Miscellania

I'm still bloody exhausted. Of course, a new born baby can do that to you. Today I'll just ramble.

After a lot of careful though, we've decided to go ahead and get US citizenship for our daughter. A lot can happen before she's 18 and I'll probably try to write to my congressman at some point (though expatriates have notoriously little influence on US politics) to try to sort out the mess.

Also, I had to delete someone's comment. I haven't had to do that before on this blog and I've already contacted the author of that comment to let them know what happened and why. I am not a fan of censoring discussion but it had to be done in this case and I'm pretty sure the person involved will understand immediately why (I know them).

Bunny says "Ovid is tired"
Photo by Patrick Berry

And in order to keep this blog post vaguely relevant to expatriate issues, I noticed that the Expat Market Place has launched. Primarily targeting British expats in Europe, their press release bills them as sort of an alternative to Amazon and Argos. Unlike the latter two, the Expat Market place will ship large goods outside of the UK and that's important because many of those large goods are more expensive on the European mainland.

What's interesting is that there are enough British expats spread throughout Europe that a company is willing to build their business around this demographic. It would be nice if this were offered for American expats also. The estimates I've read (and am too tired to research right now), are that there are anywhere between 4 to 7 million Americans living abroad — with six million the most heavily quoted figure — and 200,000 in London alone. Those would be enough to have London just miss being in the 100 most populous US cities if only their US population was counted.