From Tourist to Resident - A Changing Perspective

It all started with a few Facebook photos a friend had posted from her recent trip to London. There were the usual double decker buses, the London Eye, and one from Trafalgar Square. Someone had written a comment: "You really captured the essence of the town!" Hmm, hang on I thought. Pigeons on Trafalgar Square are not the essence of London, surely? After all I'd lived in London for many years. So my perspective would by necessity be different from somenone who's spent a weekend there. Had gone to a pizza place, maybe a cocktail bar, stayed in a hotel, did a bit of shopping, and would have gone to "a show" (being American).

Don't get me wrong - I'm not making fun of that experience. And of course having been a tourist, i.e. visiting a town as often as you possibly can is vital when you plan to make your sojourn more permanent, and become a resident. I can safely say I know what I'm talking about. When I moved to Edinburgh I'd been there plenty of times. I'd even taken the trouble to visit in various seasons so as not to be surprised by the weather. I've always done careful research before I moved and finally settled somewhere. But it is impossible to anticipate what finally awaits you.

Just a few vital examples of things you neglect to find out at your peril:

• Public transport. Sure, as a visitor you're bound to take the occasional bus ride. But you're not dependent on it. If the wait's too long, you'll jump into a cab.

When I'd moved to Edinburgh the transport system was just about to collapse. Whole areas of town were cordoned off and buses rerouted.

• Rubbish collection. Staying in a hotel will not prepare you for the often (especially inItaly and the UK) totally chaotic and insufficient collection times in your new town.

I ended up doing daily trips to a totally overfull public rubbish collection point, due to mismangement and long-term strike action.

• Shopping. During your visit you won't have found out where there's a good place to buy potatoes or washing powder, simply because you don't needed any.

• Safety. Although tourists will probably be worried about their money belt and rucksack, when you live in a place, it's not pickpockets on open squares you will be worried about. Residential areas are mostly not the sort of places tourists visits.

In Edinburgh, I was very lucky to live in an area which was both quiet, safe and central - the Westend. An absolute godsend, as I hadn't known this beautiful quarter before I actually moved there.

These are just a few pointers that the impression you may get on holiday is not necessarily the "correct" one, and certainly one you will have to query many many times once you've moved to your new place.

Let me know of your own experience in that field!

Un-Fashionable Food

You don't wear a crinoline, or a flapper's dress. Men don't wear bowler hats anymore. Clothes aren't made of the heavy, difficult to wash-and-dry fabrics they used to be. You don't wear ten layers of undergarment or complicated corsetry. You CAN of course wear those things, say for a costume party or for fun... but you wouldn't think it is quite the normal thing for everyday life or to go to work in.

So why is it that people still eat the same type of food their forefathers enjoyed many decades or even centuries ago? Every country has their own depressing litany of outdated foods. (I think it is fair to call them "outdated" as food definitely has a shelf-life (pun intended). Nowadays we know so much more about nutrition, we don't need quite so many calories as our lives tend to be less physically demanding - and most importantly our tastes should have changed.

In Germany, the dreaded combo of a piece of pork swimming in virtual estuaries of creamy gravy, garnished with rubbery canned mushrooms goes by the name of "Jaegerschnitzel".
Weirdly, it is most frequently accompanied by a heap of noodles. The recipe was first established in the early 19th century. Time to move on I say!




Britain still suffers from the heritage of wartime austerity when almost all foodstuffs were rationed. This unfortunate legacy continues to make British home-cooked meals a thing of nutritional horror. Greasy, stodgy and depressingly dull meals are still the norm in an ordinary household.

The only widely accepted modernisation would be microwaving which really is more a time-saving device than an actual modernisation. When people bother to cook "properly", they still refer to a meal-plan that was devised ages ago. Pies for example are to this day made with suet, lard and dripping - fats that are nutritionally deeply suspect.

Yet it's not just the nutritional aspect that remains iffy. The content of a Cornish pasty for example evokes the musty, mushy, greyness of a 1940's school dinner. And it really would be so easy to bring it up to date (more interesting vegetables not cooked to a pulp etc.)

The same is even true for such a gastronomic ideal as France. French cuisine with its penchant for old-fashioned "meat and two veg" formulas (and that's for lunch!), its passion for all things boiled, its unsophisticated odd puddings "(Ile flottante"! )place its cuisine firmly in the mid-19th century.

NB I'm talking about typical meals families would consume at home, not what you can get in restaurants - of course there is much more diversity there, and food has clearly moved with the times.

So why is home cooking so reluctant to adapt to any reasonable interpretation of "zeitgeist"? Why can it only either dwell in the doldrums of a forgotten decade, or else become dull fastfood? Why is there not a modern interpretation of healthy, nutritionally balanced and easy to prepare complete meals? TV-chefs like Jamie Oliver or Gordon Ramsay produce examples how this could be achieved. But there suggestions rarely make it into family homes. Too fussy, too difficult, too many ingredients, outcome unsure.... those are the arguments against. So people stick with what they know, and (think they) love. Which is either greasy and heavy 19th century food, or greasy and heavy fastfood (chips, bacon). What a shame!