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