The 3 most bizarre side effects of moving to a new country

1. The thin line between love and hate
At first, when you move to a new country, all you can think of is freedom, excitement, and curiosity. But when you’re finally all settled in and your love-at-first-sight-blindness starts fading away, things change. In no time you shift from some sort of honeymoon phase to the kind of bitterness only experienced by McDonald’s employees and the cashier at my local supermarket.

This is what professionals would call the culture shock. And it is not just about the big things, like being away from family and friends or being surrounded by people who seem to think their City is some kind of gift from the Gods to ameliorate the human species.
It’s also the smaller differences that really drive you crazy, such as waiters throwing your change at you in stead of giving it to you, citizens who never in their life experienced a thing called talking because all they ever do is shouting, and slowly (VERY slowly) progressing Virgins and Christs blocking your way to work (or worse, your way home after work).

And all of these things constantly remind you that you’re like some strange creature from another planet, who will never understand this “special culture”. (Whether you want to understand it or not, they don’t really ask for that, I mean, who wouldn’t?)

2. You start missing everything. Even the houses and the trees.
I like to think of myself as a rather flexible person. Someone who adapts to the weirdness of others. But during a few weeks I honestly thought I would have to go back home and leave Spain because of its horrible, awful, repulsive TV shows. I couldn’t imagine myself raising a family in a place were all there is to see are reality programs with naked people and the same movie on 9 different channels at 10 different times a week (dubbed in Spanish, of course). And all of a sudden I started becoming a huge fan of my grandmother’s favorite TV novel and even “Life as it is: your local vet” became unbelievably interesting to watch.

This is another side effect of that culture shock I mentioned earlier, you start mistaking “familiar” for “superior”. There are things you are so used to that they seem to play a fundamental role in the normal working of the world. You get exhausted from having to rebuild your framework from scratch over and over again and you desperately long for a well written series and would give money to hear your favorite actor’s voice.

3. You become a Patriot (yep).
I myself have never been a patriotic person. I used to consider myself European rather than Belgian. Well guess what? I was wrong. There is no such thing as “Europeans”. There is a whole ocean of differences between Belgium and Spain and very little common ground.

Before moving here, I didn’t really understand that feeling that you belong to a certain country and are proud of that. I mean, I knew there were some ways in which Belgium was (obviously) superior to Spain(education, politeness, organization, modesty — though it doesn’t seem that way right now- etc). But now there are a lot of dumb things I would suddenly defend to death (well, someone has to come up for the importance of french fries, the Red Devils, multilingualism, central heating and quality restaurants).

As time went by I started thinking of my country (and above all my city) as a sibling. You don’t have a ton in common and you go from loving to hating in a second, but if someone else makes a joke at their expense you will beat him up so hard he hopefully doesn’t make jokes again. Ever. And boy do they have some “jokes” about us. Each one of them feels like a personal insult and at first you don’t really now how to react, but by now I’ve learnt how to respond to this kind of comedians.

I do realize that during this whole writing I sound like a bitter Patriot who should ‘ve stayed home in stead of moving out and complaining, but of course that is not true. I do not regret moving and I still enjoy the sun, the cheap life, the beautiful language abd the slow pace (well, once in a while). It only became clear to me that I am 100% Belgian and will never be anything else.

P.S. I hereby leave you a marvelous article on what “Being Belgian” means: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/belgcul2.html