--Miriam Beard
Two years ago, I would not have imagined that I would be here, living in the southwest of England. In the heartland of the pristine English countryside that I longed to experience as a lovelorn young girl watching films like Howards End and Much Ado About Nothing. Two years ago, I was preparing for the vacation of a lifetime. My good friend had invited me to join her and her family on a two week cruise leaving and returning out of NYC, and travelling to Panama and the Caribbean, aboard the legendary Queen Mary 2 oceanliner. The timing of the trip and choice of ship were no accident. We were going to celebrate my friend's "granny's" 100th birthday, an extraordinary woman who had sailed on the return maiden voyage of the first Queen Mary in the 1930s! Needless to say, it was an amazing vacation. But at the time I did not realize that trip would change the bearings of the course of my life.
A native southern Californian by birth and a nurse by profession, I returned home with a nagging urge for more. The taste of the sheer unfamiliarity of different cultures and exotic landscapes had intoxicated me. Having never lived anywhere outside about a 10 mile radius in Orange County, albeit a beautiful, sunny radius, and without any obligations for me to stay put, my restlessness smoldered and grew. Thankfully, I happened to choose a profession that offers incredible flexibility for relocation and availability of work. You may be aware that there is a nursing shortage pretty much everywhere in the world? So I signed up with a US based travel nursing company and late summer last year relocated to New England. Ok, maybe not that exotic, but it was completely new to me. I lived and worked in Boston for 6 months where I had the opportunity to witness the amazing fall colors, a real winter, and bonafide bustling, noisy city life. I loved it.
You may also be aware that there is a global economic crisis we are in the midst of. To my dismay, the field of nursing was not left unaffected, and by February I was out of a job. I returned to California to figure out the next step. This seems like a fine place to introduce a small detail not mentioned earlier about the Queen Mary 2 cruise, and a huge reason to move across the Atlantic.
Love and adventure, that's what has landed me here. On board "Mary", I met a gorgeous, charming, funny and smart Englishman, Rich. He came to visit me in California a few months after the cruise, having moved back to his homeland shortly after we met. After a week together and perhaps contrary to what we expected, we were smitten. Against the odds of long distance dating, we determined to get on the same land mass. When the door closed on my continuing travel nursing in the US, my pursuit to live and work in England began.
The process of getting licensed to work as an overseas nurse is a test of will. Working as quickly as possible, efficiently and highly organized, it still took months to wade through the paperwork and wait for documents coming and going in the post. Months of perseverance and determination. Alas now here I am, smack in the middle of culture shock. And so the adventure begins...
