expat issues

Are You an Expat or an Immigrant?

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

What is the difference anyway? Expats and immigrants are both people who’ve left their own country to live in another. The words are synonyms of a sort. Only I suspect that if you conducted a poll of everyone you know from a different country, most would be able to easily self-identify as one or the other. In fact, you could probably tell without even asking.


The differences seem to lie mostly in the motivation for leaving your country to move to another. Immigrants usually move for economic reasons. Work is scarce in their native land, and they move to somewhere they see as a land of opportunity.
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Frodo Lives! Or at least Grishnakh and Ugluk do. In fact, they live at my house.

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

They call it “Orkin.” I hear them speaking it when they think I’m not listening (or is it when they think I am listening and they have secrets from me? That’s what my parents did with Spanish when I was a child). I never quite believed those parents who claimed their children had a special private language. I guess I have to believe them now. I happened to be reading the Lord of the Rings to Axa and Dominique at naptime when we got to Florence. And we were just at the part in The Two Towers where Merry and Pippin are captured by orcs, so there was a lot of the language of Mordor floating around.… Read more

Credi solo a quello che ti dice il cuore

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Axa no longer goes to asilo (preschool), as of today. Too bad the only person to whom I can say, “I told you so,” is myself. I knew it was a long shot, considering what I know about school and her personality. As long as it wasn’t doing any harm, I was O.K. with her going, as long as it actually did help her to learn Italian. There’s nothing else I could see that she could learn better at asilo than at home. And now we’ve seen that it’s not even a good place for her to learn Italian. Surprise! Things were just not working out.… Read more

Mountains Beyond Mountains

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Today I did my periodic shuffle through the lone sock bag. The verdict: ten matches and 26 singles. It is possible that our family may have too many different types of socks. We’ve gotten nearly all of them as gifts, though, so I can’t complain. But my children (and occasionally myself) are sometimes known to run about wearing mismatched socks.

Being so peripatetic has its poignancies. There’s something to miss about everywhere we’ve lived. The thing I miss about Florence is the constant unspoken but keenly felt internal nudge to dress yourself up so you can walk out on the streets and do your part to make the city a little more beautiful.… Read more