The expat child
The expat child can have a confusing time. For example, you live/are from England, but you currently live in America.
As this map, drawn my very own expat child shows…
Confusing….
He is tremendously patriotic! Whenever I say to someone ‘We live in Maryland’, he retorts with ‘No, we live in England, we’re just here on a loooooong holiday.’ 🙂
Road names in Columbia, MD
The road names in the place we live never cease to amuse and amaze me.
For example: Whistling Winds Walk; Wild Orange Gate; Summer Sky Path; Sunlit Water Way; Distant Thunder Trail; Trailing Moss Gate; Floating Clouds Path.
Columbia takes its street/road names from famous works of art and literature: for example, the neighborhood of Hobbit’s Glen takes its street names from the work of J R R Tolkien; Running Brook, from the poetry of Robert Frost; and Clemens Crossing, from the work of Mark Twain. How cool.
Soliciting in the USA
Outside many shops and businesses in the town where I live I see many signs up which say ‘No soliciting’, meaning they don’t want anyone a) knocking on their door trying to sell stuff and b) they don’t want hookers hanging about. Fair enough.
But the other day I saw a sign on the front door of a residential home which read ‘No solicitors’, which read to me, with my British head on, as ‘if you are one of the two types of practicing lawyers in England, the other being a barrister, then you can’t come in’.
Ain’t that just a funny thing?!
ukdesperatehousewifeusa 
I started laughing at the first ‘No soliciting’ sign. I didn’t know what was coming but I figured it was going to be funny. I’m still laughing!
🙂
Maybe they just really didn’t want any of those lawyers!
Where I was in the US, it was quite the thing to have vaguely French-sounding names to roads, but they tended to get them a bit wrong. Of course now I can’t think of any examples… Oh yes, there was Belle Vue (sounds French, but isn’t), Bel Aire, and Mere Ridge – and the Mere had acute accents on both e’s, so was (presumably) pronounced May-ray Ridge. May-ray isn’t a French word.