Today, I’ve watched the weather outside my window change from rainy to sunny to cloudy to rainy to sunny at least twice over. I live in Norwich, England where the weather is stereotypically grey most of the year, but I grew up in a city that gets an average of 300 days of sunshine every year. A self-professed heliophile (sun-lover, part-reptile, whatever you want to call it), this last winter was a tough one for me. And that’s why I felt like a big shift had happened once this summer’s heatwave ended here and I realized I was happy to see the gray, rainy days again. I wonder what had changed. And I realized it was me. Living abroad has changed me.
Moving to the UK was a huge decision for me. I studied abroad here in 2012, at the same university where I’m currently finishing my masters. And because I spent six months in England, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of the cultural and lifestyle differences. After all, I’d studied at an English university for a semester and had plenty of English friends and an English boyfriend. I’d started looking right-left-right when I crossed the road and knew how to use the Post Office. So it wasn’t out and out culture shock when I arrived in England in the fall of 2016, having quit my job and sold my possessions to join my then long-distance boyfriend and start my masters. From using public transportation to understanding the subtle cues of when it’s appropriate to strike up a conversation with a stranger, things were just new or different.
I’m going to be blunt. Moving abroad will break your routine into little pieces, stomp on those pieces, and then sweep them into the garbage. I figured things would change when I packed my life into two suitcases and cat-carriers and moved to the United Kingdom. After all, I was moving in with someone — a boyfriend, no less — for the first time since my freshman year of college. I was going back to school for my Masters. For the first time in years, I was unemployed. It would turn out that one of the things I had the most worries about (adjusting to living with my long-distance boyfriend) would be by and far the least troublesome aspect of moving.
The Day-to-Day
Before I moved to the UK, I thought I did a fair amount of walking. I was wrong. During the first two weeks, I thought my calves were going to burst and my feet would fall off more than once. Between moving into a new place and getting all of my “I’ve just moved here stuff” taken care of, we had a lot of errands to run. Lucky me, we also live at the top of a big hill about a mile outside of town. It’s definitely changed shopping habits from impulsive, weekly Target hauls to making lists and planning shopping trips with my boyfriend or picking up things when I happen to be in town, and even then only if it fits in whatever bag I happen to be carrying. I might also be in the best cardiovascular shape of my life thus far.
Since we don’t have a car, I usually get around by bus or train. New Yorkers, for instance, will already know this but for the uninitiated relying on public transport means a couple of things. 1) Even the smallest trips involve more planning and 2) You’ll need to learn to occupy yourself when you’re traveling somewhere. I’ve definitely become less of a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants type of person because of this (and also because it’s hard to have random adventures when everything is closed by 6 pm on a weekday — another UK/European cultural difference). But I’ve also become a little more organized and started to get into audiobooks and podcasts. It’s also a great excuse to buy a Kindle, which I definitely have or an iPad, which I also have. In case you were wondering, I have zero regrets about it.
Apart from all of the subtle cultural nuances of social interaction in the UK (that’s a whole other essay in and of itself), there are some very practical aspects of living my life I had to relearn. As an American, there’s something very innately unsettling about not being able to drive myself somewhere if I need. I decided sometime last year that since it looked like I would be potentially be staying in the UK long-term, I should get my UK license. Most cars in the UK are stick or manual transmissions. Well, I thought, that’s what I learned on. Should be no problem, right?
Quick tip for anyone considering this course of action: before you commit yourself to a driving instructor with a manual car, remember that the gear shift is on the other side and if you are right handed, you will have to learn to change gears using your left while driving on the other side of the road in a country that doesn’t use a grid system. Good luck.
Navigating Systems
Traveling is just one of those systems you don’t think about navigating every day until you move to another country. There are so many more. Making a doctor’s appointment and applying for a job are things most people (hopefully) learn to do by their early twenties. Registering with a doctor, opening a bank account, and creating a CV to find a job are somehow just different enough from the US to the UK to be potentially confusing and frustrating.
I’m lucky enough to (well, mostly) already speak the language, but writing out a CV (resume for us Americans) or a research paper or filling out a form meant doing it with British English spellings and punctuation. Think color vs. colour and leaving the “.” off of the end of personal titles. It’s all just different enough to be entirely forgettable and potentially confusing. At this point, my written and spoken English has become a strange hodge-podge of the two dialects. The upside? My boyfriend and I stopped having to “translate” words or phrases for each other, a near-constant when we began dating.
After two and a half years of living together, Our household dialect has morphed into something strangely mid-Atlantic. My accent has changed since moving here, too. Or at least it changes while I’m here. I find that most of the time I enunciate better so that people can understand me which makes my regional accent less distinguishable and then people assume I’m Canadian. Occasionally — and embarrassingly — when I’m speaking to a British person, an English pronunciation will slip out, usually when I’m repeating a word they’ve used. I can’t tell if they’ve never noticed, or they’re just too polite to say anything!
The Direction of Home
Something that I’ve always felt very strongly about is how much I love and appreciate my home. I’m from a medium sized metropolitan area and I’ve always loved the hot Arizona weather and the hustle and bustle. I love that if you want, there’s nature just about ten miles from wherever you are. There’s incredible places to eat and beautiful, and sometimes bizarre, scenery. I don’t know if anyone was more surprised than me when I felt the overwhelming urge to leave it.
But here I am, having just applied to extend my visa for another two and a half years. I still love and appreciate all of those things about Arizona. There are some things I think I will always actively look forward to between trips (like straight, wide roads and good Sonoran food). But there are some things that I return to that always seem to cause me a jolt of reverse culture shock (how friendly, or conversely, aggressive Americans can be or how much time I spend in the car every time I visit home).
When I first left, it created a lot of stress for me to feel like I was leaving things and people behind, but I haven’t really. It’s more of a matter of frequency than anything. Some things I’ve discovered I can’t live without, so I do my best to get/make them here without breaking the bank (refried beans, decent flour tortillas, calls and texts from home). It was surprising how quickly (or sometimes slowly) I found new things in my new home. New friends, new jobs, new favorite cafes, and new comfort foods. I sometimes think I was hesitant to let those new things in, fearing they might replace the old ones. In the last two and a half years, I’ve discovered that if you’re mindful about it, you don’t push old things out, you just make room for the new things.
Having spent all but three years of my life up to then in one state, the word “home” had always been a catch-all: a house, a city, a feeling, a collection of objects and smells and tastes. After moving, “home” became a point of comparison, for the weather, the culture. It was also an ineffable thing, used to describe the unsettled feeling that moving to a new country brought on. I didn’t feel at home in this smaller city. The house we moved into didn’t feel like our home at the time.
More than two years later, “home” has taken on a strange double-meaning for me. Now, I manage to use it to refer concurrently to the city where I grew up and the house where I live now. And although I’d like a home with more space and many of the job opportunities that excite me are based in London, I’m loath to live anywhere but here now. Now, whenever I go back home to Arizona, I find myself telling my friends about this café or that new bookshop “back home” in Norwich. It snuck up on me. Norwich had gotten under my skin and I’m content to let it stay there.
Perhaps the biggest change for me is that I’ve learned that your home is where you make it, and having two isn’t half-bad.
