A few more Italy highlights

The Cinque Terra is one of the most beautiful places we've visited yet. I just hope that someday we get to return.

We have had an amazing year of life changing travel - all at a fraction of the cost it would have been if we never made the move.

Living as an expat is not easy.  It's not all glory and wonderfully beautiful pictures.  We haven't posted all the challenges, difficulties, and frustrations which equal the number of incredible experiences.  Some of the simple daily activities require so much extra work.  For example, it is hard to transfer money internationally between banks, mailing a package cost 4x, getting your drivers license takes two tries if you are male, and learning the workplace legal requirements requires reprogramming on all levels.

Although, it is probably not different than living anywhere in many regards: life is what you make of it.  It depends on your outlook, your lens, the perspective of which you appreciate the gifts you have been given.

We didn't plan to move to England, we were fortunate enough to have the opportunity.  Our eyes have been opened to appreciate experiences and differences that we didn't know before.  We are continually thankful for the learning opportunity, but miss our family incredibly.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Italian Oddities

This week's visit to Italy helped us reflect on some of the cultural differences between living in the US and abroad.

We found many interesting things in Italy:

1. When you receive change back after paying, it is always placed on the counter (not in your hand).

2. Italians smoke a lot.  We got pummeled with second hand smoke:

3. In Rome it appears that you can park just about anywhere...check out a few of the worst parking offenders that we saw:

4. In addition, Italian drivers are crazy.  There is not much use of signals or traffic laws, but extensive use of the horn.  Despite that, there are more fatalities/100,000 cars in the US than in Italy:

Here are a few other interesting comparisons that may be surprising from a few countries that we have visited:

Beer is expensive in Norway!

Gas is way cheap in the US:

Actually, everything is expensive in Norway: