by Angela

This isn’t my first rodeo. Twenty years ago, during my undergraduate studies, I studied abroad for 4 months in a city south of Sydney, Australia called Wollongong. A romantic relationship with an Australian resulted in flying there two more times and spending 5 more months there in the two years that followed (TMI?). That relationship ended of course but the memories of my experiences from there remain, even more so now that I am doing it again so to speak.

“Things here are the same but different, ” Danny tells are kids as they take in their new surroundings. Not sure if this is true for everyone, but for me, everything that is different lends to the conclusion that they different because we are half-way around the world. Because New Zealand being so far away has evolved to be different. But could things be just as different in say, Florida or California. But I accept them as more normal because Florida is still in the US. For instance, take the housefly. We now have several intruders flying around our airbnb. Whack! I try repeatedly to kill them with a magazine, but they escape even my quickest attempts. I’ve never had this problem killing flies back at home! Leading me to the only natural conclusion that flies in New Zealand are much quicker than any in the US. Who knew?

Being here brings back that feeling of being different. I had it in Australia and I also had it in China. Danny and I spent 1 month in China during medical school. We REALLY felt different there. We were in a city called Jinan which you probably have never heard of even though it is about the size of New York City, 9 million people. During our time in Jinan, I don’t recall seeing other white people except on billboards. I gained a new appreciation for being a minority.

So far, I feel very much out of place here but I am okay with it. This may be in part because of the ethnic makeup of the part of town we are staying in. There were very few white people in the catholic church we went to on Sunday and the few that we did see were elderly. No one like us. Today I took the kids to a public pool. I braved driving 12 minutes on the wrong side of the road, feeling like a teenager who just got their license, to take the kids swimming. The local government (Auckland Council) operates pools and leisure centers throughout the city and the pools are free. We felt very out of place, again just a few other white people in a crowd of say 100 people. As we were waiting in a line to enter the pool, the kids and I all feeling quite awkward and unsure what to expect, I had an impulse to leave but I knew how to talk myself out of it. It was a bit harder to talk Charles out of that impulse, he wanted to leave too. But we stayed and were able to enjoy ourselves.

But that feeling of feeling different, being in a different place, a place so… unfamiliar. I wonder how long it takes before the unfamiliar becomes familiar? Does it ever fully? I think about Italian Grandma, Lucia Baldini who died 10 years ago. She immigrated to Canada and then the US with my Grandfather in the midst of growing her family of 4 children. She never learned to read or write well. Did she always feel out of place? Did she watch as her children felt at home, but did that feeling of familiarity elude her the rest of her life? I remember my grandmother being very skeptical and guarded around strangers. Now I wonder if this was the reason. Would she have been a different Grandma in Italy? Yesterday I talked to a lady who came here from Iran 20 years ago. I asked her, “Does it feel like home here, or does it still feel different.” She said New Zealand feels more home to her than Iran. Is it different for everyone or does it just take time?