Little Lives: Input on Moving Abroad
It was dinner time and I sat in a little yellow kitchen with plates of pasta, green salad, and the thrilling realization that home was 5 thousand miles out of reach. There wasn't much to hear, except for the odd thudding of tires over the cobblestone street below, thwacks from the unusual neighbor in the apartment above and the cacophony of dinner sounds, chewing, sipping, scrapping, slurping, from us and all the apartments with their kitchen windows open to the street.
My roommate, this petite old Swiss-French woman we called Madame, and myself ate our dinners in near silence. Our Madame was housing us for the year in a quaint lakeside town on the western border of Switzerland. She was a good cook, with a continuous rotation of dinners that often swam in butter or some kind of heavy sauce. She was also elegant in that Swiss European way. She cut hair for a living one town over, had kids and grandkids, and only spoke French. A language barrier we never managed to overcome as my roommate and I, both from the west coast of Canada, never learned to speak.
Over the course of our mute dinner, we sat immersed in the sounds of our own chewing. Except for our Madame. She was still, like a figure in a church’s stained glass window with tears silently rolling down her cheeks. It was at that moment I wanted nothing more than for French and English to be one.
Through broken languages, distinct facial expressions and some google translate, she confided in us that her daughter-in-law's father had been diagnosed with cancer. We tried our best to understand, but from the laws of linguistic limitations, it was hard to fully grasp the reality she was facing. She retired to her room for the rest of the evening.
That night lying in bed, I thought about this journey I had embarked on. Not only was I getting the experience of living in a European country for a year, but I was also becoming immersed in another person's life. A life I had no idea existed two months earlier.
Moving to a foreign country can do that. Living abroad morphs you into someone beyond yourself, something bigger and better than you. The little lives you encounter, so distinctly different, yet dramatically similar to your own, conceive a new reality.
Slowly the mundane things you once undervalued become much more alluring and thought-provoking. The mundanity of the way you drink your coffee or greet a stranger grows into a new phenomenon within itself. The once insignificant moments making up your existence become novelties and are no longer entirely the same. Something has shifted underneath you.
For me, even brushing my teeth looking down at cobblestone streets and hearing shards of conversations in a language I could not understand, was far less mundane for me than it was to brush my teeth in Canada where it's all I had known. Brushing your teeth is as every day as it can get, yet doing it in a different country makes it more interesting, even in the slightest of ways. The transformation of living abroad, no matter the degree of difference from your life before, makes moments and actions appear to hold more weight. Of course eventually, once you’ve been away for a significant amount of time you’ll begin to amalgamate. But in those first honeymoon years, this notion holds true, at least it did for me.
Switzerland is very much like Canada. Yet, like every country out there, there's something different from the next. At first, when I was trying to navigate this new strain of living, things often appeared wrong instead of right, simply because that wasn't how we did it in Canada. Over time, however, not only did I learn to understand why things were such ways, I learned to appreciate the people who epitomized those customs. From that, I began to appreciate their ways of life, no matter how estranged they were from my own.
After being in Switzerland long enough the things I once perceived as wrong became right. It's important to remember that things and customs function the way they do because people exhibit and uphold them. Once you understand how the people function, you can better understand the country. It's their way of life and that filters into everything that makes the place what it is.
It's important when living abroad to understand and recognize that. If you don't accept the people you won't accept the culture and consequently, neither will accept you. A country or city different from your own will eat you up and spit you out if you are not willing to learn and be open minded.
The people you come across on your travels no matter if you go 10 miles or 5 thousand miles are just like you. They have red blood and beating hearts. They have lungs that expand and retract. If you see them as simply human, the way they should be seen, their ways of life will become yours while you inhabit their space.
When Madam confided in us I felt the most connected than I had before during my travels. This new and exciting carnival of a different culture to explore became real life. As poet William Blake once said, “the man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”
To gain the full experience of moving abroad you must allow yourself to accept the things unknown to you. You should be willing to become immersed in the culture, not act as a tourist, that's where the value of living abroad dwells. If you're unwilling you'll get nothing in the long term from your experience, no new views of yourself and the world — except maybe reptiles of the mind.