Those magic words encouraged my move here, yet a year later zero savings!

 “No one saves the first year,” fellow teachers console me.  “You’re too busy paying for the essentials.”  Like a car, computer and credit card.

 Before I came here, I speculated an exotic future, but worried about my 110 voltage computer.  It could, like me, adapt, but the problem was the Hertz.  Many feverish phone calls illuminated me that my 60-Hertz-only computer wouldn’t work in a 50-Hertz-only country.  Ever buy a computer in the Gulf?  The prices and experience just aren’t the same as in America.

 Then there was the credit card to the max – for books and cotton clothes which are now worn and old and will have to be replaced.

 For my first vacation here, I delayed a much dreamed of Pharaoh trip down the Nile River. In compensation, I bought a television and second-hand video, and video club membership.

 The telephone bill, I blush.  $200 a month.  In the beginning, it had been a hunger for an American accent: fluent, colloquial English with all the “a’s” and “the’s” and proper plural verbs giving the right song to the conversation.

 Then it was the delayed mail.  Then it was the sheer necessity to talk to people who knew me before I had arrived here, grown a million white hairs and gone slowly bonkers unravelling the mixed, both spoken and unspoken, rules and intrigues of my school.

 I certainly needn’t worry about being taxed on my foreign earned income, since the USA ceiling is $70,000.  My income is far, far from that bright spot.

 Tax-free savings is still my dream. British English is easier on my ears. A few people here have a glimmer of tolerating my foibles and appreciating my brilliance.  The car is mine, the computer functions and my credit card….. Now for a trip to Zurich for a non-taxed Swiss bank account!  Maybe I should shop around? Try the Channel Islands, the Caribbean, or have all the Swiss customers gone to Austria? That certainly will be an expensive shopping spree! Oh well, there’s always next year.