A Home At The End Of The World

It's funny how quickly you can fall into the trap of "home".

You know how it is when you travel: you decide to go somewhere cool & exciting, and when you get there you know you only have limited time to do all the cool & exciting things, so you try and do ALL the cool & exciting things that you can possibly fit into one trip, and you come home exhausted.

When you decide, as many well-off New Zealanders do between the ages of 18 and 30, to go and live somewhere overseas, you often have visions of all the cool & exciting things that that city/country/continent has to offer. Perhaps you have visited there before and thought, "This is pretty sweet, imagine living here!" Or you have talked to friends who've gushed about how they had SUCH a good time there and you'd love it too. Or perhaps you've read about somewhere different, and you've imagined your last trip to Whangamomona and how exotic that was, and you've thought about how much more exotic X overseas place is, and you've therefore assumed that the ratio of exoticness to interest will be directly proportional and so it will be entirely the most exotic and interesting place you've ever lived in your life.

The reality is that it's easy to think like a traveller when you make a decision to go and live elsewhere, but much harder to live like a traveller once you get there. Living a day-to-day working life has a lot of elements that are the same all over the world, no matter how exotic your location. Unless you work for yourself, or have some incredibly fabulous/flexible/varied job, you'll have to get up at the same time, 5 or 6 days a week, go to work (where you'll do the same job you were doing at home), come home again, cook dinner, and eventually go to bed. In your week you also have to fit in grocery shopping, cleaning and the various other chores that have to be done when you don't live a transient life.

That's not to say that you don't have time to do any of the fun things that your new city/country/continent has to offer, but picking up toilet paper from the supermarket or getting your brake pads replaced does not quite tally with the romantic visions of the traveller's life.

You also have to take into account the increased time spent communicating with friends and family back home; time which you may usually have spent with them if you were back home, but that time has to be dedicated to finding and making new friends. When you're travelling you tend to have a bunch of transient friends who you hang out with during the day and get drunk with during the night. While this does describe surprisingly accurately the relationship I have with my workmates, there are some subtle but significant differences, mainly to do with "being paid to actually achieve something during work hours" and "being able to function as a full human being before 12pm", facets which do not in any way describe the times I have spent travelling. When you actually live somewhere, you want to have the kinds of friends that you can have a wine with after a long day achieving things during work hours. So in a new place, you spend time getting to know those types of people. But the friends who you used to have a wine with after a long day of achieving something during work hours are also still interested in your life (mainly because they are still imagining your life as that of a traveller, and expect that you will have more interesting stories than the ones you had at home), and so you also spend time Skyping and emailing those people, so that when you eventually go home you don't have to start the friend-making process a third time. (Also because, generally speaking, your friends from back home are not the reason you left, and you quite like them.)

Ultimately, your new home is just like your old home, only with different friends, and with different things that you've been meaning to go and do but never quite get around to.

But I have to say that, on the occasional weekend that I decide to "get away", it's rather nice to think that three hours driving will get me to Belgium or Germany, rather than Dargaville. It's the small things.