I get homesick if i go anywhere too. Used to work away from home all the time, a lot of it in Ireland, and as much as i liked it, it wasnt home and Scotland...for all its pitfalls
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I get homesick if i go anywhere too. Used to work away from home all the time, a lot of it in Ireland, and as much as i liked it, it wasnt home and Scotland...for all its pitfalls
Yes, summers were months on end of 'fantastic' weather.
-- that was OK, although we did miss the day to day variety you get in the UK.
The seasons were different, too.
Summer suddenly stopped and there was about 2 weeks of pretty much continuous rain. After which it was totally autumn. No slow changes, just wham, and there it was. Kinda strange.
Food.
We lived Spanish style from Spanish shops and supermarkets. The wife really loved it, she eats pretty much anything and is very adventurous. You can get some really strange parts of animals in Spanish shops! :eek: Fruit and veg choices were superb. Interestingly different fish, too.
Towns on the coast (45 minutes away) had Chinese restaurants which were very similar to those in the UK.
No Indian, though.
But the very first evening we were back in the UK I got sent out to get fish & chips! :lol: Not available in our part of Spain - and not usually a mainstay of our UK diet!
TV - well, I don't watch it in Spain or in the UK. The wife does a bit, and we had satellite TV installed there, a zillion channels including a lot of English language. That seemed to be OK.
Looking at it logically, I guess our yearning to get 'back home' was a whole bundle of stuff that can be rationalised logically, including a kind of risk assessment .... what if something went badly wrong? Car accident, health ... who knows what. So much easier to deal with in your home culture (and language). I guess, looking back, I was getting increasingly uneasy about that as time went by. Just a kind of "what if?".
I nipped into Tesco yesterday. I was pining for home before I got halfway round. :)
My oldest mate from school moved to Brisbane about six or seven years ago with his partner of twenty years.
They were there about four and a half years and one day they were just talking about stuff and the UK came up and all of a sudden they both realised neither of them was happy and they were only there because they thought the other one loved it.
Turned out, the first couple of years were good because of the novelty but once that wore off they were homesick.
They've been back two years now and have never been happier :)
(As am I because my Subbuteo partner is back in town !)
Having lived in the Caribbean for two years I can relate to that - the annual hurricane season was like being in a bowling alley. Having said that you can adjust, but you have to reconcile the fact that 'stuff' is not important and you can't get too attached to it, as one day it might/probably all be gone.
I saw close friends lose everything in Ivan, one mate had recently bought a house, given it a complete makeover and shipped all new furniture over from Canada. After the storm when his family left the hurricane shelter, the roof, doors and all the windows were gone - not a single possession was left inside and there was sand 3 feet high throughout the entire house. That's what can happen if you choose to live in paradise!
He's still there though, comes from Bolton.
Lol... It's just what you're used to, and holidaying somewhere is very different from living there. We've often toyed with the idea of moving abroad, to France or Italy, but when it came down to it, decided against it.
It's still a future possibility, and one way of getting round the 'homesick' thing would be to move to rural Northern France (as we like it out in the sticks), where if necessary, we'd be within a day's ferry trip from the UK, so in effect could get our 'UK hit' that way, whilst enjoying the benefits of a French lifestyle.
It's one to ponder... We'll see what the future brings! :cool:
Marco.
Yup, I had left a few months before, not due to storms though. Ivan was a monster
http://ecology.md/uploads/files_elfi.../12/klimat.jpg
My gripe was not about fish and chips, which can be very good and also a nutritional meal, but the imposition of a set of cultural(?) norms into another culture, often deriding the indigenous one.
The roots of this are not IMO in any way related to a supposed superiority of the imposed one, but in the psychology of the insecurity of being. (Ontological Security).
We all tend to belong to 'reference groups', and I suppose a deep audio and music interest places me in that one, but I don't deride film enthusiasts or denigrate their pursuit.
I do remember well being in a hotel with my ex in Spain, and piss coming over the balcony from some drunken young lads on the floor above, and also drunken slumped British with their heads resting in their own sick on tables outside drinking houses.
There is much to love about Britain, it has a great deal of beauty, and a wonderfully rich and barbaric history, and there is no doubt that I am deeply bonded with it.
It is also true that so many countries have their own beauty resulting from their terrain and climate, with their own architecture and vegetation, and lighting changes show each uniqueness.
Listen to Variations on a Theme From Thomas Tallis, and look at the beautiful English countryside, and not be moved.