Worldly Chatter

I was on the telephone with my mother the other day as I usually call her once a week. She tells me she still gets people going on about how I live in Europe. It’s so exotic and exciting! Is she touring Europe while she lives there? She also gets asked a lot if I am coming home and she has to inform them that Europe is home now. I would love to be there when people I knew find my mother and ask her about me and she tells them. The stories she tells me and I miss the live version! It’s like telling how the Red Sox won the World Series; it just isn’t the same if you didn’t watch it. When we spoke she told me about bumping into my old youth group leaders when I was thirteen and fourteen. It made me giggle on how she replayed the interaction and how they took it. Is it really that exotic to live in Europe to the average American? Though I have to remember that most of my family and friends would only leave Long Island for a vacation, the concept of living elsewhere seems to be a stretch of the imagination. Why move when you are happy or comfortable right where you are? I can understand that. So both my mother and I get the ‘why did you do that?’ ‘Did she really move for good?’

Back in 05 when I told my family that I wanted to move to the Netherlands I had one member tell me I would hate it. That life on the other side of the pond was different and I wouldn’t understand it or be able to adjust to it. Well, my anxieties about the culture shock just went up ten notches because of that. I had a lot of reactions from ‘wow isn’t that the country that has wooden shoes and everyone lives in windmills’ to I would hate it to my personal favorite. ‘Now I have a good reason to go to Europe!’ Though I still get what’s it like? Do you like it and are really happy and the one I get the most is still, I can’t believe you did that!

I don’t think it’s all that exotic. In fact it can be quite similar to my life in America. Bills need to be paid, gas is overpriced and life is a two income household. What is so different about that? What is so exotic about the grocery store, shopping for clothes going on vacation? According to my family it isn’t just shopping. It’s shopping in Europe! It’s driving to Germany like driving to Jersey but to them it’s Germany!

Don’t get me wrong there are a lot of things that are beautiful, exotic and breathtaking when in Europe that you don’t see in America. Yet even my day to day activity is fascinating to some because it’s not America. The food, fashion and automobiles are different so therefore it’s amazing and exotic. Maybe it’s me because I eat the food everyday and wear the clothes and I lost that whoa feeling that I had when I first landed. What do you think?

Netherlands, living abroad, expats