my hearing is deteriorating quickly...

When we first came out here (almost a year ago!!!), we thought it was completely strange that Europeans couldn’t tell whether we were from America, England, Australia, South Africa, whatever.  They definitely knew we weren’t Swedish and that we were native English speakers, but that was about it.  We had a lot of laughs about this – just good times laughing at the silly foreigners (locals) that we would meet.

Oh, how we laughed.

Then we went almost a year without hearing many people at all speak American English (in person at least)

Now, I find myself gravitating towards anyone I hear speaking “native English”.  My ears perk up and I try to figure out where they are from.  

The problem is that I DON’T RECOGNIZE IT right away.  Yesterday in the lunch room, I could have sworn that the guy next to me was from some random city in the US as he was talking to a coworker.  Only after five minutes and hearing him refer to someone as a “bloke” did I figure out that he was from Australia, not Kansas City. 

This has happened a few times in the past number of weeks, and I’m not exactly sure why.  Again, I can still pick up on native-english speakers, I just am losing the ability to know which country they are from.  Really, really odd and disconcerting. 

I think we’ll need to step up our skype game, and have more people visit us soon…

and I apologize for ever finding this funny....