Your kids might go to an international school if...

Our kids go to an international school.  A lot of locals refer to it as "the American school," and while I understand it used to be predominantly American, now Americans are the largest minority.  It's an IB World School, which means they use the International Baccalaureate program K-12.  There are kids who are permanent residents and citizens here, and kids whose parents' expat careers have them moving every few years.


To give you a little idea of the melting pot that is ACS Egham, I offer the following list, which is entirely my own perspective, as everyone there has a little different experience.


Your kids might go to an international school if....

• Your son spends a Saturday afternoon playing in the backyard of a French friend with the French boy and an Irish-South African boy.
• Your son's Brazilian friend has moved back to Brazil.
• Your son remarks that both his teachers since you moved have been Canadian.
• Your daughter counts among her closest friends two Dutch girls, a Canadian, a Danish girl, a Japanese-American, an American, a British-Australian girl who lived in North Carolina for eight years, and the new Danish girl she just met yesterday.
• At the school International Fair you can sample foods made by parents from Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Mexico, Canada, USA, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Egypt, France, Germany, Austria, Ireland, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, UK/England, Poland, Russia, Kazakhstan, Iran, Australia, New Zealand, Polynesian Islands, Portugal, South Africa, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand.  (Hungry yet?)
• On Friday evening, both your kids have friends over for a sleepover, and there are almost as many Dutch people in the house as Americans.
• You learn from your daughter's friends how to pronounce the last name of another family at school:  van Ballegooijen.  You almost get the pronunciation right, and they concede that Dutch is difficult for non-natives to learn.
• On the morning of the sleepover, the girls want to make pancakes.  After much negotiation over whether to make American or Dutch pancakes, they decide on Dutch.  They look up a recipe on the internet in Dutch to make sure it's authentic. (The kitchen is as messy as you imagine after the pancake-making is over.)