Who Am I?

I am first-generation American. My parents are Hungarian, from Budapest, and moved to the United States in 1952 from Germany via a displaced persons program. They left Hungary to live in Germany as they thought it would be safer for them. They lost everything and had to start over. Those were very tough times.

I grew up in New Jersey with the American Dream - meaning that you can be anything you want to be as long as you work hard. I have recently read Strengthsfinder 2.0 which totally busts that myth. They say that people should work on their strengths, and if you put as much effort into doing that instead of trying to work on the stuff you aren’t good at, just think how much better off you could be. Forget about all the time you could have saved if you knew that before.

I lived and worked in New York City for about 10 years before I moved to London (via L.A.) over 20 years ago. I had married an Englishman, and once we had started our family he thought it would be a good idea to move to London. He thought the school system and quality of life was better here. As everywhere, some things are better and some are not.

Living in London permanently is a completely different experience to being a visitor. It has been an interesting learning experience. I was lucky when I moved here in that my small street had at least three other families with children the same age as my son. It wasn’t long after when I became pregnant with twins. At one point, I had three children under the age of three!

I have also lived in three different houses, all in the same neighbourhood. My current home is on the market. The timing isn’t ideal, but I am still keeping a positive outlook. This is a situation that is beyond my control. Fortunately, I am not desperate.

Now my children are at an age where I have one in his last year of University, one has just started University, and her twin brother is on his gap year. They are pretty independent and so I find myself at a different stage in my life. I am able to reclaim some freedom.

My life is one of ongoing change, which I am not bothered about as it stops me from being bored. I have a wide variety of interests to keep me occupied. My current passions are dancing Argentine Tango and writing.

I was recently made redundant, last November. Since then, I have set up a blog titled Arlene’s New Beginning to experiment with my writing. That was quite an emotional time for me. From that blog I developed Arlene’s London Tango Pages which pretty much took on a life of its own. I am particularly proud of that blog. It is practically a full blown website and I am trying to work out the transition from a free blogsite to a dot com in order to generate some cash from it from advertising.

This is now my third blog. You are probably wondering what I have in my head that could possibly generate three blogs. Well, if you have gotten this far, I’m sure you have an idea. I have a wealth of life experiences behind me and a wealth of untapped experiences still in front of me.

I am new to this blogging business and am still trying to work out the best way forward. I still like Wordpress and will keep my Tango blog there as well as my other Arlene blog. As the title of this blog is called Arlene’s London Life, I will more than likely write about things that happened in London. After all, I have 20 years worth of stuff I could write about – children, pets, husbands, men in general, friends, people on the bus, etc. I do consider London my home. The weather may not always be ideal for me, but I do like it here. I have very good friends and I have my children. I also have a pretty good life. Some aspects may not be ideal, like being un-employed, but that is only temporary. In the meantime, I blog.

So please bear with me while I experiment with this new blog and please check out my other blogs if you want to know more. Or, you could just ask me a question.

All the best,

Arlene