Living in the first world and making friends......

I cannot believe how the week has flown by, and that it is already Thursday morning....you will have guessed, I am sure, by my lack of entries this week that life has settled down to a more normal routine of school and work and all that everyday stuff and is no longer the roller coaster ride that it was a month ago.

Simon, the children and I are finding our feet slowly and some days are better than others - last night we sat around the table, our very own "Round Table" and had a discussion on what has been hard about moving here......we know the good things and that list goes on and on, but I wanted to give the children the opportunity to voice any concerns, fears or difficulties they were experiencing so that we could talk about them......the answer was unanimous - Making friends. On this front I have to agree with them, you can never find more "family", but without friends, the days can be long and times can be lonely - I am just very grateful for the fact that both Tanya and Linda are here and although they are on different sides of the country, at least it is a friendly voice on the other side of the phone.

After our discussion last night I was giving the whole topic a lot of thought and have decided that the process of making new friends is probably the hardest part of immigrating and it really is a lot like dating......let me explain........you meet someone, you think there is a connection, after chatting for a bit, you may set up a coffee date or lunch, you arrive at the aforementioned "date" with sweaty palms and hoping that you will find something in common and that the whole meal won't be filled with award silences or that you will find you are fundamentally different in your belief of politics, religion or parenting, if you are lucky, the "date" goes well, you part promising to stay in touch, now the angst begins, will she call, should you call her, will she think you are being needy, what is too long (you get the picture) and when the phone does ring or the sms arrives you are so grateful you could cry.....so you see my divorced and separated friends out there, both my children and I are in your boat....the only thing is we aren't looking for sex (thankfully (lol)).

At this point I must mention my new friend Kerry, we are passed the "first date" I am delighted to announce and our "relationship" is progressing nicely, we have introduced each other to our respective families and now feel free to ring each other whenever the feeling takes (lol)...so if you are out there and you are new to a country, or are planning on moving to a country soon, be kind to yourself, you will meet people and you will have "second dates" and make friends, but it takes time and it takes strength and it is hard, but hang in there. Now you may be wondering at the reason for this long tirade, well as I have said before, this blog is my "diary" and everyone keeps promising me that I will look back on this whole friendship thing in a year and laugh.....well this entry is to ensure that on the 10 July 2009 I will be rolling around on the floor laughing with all my new friends!!!!!

Now for all you doubting South African's out there who have lost faith in the third world banking system, police system, civil servant system etc - take heart, even here in first world they manage to make mistakes of amazing proportions........let me explain.

Yesterday when going to pay for a new purchase, my debit card was declined and I was informed by the very very lovely lady who owns the shop that there were insufficient funds in the bank account - now please understand at this point that while the item was expensive by English standards (£45) it was by no means sufficient to wipe out our bank account, so after some deep breaths I made the call to Simon to inform him that we seem to have run out of money - as you can imagine, his stress levels automatically hit the ceiling as although he had made a transfer to South Africa, there should have been well over a 1000 pounds in the account.

After many frantic attempts to access our statements and frustrating "holding on" moments Simon finally reached an actual person (and not some electronic voice asking him to press 1, 2 or 3) only to be told that "Sorry, there was a trainee dealing with the transfer to South Africa and he had made a mistake so they had done the transaction again and oh my word, it seems to have gone through twice"....and this was for a transfer of over 2500 pounds, yes you are right as you frantically do the conversion, the princely sum of nearly R40000 (quite a mistake). So you see, even here in the first world there are those (albeit not many that we have found) that can't read and don't know how to do their jobs and we are still waiting for the bank manager who promised to phone Simon before close of business to come back to us, so as I say take heart my South African friends inefficiency is every where along with high fuel prices, rising costs of living, dropping property prices and risks of recession.