Hmm I have only had three interactions with New York police people and they were all lovely.
Admittedly at the time I was a young white male with my girlfriend and we have strong Aussie accents 
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We might be there September
Actually, I am headed to Chicago and LA for a business trip tomorrow for a week - should be fun :).
Next step is to get some dollar bux for tipping. God I hate tipping. It is such a foreign concept!
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Alrighty!
I have a Visa. A US one, easiest one I have ever got my hands on. Feeling all of my white privilege 
Fly on 16 September and started the hunt for a house, which is needed before I can get the kiddies into public school.
Super exciting!
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How are the kids doing with all of this?
So far okay⌠one is worried about tornadoes and school shootings, the other two canât wrap their heads around going to school without a uniform.
Well, I am three weeks into living in the US - having settled into Wilmette in Chicago.
A few items
- banking system is so archaic.
- dryers run on gas and are amazing
- love squirrels
- advertising is on a whole new level
- apparently it gets cold in Chicago. I have bought a bunch of stuff, hopefully itâs enough!!!
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Haha, get ready, friend. Winter is going to be quite the experience.
And yes, squirrels are great but can drive you a little crazy if you want to keep your bird feeders filled.
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How are the kids doing? Are they in public or private school? What do they think so far?
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We put the kids into public school, which seems really good so far. A little progressive, but whatever. The teachers are so engaged, with varying levels of skill, but the effort to engage is there.
The kids are enjoying it, making new friends (chatting to the Chinese kids in the Mandarin they learnt from Singapore).
Big adjustment is no school uniform.
I think we will be happy here once we get wrapped around the finances and have every company leech to our bank accounts.
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Depending on the ages of your kids, you may want to expect them to lose their gloves/mittens regularly and have a backup pair. If you label them, itâs worth checking the schoolâs lost and found, but you canât bank on it. Also, knitted gloves/mittens probably work well for children who never touch snow and arenât in windy places. I would ban their sale in child sizes except at novelty stores if I ran Chicago.
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@Baelnor would love an update, how is the family adjusting to Chicago?
We closed on a house today. We were supposed to close a couple months ago, but the seller had a problem and it got delayed.
It is going to take us about a month to get everything ready to move I think. And then we are going to move our 5th grader in the middle of the school year. I think I am a little worried on her behalf. She acts like it is no big deal though.
We are also moving from NYC to about an hour north in a very forested area. It is going to be night and day difference.
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Congrats @kennfusion ! That is awesome : ) It sounds like a very positive move.
Here, we had about a foot and a half of snow over the weekend, and the temperature has been well below zero for the last couple nights (it is a little after 930pm, and itâs currently -15) and only hitting about 4 during the daytime hours. But at least it was sunny : )
I wonder if youâll actually be a closer drive to me now and we can play something irl lol
Assuming you live in or around where you work, it is actually a little farther, I live right by the Verrazzano right now so it would be a little closer. We are moving up to Armonk, so over by CT, which puts us a little farther away.
But we should meet up sometime. We discussed it before the pandemic and thenâŚwell the pandemic.
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Heya!
Sorry all for not replying sooner - when I first saw this message I was in a really negative headspace. We were coming into to super cold frosty weather we had never experienced⌠at the same time I was headed overseas back home to Australia for a 2 week business trip (just me), leaving my wife and kids in Chicago. It was a pretty stressful time, all mixed in with emotions, kids were struggling to make friends in school and my wife was not coping. I was reaching out to my boss and connections and considering how fast I could get out of the US.
Fast forward to now and things are a little better. We settled on the North Shore in Chicago, in a lovely neighbourhood, with way too much wealth for my liking - but nice schools and pretty safe. Which was important.
Kids are adjsuting to the schools - being third culture kids and being well travelled they have had to adjust to the maturity levels of their peers. The twins have done well, though are probably idling a little and the work is easy, but my eldest lost a very tight friendship in Singapore which she is now starting to get past. She joined a D&D club at the library (how awesome are libraries and public servcies here!?!?) and started her own club at school. I shouldnt be surprised.
Wife is still adjusting, and starting to build connections which is good. We have some family road trips planned this year (Smokey Mountains | Badlands + Dakotas | Niagra Falls + COnneticut + New York) and an epic Disney World for winter. You dont do expat roles to make money!
Work is hard and busy and intense. I dont feel like I am living in Chicago, more just working in Chicago. It might change as I get better at the role and finsih the org reshuffle and embed the systems, but it also might not. I reckon we will be pulling stumps end of next year (cricket reference, which⌠being in the US⌠i am more aware of all the phrases I use. Americans are either polite and smile and nod, or dont want to come across ignorant and smile and nod. I am going to go with the first one).
What I like?
- You can buy anything, anytime, from anywhere. SeriouslyâŚ
- The diversity. I know that might sound strange, and it might just be my existince, but people really hold on to their ancestral cultural identity and are open about it. My school has representation from almost everywhere! Except black. Seems odd.
Even Better?
- This is going to delve into political theory, and i know it will be strange, but there is so much hypocrisy. I am in a progressive neighbour in a progressive state, and the entire system is built to retain the status quo. Keep the poor, poor and keep the rich, rich. What do i mean? Land taxes go straight to the schools here. If you are in an area like me, schools get $35k/kid/year in funding. Illinois average is $10k. I would hate to be in the school that brings down the average. No prizes for guessing the demographic of those shcools.
- Safety - Call me paranoid, but it really bothers me. And so much feeds into that fear - from the Ring app with the neighboorhood function to facebook to the news. Everything feeds it, I ignore it pretty well, my wife, not so much.
Overall i am starting to enjoy it and looking forward to spring and summer. I cant believe it has been 6 months already! I also like the American approach to freedom and rules. Its only a rule if someone is going to enforce it. Until then, consider it a friendly suggestion (like speed limits)
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Iâm going to rep my city here: after Niagara Falls, youâll get back on I-90 (itâs worth getting an E-Z Pass for the car if you donât have one yet) heading East. Seriously consider spending a night in Rochester, NY, and taking the kids to the Strong Museum of Play if theyâre under 10. Older than that can still be fun, but itâs amazing for the younger set.
I donât know how Illinois does things, but in NY, local taxes go to schools, but state taxes follow a formula which evens that out substantially. So, on average, wealthy places arenât a ton better funded than poorer ones, but, within an income band, municipalities which want to prioritize education spend more on it. It still sucks, because schools are one of the major contact points for social services, and poverty massively exacerbates student needs, so a poor district which spends the same per student as a rich one is going to be much less well-served. So the hypocrisy is absolutely real and rampant, but there are people in great school districts advocating for a more progressive distribution of state aid.
Youâre definitely right that thereâs a market for fear, and suppliers have happily met that need. Your approach seems optimal to me; sometimes we have to trade a degree of well-informedness for freedom from the psychological impacts of advertising.
Iâll be heading to Disney World for the first time in 8 years next month. Itâs complicated, and Iâm getting the impression that there are some things which are really kind of gross: notably, paying to wait less in lines. But, itâs my nieceâs birthday party, and my wife has a conference in Orlando that very weekend, and my kids happen to have an unusual district-level school closure the Friday weâll be down there (so theyâll miss relatively little school at a less-busy time to visit), so Iâm holding my nose and trying to focus on the excitement. If you have anything youâd like me to keep an eye out for and report back based on your familyâs particular needs, let me know!
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Itâs funny as I have been thinking a lot about some of the subjects you have touched on. I literally just moved out of NYC to the suburbs North of the city for the sole purpose of controlling what school my daughter goes to.
As @rinelk said, we do have some levers here for the state to even out funding between schools. in NYC the highest funded schools are the ones in the poorest neighborhoods. But when my daughterâs teacher tried to seek funds to get a printer for her classroom last year, I just bought it for them. It was nothing to me, but might not have been possible in some neighborhoods. Even in NYC parental involvement can greatly outweigh the government funding and provide advantages to some schools over others.
And then we literally just moved to an area where we pay an additional school tax, on top of property tax, just to ensure one of the best school systems. This is literally in lieu of paying for a private school.
But I felt I had no choice, the Mayors of NYC keep changing the rules on schools, and the uncertainty of where my child would go to school for middle and high school was not worth the risk. So we moved.
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Glad everyone seems to be adjusting @Baelnor. Iâve never had to make that significant of a move, especially with kids, and Iâm certainly not envious.
In NJ the school districts are their own authorities and have the ability to levy taxes on their own - itâs baked into the (exorbitant) property taxes here, but is one of those things I donât mind paying for. The school system where I live is highly rated and was certainly one of the driving factors when we bought our current home. Iâm on the board of our regional middle / high school and this year the tax increase was 0.8%, which is excellent considering inflation etc.
As to Disney⌠oof all around. We went in the beginning of December last year - had a pre-COVID flight credit that was expiring at the end of December and figured weâd use it to take the family: my wife and I, my mother-in-law, and my daughters, 10 and 7.
It. Was. Exhausting.
And. Expensive.
As. Fuck.
Mind you, we stayed in the Animal Kingdom hotel, which was very cool, for the first few days anyway. By the third day my jaded kids couldâve given two fucks about the giraffe outside their window - Iâd point out the wildlife and theyâd act as if it were a stray cat wandering around the neighborhood. Yeah dad, we get it. Fucking ingrates.
Not sure how old your kids are, but one of the mistakes we made was trying to see everything / do everything every day when all they wanted to do was go in the pool. After the first two days there, we kind of got the idea and would go to the parks in the morning and be back at the hotel after lunch for a swim and a rest, then back for dinner.
It certainly didnât help that we learned 10 is afraid of heights on the first day (while on the magic carpet ride, as sheâs screaming to let her off and 7 is cackling with delight making the ride go higher), negating any rides whatsoever.
The Disney shuttle was fantastic though, no need to Uber / rent a car / etc. Food was fair - we didnât starve but also didnât eat anything that we talked about later. You can Instacart or Drizly stuff to your hotel room if youâre on property, which was nice to learn. The front desk will hold it for you if youâre not there, and itâs a great way to order booze (we definitely needed it) or snacks or whatnot.
Finally, Orlando airport is the single worst airport I have ever ever ever flown out of. Get there at least 3 hours before your flight home - we were there the normal 2 hours before and spent 1:59 standing in the TSA line. We were literally running through the airport to make the flight like something out of a movie.
eta: Just saw your post about kids being 10/9/9 @Baelnor. Definitely learn from my mistakes lol.
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Mind you, we stayed in the Animal Kingdom hotel, which was very cool, for the first few days anyway. By the third day my jaded kids couldâve given two fucks about the giraffe outside their window - Iâd point out the wildlife and theyâd act as if it were a stray cat wandering around the neighborhood. Yeah dad, we get it. Fucking ingrates.
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