, I've fallen into a scene. Having been a perpetual scenester since my early teens, I've seen a lot. Overambitious gradesters hustling for GPA, intravenous drug-using punk rockers, riot grrls with questionable gender politiks, sexually perverse photography involving tennis racquets, grain-eating, therapy-loving "motivation" examiners--it's endless. But I'm not sure if anything I've been a part, or on the fringe, of, could possibly be as weird as what I've gotten myself into now.

Techno.

I know. Seriously, I don't think there's anything I can say to explain this away or even make sense of it. I can only being by saying moving to a new country is a very, very lonely time in one's life, and one's decision making abilities are often clouded by the desperate longing for human companionship and free drinks. Also, I think we all know that overall, I'm a miserable person. But the times in my life when I've been happiest are when I've had a gang and been on a scene. That's my best justification.

When I moved here, my only close friend was a DJ. Before I met him, I had been told he was one of the top DJs in Dublin --"Like being the best speller in your 3rd grade class," I later quipped to him--and thoroughly unimpressed, I proceeded to give him the notorious Lina stink-eye and brush-off when we first met. The second time, though, I said "So you're a DJ, eh? Do you know this tune?" I proceeded to list some of the stupidest songs I could think of, and he not only knew them all, he knew their 12" b-sides and the Razormaid mixes that sampled them.

Now, I'm known for having the most random musical preferences on the face of the earth. And not in a cool I-listen-to-60s-French-pop tunes sort of way, but in a kind of lame I-collect-Samantha-Fox-singles sort of way. So to find someone that although didn't necessarily support it, but at least knew it, was a breath of fresh air in this strange, new country.

Little did I know that this was like when the drug dealer gives you your first hit free. Talking about my favorite 80s new wave songs slowly brought us to italo disco, one of his--and now mine--passions. Italo is a word to describe music from the late 70s and early 80s, mostly Italian in provenance, and cheesy and wonderful beyond belief. Think Baltimora's 'Tarzan Boy.' I'm not going to write more about Italo right now because I have too much to say about it to do it all now.

Anyway, as it turns out, my new best friend is known for DJing two types of music, Italo and techno. Mainly techno.

It started slowly. Invited to a show or two, meeting a few people who became friends, getting perma-guestlisted at weekly clubs, but it wasn't until I had a shocking realization that I finally got into it. The predominant fan base at techno gigs are boys. Young boys. This in combination with the free ins I get to the clubs have made me a regular on the scene, albeit a ambivalent one. Don't get me wrong, I love anything with a synthesizer; I was there for the original Electroclash, after all, but I never thought I was going to be having idle chats about 808s with Dutch techno djs. Just last week I was talking to a German techno dj who was in town to play, about dubstep. I was telling him that I had heard it had to be listened to with a ton of speakers, festival-style, to be appreciated and I wondered what he thought about it. "I think if music is good, it sounds good at any volume," he said.

"Like Chris de Burgh, 'Lady in Red,'" I squealed happily, looking up for a sign of agreement.

"Uh, yes, like that."

So clearly I haven't quite learned to fit in yet. That night, I was in the club, leaning against a wall watching said German play. I was watching the dance floor as if it were a controlled experiment and I was a sociologist trying to sort of the relationship between man and ape. I can't begin to describe what really, really, enthusiastic teenage techno-heads behave like after midnight. I was standing with one of my other dj friends--I have about a dozen now--and finally he turns to me and says, "do you even like techno?"

He's caught me. My face turns red. "I just come here for the boys," I say, abashed. "I just come here for the boys."

Anyway. I have a lot more to say about what's going on musically in Dublin, and how last night, a DJ saved my life. Promise to update more.

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In the same post I was writing about slang here that I don't understand. I couldn't think of much while I was writing it, though. I was sitting in the Glasgow airport this weekend with some Irish friends (last week I found myself in three countries, oddly) when I heard something that tickled my fancy--much better than the examples I put here previously. One of the guys was telling a story that began "That fooking eejit was going to the jacks for a slash, but it was jammers, so he..." The story ended with a bathroom covered in blood, and the eejit being slapped across the face with a five Euro note.