Objectivity: The Expat’s Blessing
California Contrasts Articles - 1 || 2 || 3 || 4 || 5 ||
When we first moved to Costa Rica, after a short passing of time, my family and I would start jonesing for States-like stimuli. Consequently, about once a month we would find our way to San Jose where we would walk around a mall and go see a movie. Eating fast food at the mall’s food court was therapeutic.
After some years living in Costa Rica, we look back at those times and wonder a bit at them. How could those particular activities have been a need? Now, don’t get me wrong, I love shopping. Some say I’m part woman because of my ability to enjoy a good day out looking at the latest things. I also really enjoy people watching. So, nothing against these things. But it is interesting after having lived down in Costa Rica’s southern zone for some years, to look back and wonder how visiting stores and buying things could have come to be such a symbol of our homeland.
Now it happens in reverse. I seem to allow a year or so to pass between trips to the States when I go to visit my mother in Davis California. In the first hours of arriving in the States I feel my most sensitized to the country and its peculiar ways. I am pure Gringo, having been raised there, and having spent 20 adult years there with family and in the scene. So it is a brief and passing phenomenon that occurrs when I first arrive there, and it is this state of mind that I am setting out to capture in these writings.
This visit, July of 2006, I am going to be posting impressions and observations of the States from the point of view of an expat who has immersed himself in another culture, language, and eco-system - returning to, what - home?
