Living Abroad: Different lives in different places

For many travellers, the dream is of course, to be able to be a perpetual vagabond, on the road as long as there’s a new place to go, new sights to see. Others have done it, and have inspired me to want to do it; but I’m not so sure I’d want to be on the road forever, skipping from country to country every few weeks, living out of a suitcase for a decade, making transient friends as I moved across the globe.

Houses of Parliament

Instead, what I’d like to do is to wear different lives in different places around the world. I’d love to know what it’s like to be a porteña in Buenos Aires, eating gnocchi on the 29th of each month, dancing at milongas on the weekend, and conjugating vos with impunity. I’d like to spend a summer in Norway, camping, hiking, fishing, breathing in the air of the mountains, kayaking in the fjords, eating smoked fish like the locals. I’d love to live as a Parisian for a year, and learn how to appreciate good butter, good bread, good wine, how to drape a scarf, how to walk on cobblestones with heels on.

Streets of Buenos Aires, Argentina

I spent over a month in Argentina; a week in Norway in the winter and I’ve visited Paris many times, but none of these experiences capture what it must be like to live there, to be absorbed into the local rhythms, to adapt to foreign habits and then to become a different person, living in a foreign place.

Living in Paris isn’t always a carousel of fun

The difference between travel and living abroad, is not just the depth or time length of the experience; it’s how being somewhere else rewires your thinking. Pre conceptions are challenged, discarded, reabsorbed. You learn that nothing is a given, that everything is done differently somewhere else in the world. You learn that fundamentally, people are the same everywhere in the world, but each life is different in a different place.