… you don’t belong anymore. As depressing as this sounds, I find it to be true. Whether it is 10 years or 8 or 11 makes no difference. Once you spend a long time abroad you will necessarily loose touch with what used to be home. I go home now and I find that people say funny things, use weird expressions and they do so with a straight face. It’s not that they are weirdos, it’s that I no longer know the slang – or even the idioms of my generation is using (let along the youngsters).
Customs change and as a visitor, even a regular one, that is hard to follow. I have been to Germany every year, sometimes twice, ever since I came to the US. I am not going for a week, being my own boss, I go for weeks – so, one would think – I should be up to date on trends. Not so, one sees what one expects to see, wants to see, which often is that things are still the same. For example, it took me years to revise two firmly held believes:
- all Germans love small cars and the majority will not be caught dead in an SUV. That was until last year when I noticed an amazing, or rather shocking number of over-sized vehicles negotiating the narrow roads of my home town. Nothing like California, of course, but certainly a lot more than before.
- German kids have a healthy attitude towards alcohol, after all they don’t have to wait until they are 21 to have a beer in public. This sounds good, doesn’t it? It also makes sense, at least applying my kind of logic and some kitchen psychology. Problem is, it ain’t true. Binge drinking among young, often very young teens (like 13) was a huge problem for many years. I think it has gotten somewhat better with intervention programs, etc. But it took me years to catch on to that one. Not that the German newspapers didn’t report about it. I just ignored this inconvenient fact that was so at odds with the picture I had created in my head.
Some believes still hold true, though. More about that another day.
Expats Returning - Or Not? 