As I type this, my neighbor is probably hiking around what used to be my little corner of the world, La Hulpe, Belgium.
A few weeks ago, she announced that she was going to get to tag along with her husband on a business trip to Brussels. She came over last week and I armed her with the following: guide books, lots of suggestions, a hand-drawn map of my little town, outlet adaptors and my old hairdryer. My European hairdryer is awesome, if I do say so myself.
She was planning to visit La Hulpe on Thursday, today. It's fitting that it's a rainy, Belgium-type day here in Minnesota.
If this had been last year at this time, my heart would physically be hurting right now. I'm so grateful that it's not. I'm glad she got to go. I'm glad I had the chance to tell her about some of my favorite places, and I hope she thinks they are just as special as I did.
If you are just finding my blog for the first time, the entries have become few and far between. But it still serves a purpose. If you are a new expat, please stop and look around. If you find yourself having to leave a country that you've grown to love, you will be especially interested in the last year of entries. This blog contains a lot of experience, that you might even be able to track in a real-time-style as you browse through. If you are feeling overwhelmed by your new country, or overwhelmed by having to leave your adopted country and repatriate to your own, maybe you will find solace in knowing that someone else has traveled that path before you. And maybe you will even find something in here that will help.
In the next post (which I will write when I am feeling nostalgic for days gone by) I will try to link to some of my favorite posts from over the years.
Thursday, May 7, 2015
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
Americans Abroad and Political Blunders
As an American living abroad, it is easy to find yourself living in your own cultural bubble. With television and radio broadcasting in a language foreign to your own, your world becomes quiet. It was one of the most difficult things to adapt to upon moving back. After years of quiet, I felt as if I was constantly bombarded with commercials and voices, telling me what to do, where to shop and what to buy. I had to remember how to tune it out again, once those voices were speaking my own language. I noticed it with the kids too. When we first arrived, they were fascinated with American commercials, often singing the name of the stores we passed, like: O, O, O, O'Reily's! Auto Parts!
However, whenever something big in the world-wide political arena happened, that safe cultural bubble would burst. And language barriers aside, as the only Americans walking around our little town, we would hear about it.
I once spoke with an American woman who had been living in Belgium a long time, they had arrived during the years of the Bush administration. She told me stories about school children, chanting anti-American sentiments and singling out her children once at an event. She described how those attitudes had shifted, and it was so much better for Americans once Obama came into office.
It's not something most Americans think about. Our borders are vast and our world is isolated. Most of us don't have to worry too much about what those in other countries think about us. It is assumed that people, for the most part, like Americans. To which I would now be forced to point out that "like" is probably too strong of a word. "Tolerate" might be better. In any event, while we were living overseas, the fact that our president was popular in the foreign countries where we lived, worked and traveled, helped.
But this week, I am thinking about my expat friends. America's thoughtless lack of a presence in Paris, will not go unnoticed. And my American friends living abroad will most certainly hear about it.
However, whenever something big in the world-wide political arena happened, that safe cultural bubble would burst. And language barriers aside, as the only Americans walking around our little town, we would hear about it.
I once spoke with an American woman who had been living in Belgium a long time, they had arrived during the years of the Bush administration. She told me stories about school children, chanting anti-American sentiments and singling out her children once at an event. She described how those attitudes had shifted, and it was so much better for Americans once Obama came into office.
It's not something most Americans think about. Our borders are vast and our world is isolated. Most of us don't have to worry too much about what those in other countries think about us. It is assumed that people, for the most part, like Americans. To which I would now be forced to point out that "like" is probably too strong of a word. "Tolerate" might be better. In any event, while we were living overseas, the fact that our president was popular in the foreign countries where we lived, worked and traveled, helped.
But this week, I am thinking about my expat friends. America's thoughtless lack of a presence in Paris, will not go unnoticed. And my American friends living abroad will most certainly hear about it.
Declaration.
I hereby declare my period of mourning for Belgium, over.
I went into the Christmas season with a melancholy heart. It was impossible not to remember, and thereby re-live, all of the stress we were under last year as we made our move from Belgium to Minnesota. I was dreading our one-year anniversary.
But instead, a really great thing happened on our one-year anniversary. My heart stopped hurting. The physical pain I felt in my heart whenever I thought about Belgium, went away. It was like a switch had been flipped. I'm not sure why. Except that with every day that passed, up to that point, if I thought back to what I was doing the year before, those memories always took me to Belgium. Once we hit the one-year anniversary that changed.
And I am so very glad. It's not easy to live under that black umbrella of mourning. Belgium will always be in my heart…but now I appreciate that it doesn't break in half every time I think about it.
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