One of my work colleagues recently asked me what I do on the weekends. I kind of laughed and said I mostly sleep and try to read and write a little, take the dog to the park, and eat good food. Maybe, if we are truly inspired, we go out to see a movie in a theatre. That’s pretty much it.

She looked at me with what I took to be an
expression of, “You’re kidding, right?”

Nope, not kidding. I dream of quiet weekends where the phone never rings and I don’t have to speak to or hear anyone outside of the walls of my tiny little abode in the country. Oh, wait, that’s right, I live in the middle of a huge apartment complex in Sydney’s Inner West with a major thoroughfare outside my front door and noisy children playing in the courtyard all day, every day. Silly me.

The other part of the equation, of course, is where I live. I find that when you live in a “Tourist Destination City,” your friends expect you to be on some kind of a Grand Adventure, all of the time. Ha!

If I had a dollar for every person who mentioned
what a great adventure we were embarking on
when we moved here...Nope, forget it, not even worth it.

Just do me a favor, if you ever see me in person on one of my trips back to the USA, do not utter that statement in my presence, my head might literally explode. And yes, I do know what literally means.

After almost five years, my days of being a tourist in my adopted home country are pretty much behind me. I have acquaintances who have managed to keep going with the “tourist abroad” thing and let me tell you, I would throw myself in front of a commuter train if I had to try to keep up with them. No, I do not want to climb the Harbour Bridge. Nor do I want to do a death march in the bush in 90% humidity. You can keep your Groupon, Red Balloon, or whatever the hell the latest flavor of the month is in group activities. And, “H-e-” to the double “l” no, I am not going camping, even if it’s called “glamping.”

Similarly, going into Sydney’s CBD — that’s shorthand for the “Central Business District” — holds no appeal for me on the weekend after working downtown for nearly three years. Especially not after what happened in Martin Place last December and being in lockdown in an adjacent building for an entire day.

Finally, do not get me started on the traffic on the weekends, which is abysmal. Driving out to the beaches or to one of the bigger parks in town is something I normally only undertake for a special event, like our Dachshunds in the Park monthly gatherings, and even then I am not doing the driving. I hate driving in Sydney, it’s just too stressful for me. Maybe someday I will get over that, but it has not happened yet (much to my husband’s annoyance).

It’s hard to explain to someone who has never picked up their life and their family and moved to another country, that after a few years, you are just doing the same things in a different place. I still work in high tech and spend my weekdays looking at code and trying to make sense of things, some of which are quite hard to understand. I still work with engineers, and no matter that many of them are Australian now, engineers are engineers the world over.

I mean, don’t get me wrong:

There are plenty of things that are different.

Like the fact that everything in Sydney is about a billion times (on average) more expensive and the salaries are less (what??!!), so my lifestyle is not exactly the same. You learn to do without a whole lot of things, most of which you never needed in the first place, and make compromises.

On the plus side, I take public transportation almost everywhere and feel safer than I have in years. I love the sunshine and free government health care that we are entitled to as Permanent Residents. My son is getting an interesting and varied education. He is also learning to see the world through a different, non-American perspective, which is invaluable.

Of course we are and always will be Americans, and there is much I miss about back “home,” but there is a lot to like about the experience of living abroad. It forces you to reevaluate your values in unexpected and surprising ways. I don’t think you can ever go back to wherever it is that you came from and have it be the same. At least that has not been my experience. Living abroad changes you. Period. You cannot put the genie back into the bottle once she’s out, either.

So, getting back to the original impetus for this post. What I really do on the weekends is,

As little as humanly possible.

Other than hanging out with my two favorite people in the world, I try to find some time for “me” and quietly reflect on my life, read, and write. That’s really the long and the short of it. I am not writing with some big goal in mind, in fact I don’t even know who reads this stuff most of the time. I am someone who writes because I feel I have to. I have stories rattling around in my head that are dying to get out. I have tried to push them back down for too long and they are not going to stay down any longer. I took a week off writing after my first batch of posts here because I had to deal with some heavy, unpleasant real world stuff… Life happens, it continues to happen, but I am back now. It was a hard week, there have been lots of hard weeks, but you just pick up and carry on.

Writing is easy.
You just sit down at the typewriter,
open a vein,
and bleed it out drop by drop.
— Walter “Red” Smith