Filed under: when I grow up
Time to pack again, this time to move across town to take care of a beautiful house and some friendly dogs for a couple of months. A properly furnished house with great views and a lawn, the kind no one my age seems to own. Trying on a future life for fun.
Yesterday, a call from nowhere means waiting to see if there will be a bigger move to another place entirely. This isn’t so difficult, nothing here is set up yet with any permanence, there aren’t any commitments to undo. But there is a growing group of friends and plans were being made and things were happening. My mind had settled in a bit to an idea of how life would be. I bought a frying pan and a cheese grater.
It’s a situation where both outcomes are good.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Travel blogging used to, largely, be a collection of people who were good at travel and wanted to write about it. They used to be a resource for things missing from guidebooks about independent travel – tips on difficult logistics, write ups about mishaps (sometimes a bit politically incorrect from a time before we all were expected to know to be constantly conscious of an ever-changing number of factors), and current information on the ground about the state of costs and politics and options. The pictures were generally not enhanced and the web design wasn’t aspirational, if it existed at all.
Those blissful early basic HTML days.
Travel blogging today seems more like people who are good at things like SEO and copy writing. Reviewing writing about places I have recently been, there’s so much missing. While moving around the world, it was still hard to find solid information respecting more challenging logistics or anything that wasn’t a TOP TEN X TO DO IN Z!!
Maybe that’s not a bad thing.
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Immediately, the urge to travel more now is satisfied by just staying here.
At this point, having spent literally years in this one country, there is still so much that’s new every day. So many questions to ask, things to do or see or eat for the first time. Languages to explore, history to understand.
And when that’s enough? Just beyond these borders, new languages, customs, cultures, people, views.
Filed under: nomadisms
Recently, a lot of reflections on immigration; it comes up a lot in casual conversation. Not an expat, not quite an immigrant, usually it makes sense to just say “I’m foreign.” Then, the questions come. From where? Why? Will you go back?
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One of the subtle challenges to relocating is the disorientation.
People in different places have subtle social cues that facilitate daily interactions – the ability to pick up and mimic these cues appropriately predicts how quickly integration will happen. The world doesn’t change for you, you must change for it. The opposite of integration is isolation. Amplify exponentially with any language barriers or deep difference in cultural values.
It’s in things like the grocery shopping. Maybe everything is unfamiliar, maybe even the way the shopping is arranged is new with things that have to be learned. Simple things may be expensive or completely unavailable; ordinary things that are familiar become valuable just for familiarity, some scrap of something to move towards. Food, one of the most basic things that we learn about, that defines our cultures and our routines, may need to be radically relearned.
Things don’t work the same way. The power plugs, the phones, the process at the bank. The furnishings in a home, how holidays are celebrated. On holiday, this is a novelty, a cultural experience. After the holiday is over, it becomes real life. The changes can feel like being a child again, it becomes easy to criticize and generalize about the people who would put in place a system that doesn’t make sense. Except some of the things do make sense, it’s just you that hasn’t learned to make sense of them yet.
At this point, after over a decade of living in other cultures, living among large groups of immigrants in my own country, and watching a partner experience immigration, it’s clear that most people don’t fully adapt to long term relocation. They recreate aspects of the familiar to stay comfortable, they associate with others like them (or at least others having the same foreigner experience), they learn to exist in the in-between as best possible. As positive as they may be about the experience, if you go to their homes and into their lives you will find the same challenges over and over.
There are some outliers who integrate almost fully, who learn a completely new way of living, but they seem to be the exceptions. When people ask me if they should move to another country now, I no longer try and weigh the objectives pros and cons of each place they are discussing based on experience visiting and living in a number of places, I try and (likely unsuccessfully) explain the complicated experience of starting over.
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Do many people actually find their people? Or is finding my people a quest for those who are a bit strange anyways, a reflection of not fitting into the averages. Does everyone have experiences of group synergy at some point, a sense of knowing and being known within a group of people?
This sounds like a very bad quora question.
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Mi Gente [original version currently with more than two billion streams on youtube alone] is to be credited with rapidly advancing my basic Spanish in late 2017. Reggaeton: better than flashcards! (And more fun at parties)
Underthecurrent 