The times they are a-changin'

Although Brussels is my first expat experience, I have spoken with enough other expats to know that we are living in the lap of luxury here. Other veteran expat wives have so many stories to tell of rats in their homes in Vietnam, seeing a live (yes, live) monkey's brains being eaten at the dinner table because it was the custom, and so many other things that can make your stomach turn. These women discreetly roll their eyes a lot when they hear new expat wives complain about how hard it is to get adjusted to Brussels. I think I caught on early to just how lucky we are:

• Even though French is prevalent here, we can still at least get by with our English.
• Even if a word is in French, we can at least read the letters and numbers. You can't quite do that with Arabic characters: ﮙﯟﯧﯚﯚﮱ.
• We live in a county where the majority of people are white, so you can at least blend in--talk about how I would stand out in Korea!
• The food here is wonderful, and besides the random calf's head or pig brains on a menu, you usually don't get too much of a surprise.
• We are here as expats in 2005, when Vonage, Skype, e-mail and Internet are better than they ever have been.

My friend Sue has served her fair share of time being an expat wife (13 cities in 26 years). She was recently reminiscing about when she lived in Naples, Italy, as recently as the mid-1980s. They were renting a home from someone who was fairly high up in the Italian telephone company. It was only for this reason that they even had a phone in their home. They were the only ones in the whole neighborhood with a phone in their house. Still, when Sue wanted to call her mom back in the States, she first had to dial the operator. The operator would tell her that she would ring her when she had an open line. And after that, Sue just had to wait by the phone for anywhere from 10 minutes to 4 hours. Once a line was finally available, there was no telling if her mom would actually be there to answer the call, and even if she was, they would have to keep the call short because of the cost.

All of this just blows my mind when I think of how easy life is for me over here. If I want to call someone, I just pick up my Vonage phone that has an Atlanta number and dial. The call is connected over the Internet, and I can call as much as I want for $25 a month! If I can't get in touch with someone, I just e-mail them. If I don't feel like talking on the phone, I can IM (instant message) them back and forth as much as I want.

And now the Wingfields, aka the Family of Technology, have just blown my mind yet again. Burt and Kyle have figured out the -- drumroll please...............Slingbox Recorder. Yes, I can now record any U.S. TV show that I want to and watch it at my leisure. Even more amazing is that the recorder is basically just like TiVo, so I can press one button and record as many Law & Orders as I want to. I can pause a live TV show, I can rewind a live TV show, I CAN DO ANYTHING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!