Why call a blog "Asparagus for Breakfast" you may ask (or you may not and then the rest of this answer is going to seem uninteresting and perhaps tedious...but if you can stomach it, please bear with me)? For one, I think it has a nice ring to it. And secondly, it happened that the morning we indeed had asparagus with our breakfast that I realized we had flipped a lot of normal things on their head. It did take me awhile to fully come to terms with all we have changed about our lives (a year really, from the very start of trying to make coming here a reality), but it happened. We've been trying to eat healthier--include more veggies in the diet, keep out the sugar and not so good things (it is a process and we're still in it). I was trying out a particular Detox diet to see if it would help me feel more energy, and somehow or other we found ourselves eating asparagus as part of our morning cuisine. The funny thing was that morning (and not necessarily any other mornings since) Tyler was chowing down on the asparagus. Go figure!
This moment made me take a pause and briefly go over how this past year has been a flip flop for us--everything from living in a different time zone, different (but similar) country and culture, occupying different roles (Luke as primary caregiver and me as full-time student), different lifestyle (no car, no dryer, no dishwasher, no microwave and such) and different habits of all sorts. At least the language isn't different...well, for the most part...there are quite a few new terms we are learning: pants are trousers, underwear are "pants" (good one to know), french fries are "chips", chips are "crisps", boots are "wellies", the trunk of the car is a "boot", the sidewalk is "the pavement", and so on. The British do not call boo-boos "boo-boos", and when we say the word in front of others we get very strange looks (a what?). Band-aids are "plasters" and the list goes on.
We discovered that after being here a couple months that disagreeing about the weather is rude. If someone opens up a conversation with "What a miserable day!" You agree. It doesn't matter if you think it's lovely (but chances are if they are saying it's miserable, it probably is). It's meant for conversation, and agreeing is equivalent with accepting an invitation to chat. We also discovered that forming lines/waiting your turn or queuing" is a really big deal. People know there place in line (say, to get on a bus) even if it looks like there is just a random mass of people. Do not cut...even if you think you are just joining the mass--join the back of the mass or wait for someone to cue you in and wave you in front of them. (Oh yeah, and waiting in line is "queuing"). If you've been to England you may be laughing now and either reminiscing of what that was like or totally disagreeing with me, to which I would have to say that these are not directly my own observations. They came from a book that was shown to us by friends here called Watching the English written by a woman who is English. Since reading sections of it I have definitely noticed several occasions where she is right on.
In short, there has been a lot of change over the last year for our 3-person family. There have been adjustments--some welcomed and some reluctantly let in--but we are learning a TON about who we are, where we are going and who we want to be.
The morning we sat eating that stalky green crunchy veggie with our tea, I decided I wanted to record the journey of these backwards and upside down life moments. I want to remember why we did what we did, how it felt, what it looked like and what we learned from it.
So there are the ins and outs of this particular blog...random thoughts about norm-challenging, finding the real us and what we need to do in the midst of invisible rules telling us what we should do.
