A Look Back

The last days I´ve spent a lot of time on finding old pictures and getting them all together in this 4 minute video. This is going to be my last post on this blog, so enjoy the video, illustrating my life in Oman. A picture is worth a thousand words, isn´t it?

What happens to you when moving to a foreign country?

All over the world, expatriates are huddled together in restaurants and bars talking about their homeland and the experience of leaving. All these people that are gathered usually do not come from one country, they represent multiple. France, Sweden, the US, Norway, India, Denmark, Canada, Australia etc. The warm, but nostalgic chat goes on and on about life in this new country, and what a beautiful life they are all living. Moreover, that is far from the only subject they are talking about.

Something else that lingers between all of them is fear. First, fear of fitting in, of finding new friends. Fear of the unknown, a new culture, a new language, a new country. At some point, this fear ebbs out, but then another fear hits you. The fear of “What am I missing?” Another birthday party, family gathering, your niece growing up, people getting married. You realize that life goes on without you. People change, they have become different people, and so have you.

There is no denying that this change takes place. Living in another country will fundamentally change you and widen your mental horizon. You take on qualities from the people around you, good and bad, and as a result, your mannerisms, way of talking and thinking change. What is important is to remember that there is nothing wrong with that. When deciding to move, you also decide, consciously or not, to evolve and to change.

Many people move for exactly the reason of change, however, some move because they are sick of the place they are currently living in. They are fatigued of doing the same things every single day, the same people, the same restaurants where they have eaten everything on the menu. Moving to a foreign country brings along a sense of freedom. You get to escape from yourself in a way, and start all over somewhere new.

Suddenly, walking streets up and down gives a feeling of delight. Even going to the grocery store is tremendously thrilling, where you have to communicate in another language, as well as finding and trying new food. The most exhilarating thing might be meeting amazing people from different parts of the world, and before you know it, you have friends from every single continent, whom you walk on the beach with, eat lunch or celebrate New Year’s Eve with. It is almost like being a child again. You have to start everything all over, get to know new places, languages, as well as people.

Then again, there is the fear of missing out that hits you. You realize that life goes completely on without you. Most expats know one person who has lived abroad for 20 years, and cannot even imagine moving back home. Because what once was home, is not home anymore. It might still be their nationality (at least according to the passport), but not home. Life at that place has changed too much. Their new country has taken the place as their new home, and for every day that passes, you realize that you gradually become this person yourself.

It is then you understand that you will always be an expat, no matter where you are living. You will never be one person again. You will always be two distinct people, constantly longing for the other country. No matter where you live on this Earth, you will permanently miss the people you love, you will miss the nature, the culture, the language, and you will miss almost everything about the country you are not currently living in. To get on that plane has a vast price; however, I am never going to regret taking that step. 

Arabic

Arabic is the first-language of approximately 237,000,000 people worldwide. This makes Arabic the 5th most widely spoken language in the world. It is a beautiful language that I would love to learn someday, perhaps after high school. It would be amazing to be able to talk Arabic when visiting Oman and other Arab countries, and maybe the language will be quite useful in my future jobs, who knows? Anyway, as of today I´ll have to do with the basic phrases I´ve learned. The following words and phrases are in fact very useful to know when visiting an Arab country. You´ll be surprised how even a grumpy security guard ends up smiling and wishing you "good morning", simpy because you said hello in Arabic instead of saying it in English.

Greetings
As-salaam alaykum: Peace be with you (greeting)
Wa alaykum as-salaam: And peace be with you (reply)
Sabah al khair: Good morning
Sabah al noor: Good morning (response)
Misa al kayr: Good evening
Misa ah noor: good evening (response)
Marhaba: Hello
Ma´salamah: Goodbye

Kayf halek?: How are you? (to a man)
Kayf halik?: How are you? (to a woman)
Al hamdu lillah, bikhair: Fine, thanks be to God
Zain: Good

Useful words/phrases
Shu ismak?: What is your name? (to a man)
Shu ismik?: What is your name? (to a woman)
Ismi..: My name is...
Naam: Yes
La: No
Shukran: Thank you
Ahhlan wa sahlan: Welcome
Min fadlak: Please
Mafee mooskalah: No problem
Afwan: Excuse me
Yillah: Let´s go! (When dune bashing most drivers will make you shout "yillah!")

Insha´llah: God willing or at such time as God desires (This word is used as an excuse for everything)

General
Wayn: Where is
Hammam: Bathroom
Funduq: Hotel
Teksi: Taxi
Mushtashfa: Hospital
Souq: Market
Telefon: Telephone

Ma bihki arabi: I don´t speak Arabic

Arabic is a beautiful and complex language. It is difficult to learn (especially considering the fact that the phrases change based on gender), however, as mentioned, knowing a few phrases is useful when visiting Oman or another Arab country. I don´t know if I´ll ever learn to write and read Arabic, but I really want to learn how to speak the language.

Can you guess what is written at the top of the post?

A Letter To My Norwegian Grade 7 Class

Today, I decided to share a letter that I wrote to my old class back in Norway while living in Muscat, right before their Christmas break. It is a short letter, sharing a few words and pictures about what I had done the last weeks. Note, this was written in grade 7, and was originally written in Norwegian. However, I´ve translated it into English, the way I would have written it back then. 

"Hi!

We just started Winter Break here in Oman. At the moment, we are making Christmas cookies. We have bought a plastic tree and decorated it, to get a tiny feeling of it actually being Christmas. 

During the last three days of school we had Minicourses. We were placed in four different “classes”, where we did different activities throughout the day. One of mine was “Wadi hikes”. 
(Left picture: one of the peaks we climbed. Right picture: one of the Wadis.)

(Here you have to keep your balance. On the left is a hot spring, while the wadi is a couple meters below on the right side.)

I participated in Wild Wadi Games, Just Bead It and Basic Arabic as well.

I have been watching all of the European Handball Championship games online. Doing so makes it feel a bit more like Christmas, especially winning!!

We have celebrated the national day and the Sultan´s anniversary. There has been held many parades because of this. We were able to get tickets for the children parade. It was amazing.

The last week of school we had a concert.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!!"

There´s still a couple months untill Christmas, moreover; I wish you a great weekend! :)

Favorite Expat Quotes

Once in a while I find quotes about living abroad and discover that some suits my feelings or thoughts about the subject right at that moment or just in general. Some bring joy, others sadness, and some are simply inspirational. Anyway, I have gathered some of my favorite expat quotes below.

“The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.” - Italo Calvin

“It was when I realized I had a new nationality: I was in exile. I am an adulterous resident: when I am in one city, I am dreaming of the other. I am an exile; citizen of the country of longing.” – Suketu Mehta

“It is a bitter-sweet thing, knowing two cultures. Once you leave your birthplace nothing is ever the same.” – Sarah Turnbull

“The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped. – Adam Gopnik

“Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.” – Jodi Picoult

“Life might be difficult for a while, but I would tough it out because living in a foreign country is one of those things everyone should try at least once. My understanding was that it completed a person, sanding down the rough provincial edges and transforming you into a citizen of the world.” – David Sedaris

“Splendid to arrive alone in a foreign country and feel the assault of difference. Here they are all along, busy with living; they don´t talk or look like me. The rhythm of their day is entirely different; I am a foreign.” – Frances Mayes

”I’m homesick all the time,” she said, still not looking at him “I just don’t know where home is. There’s this promise of happiness out there. I know it. I even feel it sometimes. But it’s like chasing the moon – just when I think I have it, it disappears into the horizon. I grieve and try to move on, but then the damn thing comes back the next night, giving me hope of catching it all over again.” – Sarah Addison Allen

“Almost every truly creative being feels alienated and expatriated in his own country.” – Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“What makes expat life so addictive is that every boring or mundane activity you experience at home is, when you move to a foreign country, suddenly transformed into an exciting adventure. When abroad, boredom, routine and ‘normal’ cease to exist. And all that’s left is the thrill and challenge of uncertainty. Try finding peanut butter in a Japanese grocery store or explaining in broken Spanish to the Guatemalan pharmacy that you new cough drops and you´ll understand. When abroad, boredom, routine and `normal` cease to exist. And all that´s left is the thrill and challenge and uncertainty.” – Reannon Muth

“The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” – Saint Augustine

If there is one thing making me happy, sad and nostalgic at once it is these quotes. I want to go back, while at the same time skip a couple years to when I can discover the world on my own. At this moment, I even miss sitting in cramped airplane seats. I guess, that´s when you know you got to go somewhere soon, right?

The 15 Hardest Things About Moving Home After Living Abroad

1. Feeling nostalgic because of a smell, a song, a food. You end up missing little things you never thought you´d miss. I have a perfume in my closet that puts me right back in our apartment in Oman, and sometimes I have to use it just to bring a part of my “previous” life into my current everyday life. 
2.  Messing up sentences when speaking, because you can´t remember every tenth word in your mother tongue. I even used English to do math for a year and a half after moving back. So I would sit there whispering to myself “one plus one” (of course the equations weren´t that easy, but anyway) in English, even though the question and everything else around me was in Norwegian.
3. Having dreams where you´re back in your apartment, at school, hanging out with friends, then waking up and realizing those dreams are only memories, and that that chapter of your life is closed.
4. Constantly having to calculate what the time is in all the different places where your friends are living. “Why doesn´t she open my text? Oh wait she´s probably asleep!”
5.  Becoming awfully jealous when someone you know is going on vacation there, whether it is some of your friends who once lived there, or anyone else you hear of.
6. Unexpectedly remembering all the “touristy” things you didn´t do, because you always postponed it to the next week or month. You were living in the country after all, so of course you would get time to do it at some point. I have been in a bunch of places in Oman, trust me on that one, but still I can´t believe I haven´t been to Salalah and Khaluf.
7. Suddenly understanding what everyone around you is saying. You see, not being able to understand what the people next to you are saying is actually quite nice. First, because you can concentrate on the person you are talking to or whatever you´re doing. Second, it feels amazing when you actually occasionally understand a word of Arabic, or recognize what language other expats are talking.
8. Not having that ultra-special connection of being an expat anymore. The connection between the Norwegians for instance were great. Of course, even in such a situation there are people you like better than others, but you do still talk to whoever you overhear talking Norwegian. You have a common place and a culture to talk about, and then it expands from there one, because you now have two places and cultures in common. Moreover, the connection between expats from any country was special, because we were all experiencing the same country in which was different from our own.
9. Experiencing listless moments when all you want to do is look at pictures and watch a movie from your old place, just to get a tiny feeling of being back there. The thing that sucks though is that there are hardly any movies filmed in Oman. Therefore, a YouTube video or a movie from Abu Dhabi will have to do.
10.  Missing the wonderful and weird food, you got at friends´ houses. Whether you went to an Arabic family or an American friend, the food would be quite different from what you were used to. I remember eating breakfast at an American friends´ house after a sleepover. We got these thick American pancakes, and they tasted great for about five bites before they turned out to be excessively heavy. Everyone else used tons of syrup and ate two pancakes, while my Danish friend and I, eating one with nothing on top, had no idea how in the world they were able to eat all that sugar. On the other hand, if anyone now mentions hummus…! Yes, please!
11.  Everything is more expensive, and some types of food is not available in Norway. My extreme joy when discovering Raffaelos in a shop in Poland should have been on tape, because that felt just like Christmas Eve.
12. You no longer speak one language (and this is a good thing, but it happens to be annoying at times). I still find myself not remembering a Norwegian word or phrase, and end up having to say it in English. Of course this goes both ways, but I could also end up saying inshallah, which is an annoying word, meaning “if it is God´s will” or more westernized “maybe”. Omanis use it in more or less every second sentence, and it is only used as a bad explanation for not being on time or not showing up. I also found that my Norwegian accent changed, because I was surrounded by people from Denmark (and speaking some Danish myself), Sweden, and different parts of Norway more or less everyday, and of course you would speak your mother tongue when you had the chance.
13. All the goodbyes you have said, and not knowing when or if you´ll ever see someone again. The scariest part is probably acknowledging the fact that you´ll never see most of those people ever again. However, the hardest part is being away from everyone you came to love and not having any time limit on how much time will pass before seeing each other again.  
14. People are interested in hearing about your experience for about two seconds. They ask, or more precisely a few people, actually ask, what it was like, how I have been. Then, as you start answering, you can feel their attention ebbing out in seconds, because they can´t recognize themselves in anything you´re saying and they simply don´t understand. Some might try to, but most don´t even try. It is too far away from their reality. I was warned before I moved, that this would happen. Life would just keep going as always, and you would be part of that physically, but only partially mentally. I´m glad I was aware on that beforehand, but I was still disappointed that even the people closest to me didn´t ask more. In a way, to them it was like it only happened on the surface, like there was nothing more to it than the fact that I once lived in a country named Oman. However, for my part, I had never been in deeper water than this, for the good and the bad. Moreover, all people knew were the shallow water from my childhood, and the surface from Oman. How in the world, could they understand me when knowing basically nothing about something that formed a huge part of who I now am as a person? All of this, makes the longing (as mentioned) worse. The longing for people who understand, the people that were there with you. The people that have felt similar feelings, the people that you have an ultra-special connection to. The memories.
15.  It is then you understand that nothing is ever going to be the same…                                                                                                                                                                         “It is a bitter-sweet thing, knowing two cultures. Once you leave your birthplace nothing is ever the same”             – Sarah Turnbull

New Customs Or Not As An Expatriate

Every year, thousands of people move to a foreign country. Some because of a job, others because they want to explore the world, or both for that matter. Being an expat can be tough. You will face a new culture, a new language, and a new landscape. This might all sound exciting, and it is, but moving to a foreign country is not all thrilling. Many difficulties and hard decisions will arise, and one of those decisions is whether you decide to follow the customs of your new country or keep your own.

First, a significant factor in living a good life is to be yourself. Stay true to yourself. No matter what you undertake, you should not feel pushed to become someone you are not, and never think that you have to change to be accepted in your new community. For the reason that you do not have to. People will accept you as the person you are, as long as you have a respectful attitude towards them. Everyone has an outstanding identity. You are unique and should not feel like you have to change. However, being open-minded and willing to learn about other cultures has never hurt anyone.

Second, if choosing to follow the customs of your new country, then that will absolutely become a vast advantage in understanding the culture. You will get to the soul of why people live the way they do, and you might even find that you prefer this lifestyle yourself. On the other hand, you might find that this way of living is not the best for you, and it will make you appreciate your own way of living more than you did before. That goes for your country and everything in it as well. One thing is for sure, you will evolve as a person if you are open to everything and everyone surrounding you. However, following your new country`s customs might bring along a few problems.

There are certain rules in some countries that will put you in a complicated situation if you go too far in following their customs, and the other way around. Take for an instance, a male expatriate living in Oman. If he decides to live exactly like an Omani, then an arrest will probably take place for wearing a dish dash, because non-Muslims are not allowed to wear those. On the other side, a woman living in Saudi Arabia might get arrested for following her own customs, because it is mandatory to wear a burka, and she is not allowed to drive a car either. At home, they both decide how they want to live; moreover, they have to be careful in public. There are many dissimilar rules in different countries, and it is not always up to the individual to decide how to live.

All in all, there are both advantages, as well as disadvantages by following a foreign country`s customs and following your own. I believe, that every single expatriate have to decide what he or she wants. However, I preferred to follow my own customs as a general. For my part, that was important in order to stay true to myself, and it surely made me feel safer and more at home. On the other hand, nothing will ever be the same. I gained experiences, which lead to changes in my lifestyle, which means that even my customs changed. However, that was all right, because it happened over time. Moreover, as a conclusion, there is no answer to what is the best. Everyone have to take a stand for themselves, as long as you follow the rules and laws of the country, then you can live how you want. Finally, yet importantly, be respectful towards everyone always, and you will gain an experience and a memory worth a lifetime.

Do you prefer to change your customs when moving to a new country? Or do you keep your own?