8 months of adventure

My husband has been here 8 months. What an adventure. I am picking up some Albanian, at least I am understanding more when I listen to my hubby talk to family. I am shy to speak the words, though. Hubby has learned a lot and is adjusting well to America. It's still a learning experience for him, and for me. Driving, for instance....I thought it was rather easy here, it's flat, and the roads go north/south or east/west. If you know the names of the main roads, and you are driving on one of them, eventually you will come to an intersection of one of the others. Easy peasy. NOT if you grew up in a city with hills and virtually no street names! Apparently at one time Prishtina had no street names. People lived on this hill or that hill or somewhere between, but always with LANDMARKS, not street names. So my poor hubby is still struggling with the expanse of flatness here, with the absence of landmarks. Yeah, there's GPS. He would be totally lost without it.

Culture shock---there is still some of that, like TAXES. Being self-employed, I've been pretty much out of the picture regarding the kind of taxes that come out of a regular paycheck. In Europe its common for people to be paid "under the table".  So neither of us were prepared for how MUCH would be taken. I think the hardest thing for hubby, and maybe for a lot of foreigners, is learning about how many laws and restrictions we have here. Hunting license, building license, etc. In Kosovo or Albania, if you need to add on to your house you just do it. Over there, if you are hungry for wild meat you just go out and hunt it. I feel like I'm constantly reining my hubby in, "no you can't do that, omg no, not that either".

On top of that, now we have the Obamacare looming. Thankfully the state of Indiana decided not to drop me, at least until April. With the Indiana insurance, I have 100% coverage. I pay my small monthly premium. If I had to switch to Obama care, even with the tax credit my premium would have tripled. It would cost between $20 and $50 to see a doctor, and I can't even figure out the prescription "coverage". And a $6,000 deductible? Who are they kidding? It's all a mess.

But in spite of all the road blocks, laws, restrictions and so forth, my hubby loves it here. America is a huge country. Foreigners learn about us from books, movies and youtube. No wonder they have so many strange ideas about us. No wonder they think our streets are "paved with gold" and every corner has gangster shoot-outs. Sometimes reality can be disappointing as well as comforting.