Culture shock - having lived most of my life in the Middle East - I now had to relocate back to my husband's home town in the North-East of England - how do I cope?
After living most of my life in Bahrain I now had to relocate to UK, a country for which I held a passport for but little else - it seemed like I was moving to a foreign country! Everything I had ever been used to was to change and I was to find myself in a town I didn't know with no friends and the worst - not knowing where to go to do my favourite type of shopping!!
Making friends has always come easy to me as being an expat it is something you do as second nature - welcoming and assisting new arrivals to the country and helping them to find their feet and quickly become included into the social networking. However this was not how things are done in UK as I was to find out - people are a lot more suspicious of a friendly nature and when using the normal conversation pieces I had been used to in the Middle East such as "where does your husband work" - I very quickly realised using the same tactics in UK was met with a more hostile reaction such as "why do you want to know where my husband works"!! So I had to learn how to socialise all over again in this new and foreign land and ensure that my 'norm' of conversation was not overstepping the mark or been seen as nosy! - you have to know people quite a while before you can enquire of such personal things! Luckily I had my love of #Netball which got me into a great group of girls and fortunately I did succeed in making friends some of whom are still good friends today 20+ years later!
Now I had the friendships sorted it became a necessity to find a favourite shopping haunt to fulfil my need of my favourity shopping . Of course #Newcastle was a fantastic city to shop in but not my kind of shopping - it was just malls of the same old shops found all over UK with the smattering of big name department stores. My friends were all fans of the mall type of shopping so were unable to assist me to find my type of shopping. is type of shopping so they were unable to help and really didn't understand what it was I was looking for!
So my search began - each time I had a day off and no child commitments, I would take a drive to a different town/suburb to see what the shopping was like. I went all over the place but seemed destined not to find it. Then one day I decided to drive to #Byker a suburb of Newcastle that was renowned for being pretty rough. At this time in the early 90's it seemed that car theft was also notorious in the north-east of England so I headed there with a little bit of trepidation and decided to be on the safe side to park as close to the police station as I could to ensure my car would be there on my return. I also ensured that I was dressed so as not to stand out amongst the locals - no point wearing high end clothes in this part of town. To my surprise Shields Road where the main shopping thoroughfare was turned out to be a haven of unexpected shopping bliss. There were all sorts of small shops selling clothes never seen in the malls and to my utter delight was the #pièce de résistance which was a shop called quite simply "The Catalogue Shop". Here was an Aladdin's Cave for a shopper like me - it was just where any returned goods by catalogue shoppers in UK (which was so popular in the 80s/90s (as prior to online shopping)) were returned to and then on-sold as they were then classed as used goods! In today's online world - these stores are no longer in operation.
So this is where I found my shopping mecca during my time in the North-East of England which was to provide me with endless individual outfits and continually stagger my work colleagues and friends as to where I got my clothes from hahahaha!
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