Happy 4th of July! Outside America, and in winter, you don't miss it except as a memory.
Today's title will either be instantly recognizable, or totally meaningless.
If it's totally meaningless, this classic dialog is from the first episode of the New Zealand soap opera Shortland St. The dashing Dr. Ropata is upbraided for bringing his crazy foreign experiences and assumptions back to New Zealand.
There's a great deal of absurdity in moving back to your home town and complaining about the weather. Actually, it wasn't so much the weather as the weather forecast. I opined this morning that one of the great things about America was the relatively accurate hourly forecast that allows you to, for example, plan your run for the coolest, warmest or driest time of the day. My mother upbraided me for this comment by saying "you're not living in the middle of a large continent now, you're living on an island in the middle of an ocean where the weather is quite unpredictable." It's not the forecast, it's the weather itself.
If I was in America I would say that I "lucked out" this morning. If I was in New Zealand I wouldn't because the phrase means the opposite. The rain lifted 20 minutes in to the run, and I got the most glorious view of the city from Tinakori Hill (really, click the link, it's a beautiful city), a view that is relatively recent after a storm a couple of years ago necessitated the removal of many trees. That green house in the bottom right corner of the photo is the Prime Minister's house. What a quaint country. You can run up the hill behind the Prime Minister's house and look into her backyard.
It's both the truth and the politic thing to say that the unpredictable weather is all I can complain about after five days back in Wellington. The coffee is good. The trail running is excellent. I've almost adjusted to hearing New Zealand accents again. When I got off the plane in Auckland I thought "they speak funny here." I'm trying to keep the best parts of the Midwestern inflection on my New Zealand accent. The mid-Pacific accent is not nearly as common as the mid-Atlantic accent, but perhaps I'll make it famous in time.
One of the truisms of international moving is that moving home is never quite as easy as people naively imagine. Both place and person have changed. When I moved to Minneapolis I tried to tell myself that the inevitable minor frustrations of moving were not all about America, which is the easy way out for foreigners in America. Oh to be sure, there are some unique things about America including some things that are annoying, and others it's just fun to tease the locals about, but when you're moving you're not moving from country to country, you're moving from city to city, from neighborhood to neighborhood. You'd have the same frustrations moving in your home country, of not knowing the bus timetable or where the best stores or restaurants were, etc, etc ...
Moving home there is none little of that. Some things have changed, but mostly I know my way round—though I have forgotten the names of many streets I know where I am, I just couldn't describe it to the emergency services if I called them out of sight of a street sign—and I find myself more surprised that things have not changed. I have seen strangers on the bus that I saw on the same bus route when I was in high school.
The truism is that both place and person change. But both would have changed if I'd stayed here, the personal relationship to place evolving gradually over time. What they call the shock of re-entry is that all those changes appear to have taken place at once. So I ask when something occurred, and the locals look at me oddly, not remembering (for example) if that new building went up in 2002 or 2003. Not that it really matters. It's there now, and so am I.
Posted by eroberts at July 4, 2007 6:27 AM