London: Paradise for Fidgety People
For my entire childhood I lived in London, and for my entire childhood I didn’t want to. I remember travelling down the motorway on a rainy Saturday afternoon on the way back from my grandfather’s, looking out at the grey nothingness of my world, thinking that there must be something else. There must be places where the sun always shines, where people were friendly, where life was cheap, and the opportunities were endless.
This thought stayed with me for a long time. It weighed down on me constantly. Everything that for my friends was a defining cornerstone of their British identity was just another point on the list of things that made me feel that I didn’t belong. Sport, travel, music, food, TV shows… I always did everything differently to them. But they were lucky. There were 60 million people who all did exactly the same bizarre things as them. I was left being the odd one out.
From a very young age the solution was clear to me: I had to leave. I had to find somewhere I did belong. I just had to wait.
Waiting wasn’t too bad. I distracted myself. On weekends I’d jump on the Tube and get off at a station I’d never heard of, finding myself surrounded by different cultures, different smells, and new languages I’d never heard before. I’d drift down the street in a trance, soaking up the atmosphere, observing people’s faces, wondering what had brought them there. I’d spend the tube journeys back trying to guess which languages the people around me were speaking. I’d try to listen in to the things they were saying, or decipher the three letter codes on their fresh green luggage tags to work out where they’d come from.
Their foreignness was exotic. It made my own escape feel closer. Watching people flit in and out of my country with their gestures, their accents, and their expressions was exhilarating.
The only question was where to go.
The day eventually came in October 2011. I said goodbye to my friends and flew to Moscow on a one way ticket. But it was never a permanent move. It was an eight month stint to learn Russian. Although the winter snows were thick, merciless and magical, they soon melted and along came May, along with my return trip back to the UK.
But I had caught the bug. There were highs and lows in those eight months, but looking back, at least every day was an adventure in which I’d learn something new. So I spent the last two years of my degree planning my second, permanent move in detail.
I moved to Budapest, Hungary in July 2014. I’ll never forget that feeling. Hurtling down the motorway in a taxi packed full of my things to Gatwick airport, taking in the curve of every green hill as though I’d never see it again. Paying £16.50 for my last English meal at Giraffe, breathing a sigh of relief that life was about to become so much more affordable. Arriving in Hungary in the middle of the night, after a hellish easyJet flight surrounded by Brits planning their long weekends in the baths. Standing with my suitcases outside the arrivals hall at Ferihegy airport, looking out into the balmy darkness, and thinking ‘So what now?’
I spent just over a year in Budapest. By January I wanted to move on. Why hadn’t I moved to Berlin? Why didn’t I think of going to somewhere like Brazil or Tel Aviv? Why didn’t I go and live somewhere where the winters weren’t so harsh and the Autumns so dreary?
I made a million different plans, and prepared to leave Hungary. That summer a refugee camp had opened up at the end of my street, full of families fleeing civil war in Syria. As I packed my boxes and helped the new owner of my IKEA sofa bed move it down the six flights of stairs, I looked across at them, huddled together in roasting heat of an August heatwave, sick with fatigue and despair. They never chose to come to Hungary. They wanted to leave as soon as they could. Except they couldn’t.
I felt guilty that I’d ever felt trapped there. At any time I could’ve picked up my burgundy coloured passport and left. On the day that I eventually did that and headed back to the airport, they started marching across the Danube river towards the Austrian border.
In September 2015 I went to Spain. Valencia, to be precise. I longed for the sea air, I thirsted for that winter sunshine and outdoor living. That was the last hurrah for my dream of living abroad.
It turned out the Spain I thought I knew was just a mirage. It was a show put on for tourists that closes up in October and reopens in May, leaving months of empty cold and football in between. Local people never saw me as a potential friend. I was a tourist, a customer, a guiri.
At last, in the place that most resembled how I imagined life abroad staring out the car window on that grey afternoon years ago, I never felt more alone. I even wondered whether I should go back to Budapest. But when the Spring came round, I packed my newly acquired little Fiat 500 and set off on an epic two day journey across the Pyrenees, through the wine countries of France, and into a tiny tunnel that would transport me under the sea back onto the island I’d been so happy to leave just two years earlier — to England.
But London as an adult was different. It was a place where you automatically belong, precisely because nobody belongs. London is a blank canvas onto which people from all over the world project their hopes, their aspirations, their disappointments and their frustrations. How can you be the local in a place where everyone is a foreigner? How can you be the foreigner in a place where nobody else is from there, either?
I realised that urge to live abroad, to have different experiences and learn about the world would never go away. But I realised that ultimately, I am a fidgeter. There will always be a part of me that wants to be somewhere else, doing other things.
I stand the best chance of taming that urge in London. The whole world is here, at my door. I work in a company with 30+ different nationalities and I hear 15+ languages every single day. Each step I take down the street feels like a step into a different world, a different culture, and a different place. In London I often feel like I have travelled in and out of five or six different countries in one day.
London is good for people like me. London is good for fidgeters, and people who struggle to make up their mind. In London you don’t have to choose which country you want to live in. The whole world is here for you, in a way that — ironically — it isn’t in most other places round the world.
Sometimes it’s OK to feel that you don’t belong. You just have to make sure you live in a place where nobody else belongs, either.
Alex Rawlings is a polyglot language addict living in London, UK. In 2012 he was named Britain’s Most Multilingual Student in a nationwide competition by Harper Collins, after being tested for fluency in 11 languages. In 2017 he published his first book “How To Speak Any Language Fluently”. He organises the annual Polyglot Conference and works for Memrise.
