A Time of Magic

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It has to be Florida, doesn’t it?

At just everywhere else in the world you can expect theme parks to add another attraction or two each year, in Florida they seem to add another theme park. Paradoxically, that makes Orlando vacations more difficult to plan in that there’s just too much to interest everyone. It’s somewhere that you need to cut down the number of places you intend going to rather than scabbling around to find somewhere of interest that can happen in many other vacation destinations.

Still, ’tis nice to have way too much to see than not enough, isn’t it?

I don’t know what it is about North Carolina but we seem to be attracting people from there like a magnet of late.

As usual, when we get guests with a website we’ve been nosying into what the place is like and it’s simply lovely. There’s heaps to do both in North Carolina itself (which is quite an historic area in America) and it’s close enough to both Florida and Virginia to make it a good choice as a centre.

Outer Banks rentals offer you the chance to rent a holiday home (or vacation rental as they call them) which is probably the best way to experience this area. Hotels are short-term places but this is an area that you need to settle into for a while to get the full benefit of it.
 

One basic assumption that just about everyone emmigrating to a foreign country makes is that the children will pick up the language very quickly and be truly bilingual from pretty much as soon as they can speak if they’re under 5 when the family moves.

This isn’t what happens in practice though.

What you find is that, unless you are careful, your children will grow up being able to speak to you in perfect english but unable either to speak to or understand other english speakers. Sadly, you’ll not notice this until it’s too late to do anything about it as they’ll usually appear to be completely fluent when speaking to you but they’re fluent in the sense that your 2 year old is fluent: your brain makes all kinds of allowances for the errors that they make and it sounds like proper english, but it, of course, isn’t for your 2 year old.

If you keep an eye on the children of neighbours in areas where there are some, but not lots, of expats you’ll find this effect gets more and more evident for children of ages from 10 downwards. Above that, they’ll tend to pronounce english words with the foreign accent but are still understandable by others.

That’s just the spoken language too: the written word is something for another post.