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I expect to feel right at home when I go back, but we’ll see.
Or you might feel reverse culture shock. 👀
Maybe. I think we’re going to go back sometime in the next couple of years, because we want to show our daughter around and introduce her to our friends.
You just reminded me of another potential problem: if I feel disconnected from the old water, it would def affect the next generation, I see so many second-generation immigrants who already don't even speak their grandma's language. 🫠
Fortunate for us that the Anglosphere is so enormous. We’re far from home but still speaking the same language.
I know a few parents who are trying to raise their kids bilingual. It definitely looks like an uphill battle.
When I lived in Egypt in an expat zone, my neighbors were a Dutch/Italian couple. Their kids spoke 4 languages (Arabic (local), English (what parents speak), Dutch (mom), Italian (dad)) and according to those for those that could judge their language that I couldn't, they were fluent in all 4.
Not all kids can do that though.
I was trilingual by the age of 10.
My brother (at around 7), on the other hand, struggled a lot with it and would mix words from each language into a sentence without realizing it.
At some point, his teacher asked my parents to agree on using one language at home and reserve the use of others (and then only those exclusively) to specific events or locations.
They never managed to uphold the discipline required for that, so we stuck to one language from there on out.
hahha I do that from time to time.
Also, some words are quite difficult or almost impossible to translate into other languages.
Love to see kids like this! it would be really interesting to see how they feel about themselves, like, do they feel more Arab or more Dutch/Italian.
Remembering how it went there back then, they will probably always feel a bit outsider. There's a big religious barrier and from what I hear it only got broader. However, I traveled a lot in my teens due to parents' work myself and I most often just don't feel the tribal roots thing that much; I expect that to be similar for them and I expect them to travel. They're coming of age now, so it'd be interesting to find out what's what.
I know it’s possible, if the parents are really committed to the effort and/or there’s a lot of exposure to the languages being spoken natively.
It’s something that has to be whole-assed though.
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This is real and can take on unexpected forms.
When I returned to my birth country after growing up about 3/4 of the formative parts of my years in another country, I felt immediately right at home.
Yet still, my body showed very strong symptoms of culture shock. I hadn't connected the issues to that until I had to finally see a doctor about the problems. He then connected it to return culture shock amplifying an issue I had from an older injury (sustained and supposedly cured while still in the foreign country.)
He then connected it to return culture shock amplifying an issue I had from an older injury (sustained and supposedly cured while still in the foreign country.)
This is really interesting! I guess it's because each country has its own unique energy, soil, and water, which then affects the food we eat and slowly changes our bodies?
Nah, the injury was a very mundane, mechanical one. A knee injury sustained playing soccer.
The damaged ligaments had healed (have been for 2 years), but my nervous system hadn't fully understood that yet.
Add the subconscious stress from return/reverse culture shock to that, and my lower back got so stiff and painful, I was unable to get up from bed after sleeping. (And that as a mid-20's, active guy.)
It got so bad, I had to roll over on my stomach and push myself up like a plank to get out of bed. An hour or so later, the issues were mostly gone and only minor pain in my lower back remained.
Bizarre combination of issues there but, ultimately, the stress made the benign nerve signal path issues show up in that stiffness and pain. It was fixed in under two weeks.
I like the in-between.
Very definitely Nordic (and, speaking to Americans, Europoorean!), but neither Swedish nor Icelandic. It's nice to be in both, selectively revealing yourself to the world style.
selectively revealing yourself to the world style
👀 food for thought, how about when you towards the Nordic people?
aaaah yes, just over here routinely quoting Hughes 1:4. Beautiful
Hughes
me looking at who/what's Hughes, and still no idea.🤔
Early cypherpunk, important privacy guy fr the 1990s
Eric Hughes?
Yes!
sorry, I'm not following? When I what towards the Nordic peeps...?
so you are saying you are like Nordic when speaking to Americans, Europoorean, but how about the other ways around?
do I feel American when I speak to Nordics?
well, sort of: I understand/appreciate America in a way most Nordics don't. Also: they've usually never been, and they get their impression of what America is like from state TV/propaganda news so their knowledge is, uh, warped.
I like your approach, need to think more about it.
I haven’t been back to my homeland in over a decade. I expect to feel right at home when I go back, but we’ll see. I don’t think I’ve fully acclimated to where I moved to.