Among my friends growing up in Olympia, WA, some sort of European heritage was often a given. (It was clearly not a very diverse area at the time, and still isn't for that matter.) It's interesting that the Irish took such interest in your background once you moved there, but yet you never really were able to fit in, or feel like you fit in -- and this despite sharing a common language. (Well, sort of.)
I'm glad to hear Nice is feeling like home. How are you doing in the "meeting people" department? I think this is always a challenge for retirees in new places, even within their own country.
I had mistakenly thought that being an Irish American would provide natural affinities with Irish culture and Irish people; it is however quite a different culture. Irish people sometimes dislike it when Americans who are part of the Irish diaspora call themselves Irish, since in fact they are clearly Americans. Assumptions about the nature of work and the workplace, the relationship of workers to management, etc., are also very different (we worked in the public sector) and adaptation to workplace culture was perhaps the biggest challenge.
Associations have provided a venue for making contacts as well as improving French language abilities; I have a couple essays about that forthcoming. I've now also registered with JeVeuxAider.gouv.fr an hope to find a fitting volunteer activity locally. Then there is Democrats Abroad; beyond that, though, we don't actively try to engage with the American expat community.
I get a reminiscent chill when you refer to the soft cold-shoulders you met up with in Dublin. [Decades earlier, of course] I thought congenial work in a new university/ national treasure town would be right for my essential English-ness to flourish and be recognized. Nope. SCR members, the most hardcore anti-Americans I’ve yet come across, gleefully refused to be introduced, and the younger members of faculty and staff I preferred as company were never going to relinquish the hot-house-plant view they formed of me.
Luckily, I had regular mail delivery plus some useful inner resources. I finished my work and boarded the Simplon Express to bask in a climate warmer in more ways than one than the flintiness of Canterbury.
So — deeply Anglophilic still, but from afar. Thriving in retirement in mid-Cambridge.
Smiled at this : 'Nobody ever asked me whether I was from a Traveller family'.
No archetypal or idiosyncratic characteristics jumped out :-)
Among my friends growing up in Olympia, WA, some sort of European heritage was often a given. (It was clearly not a very diverse area at the time, and still isn't for that matter.) It's interesting that the Irish took such interest in your background once you moved there, but yet you never really were able to fit in, or feel like you fit in -- and this despite sharing a common language. (Well, sort of.)
I'm glad to hear Nice is feeling like home. How are you doing in the "meeting people" department? I think this is always a challenge for retirees in new places, even within their own country.
I had mistakenly thought that being an Irish American would provide natural affinities with Irish culture and Irish people; it is however quite a different culture. Irish people sometimes dislike it when Americans who are part of the Irish diaspora call themselves Irish, since in fact they are clearly Americans. Assumptions about the nature of work and the workplace, the relationship of workers to management, etc., are also very different (we worked in the public sector) and adaptation to workplace culture was perhaps the biggest challenge.
Associations have provided a venue for making contacts as well as improving French language abilities; I have a couple essays about that forthcoming. I've now also registered with JeVeuxAider.gouv.fr an hope to find a fitting volunteer activity locally. Then there is Democrats Abroad; beyond that, though, we don't actively try to engage with the American expat community.
I get a reminiscent chill when you refer to the soft cold-shoulders you met up with in Dublin. [Decades earlier, of course] I thought congenial work in a new university/ national treasure town would be right for my essential English-ness to flourish and be recognized. Nope. SCR members, the most hardcore anti-Americans I’ve yet come across, gleefully refused to be introduced, and the younger members of faculty and staff I preferred as company were never going to relinquish the hot-house-plant view they formed of me.
Luckily, I had regular mail delivery plus some useful inner resources. I finished my work and boarded the Simplon Express to bask in a climate warmer in more ways than one than the flintiness of Canterbury.
So — deeply Anglophilic still, but from afar. Thriving in retirement in mid-Cambridge.
What recollections you called up!