No one returns from a trip or a stay abroad as we went: our perception of ourselves and the world changes. Some rough edges of our personalities have long been filed down by our lifestyle, our culture, our confrontation with others. We believe knowing your strengths and weaknesses and it has over the years, built a life that can exploit the former and avoid - as much as possible - that we jump to the second face . We carefully placed on our card geography interior, our highways, our peaks to climb, our wetlands, our deadlocks and our safe havens: we are assured we can move forward in life-clad certainties ... If the holidays make a foray into other landscapes, other cultures and other habits, they are too short for us to confront our limits. Instead, it aims to ensure that we do forget that we extirpent constraints of everyday life to the dream, the sun, the discoveries of the exotic (and our photos show how much our eyes is selective: how many sunsets over the sea and how many open sewers? Yet they are two sides of the same reality). Like it or not, the holidays make us tourists who slip on the surface of the world.
But stay longer (even if only 2 months) changes everything. During the first 2-3 weeks, we lived in tourists and everything was like a postcard from Florida: nice house with swimming pool, palm trees, with their Everglades alligators, sandy beaches and supermarket where everything is oversized to us. Milk and orange juice can be bought per gallon (3.7 liters), meat packaging by at least 2 T-bones of 400 grams each, beer in packs of 12 and live without a car is totally impossible . Then gradually, the postcard and pale colors beneath the veneer of paradise, the reality is emerging ... Moisture months while the flow toilets is undersized and if one uses more than 2 coupons paper it is blocked, large cockroaches roam the night in the kitchen and nothing better to omit the list races if you do not want to redo 8 km to go to the store nearest you.
That our habits and modes of operation all messed up! We had fun at first, then angry, we criticize, we reject. It's like in love stories ... The foibles that we find in touching another become unbearable defects, has anyone seen that what brought us together and now you see this sets us apart. We are no longer very sure to love ...
The secret is not to stop there, but understand that this is precisely what bothers us (un-range) which makes us evolve and must drop his beautiful geographical map well-ordered because the landscape has changed. We enter into the unknown, our benchmarks are outdated, we must draw a new map of reality without switching from one extreme to another, taking a step back and keeping a sense of humor ( and there are days it's hard!).
We went through these steps over a short period, with the certainty that we would go home, but this trip has changed my view of immigrants: I realized how difficult it is to change language, culture, lifestyle, eating habits and often occupation, often for the rest of his days. I raise my hat to those who have passed this obstacle course with flying colors, especially our friends and Alina Tavi, Dante and Pina, Yosch and Sarah, Kristel and Andrea, Santina, Carmen, Abdoulaye, and William Hussein (sorry to those I forget)!
America, like us, is both complex, touching, full of contradictions, funny, annoying, good boy ... We love it and hate it in turn with emotion as we are witnessing the opening day of Barack Obama, we see that there exists in this country than on outward signs of wealth, it is confirmed that we can draw from scratch and its successful tour, which has its hands in the poop to the elbow or an immediate complicity that arises before the antics of our dogs Dod Beach. ..
Bye bye and thank you, America!
PS A big thank you to all who have encouraged and complimented for this blog! Your reactions, your laughter, your indignation were my fuel and I had a great time to share with you day after day that we live ... Did you like this blog? It will soon be a book with photos: if you want a copy (which will cost about thirty dollars), you can order it by mail to the following address:
blog.floride @ gmail. com
0 comments:
Post a Comment