After 5 years living in Basel, how does your Auntie hear the phrase, „Go home, expat“ ?
Waking, one morning, in the village where we then lived, your Auntie & her best friend prepared for their day. On a whim, we decided to visit friends. So, we called our boyfriends to cancel our dates. Packed a picnic of sodas & salty snacks, & tunes … Checked our tires … Then, 6.5 hours later, we arrived in Buffalo.
The American road trip is most certainly a tradition unique to a nation in which its citizens legally drive 5 years before they can drink alcoholic beverages. And one, also, of course, paved from sea to shining sea.
The romance of the road calls to everyone in the States – excluding New Yorkers, who blissfully & quite proudly remain unaware America exists beyond their five boroughs. In that peculiarity, New Yorkers are a bit more Swiss than even the formerly-Swiss, Amish people where I grew up.
Where I grew up, in a series of small farming villages, it was common to travel an hour to do almost anything. Seeing a movie or going shopping at a mall necessitated it. But so did most hospital visits or trips to an art museum.
Obviously, Darling, for the Amish, some of whom only rarely went out for these things, it only took this long because their horses could only pull them & their buggies rather slowly. But they still had to traverse that long hour from their farm to the auction houses or businesses where they worked.
And those boys my best friend & I stood up to go to Buffalo ? Both Mennonites on Rumspringa who would have driven their farm trucks nearly 90 minutes to collect us that evening & another 90 minutes back home.
We left them there, in that country town. That’s where they belonged, & we didn’t.
From Basel, a peaceful hour’s train ride will bring you to Zurich. Friends I know will travel there for a concert or another large event. But, anyone I know who has moved there has returned because living in Zurich meant they almost never saw their friends from Basel.
And, even for many Swiss people, it is very difficult to make friends in a new Swiss region.
Darling, Switzerland is like an Amish quilt: a patchwork of remnants braided, twisted, & sewn into the fabric the comprises every Swiss person’s being. One the whole, it is functional & complete. But every part is as well. From the largest quilted star to the strip separating one square from the next, this nation only appears as one because of the interdependence & design in the small.
Therefore, children become friends in primary school. They grow up together & form bonds while developing their education, vocational training, and social interests. And these things rarely occur outside of one’s home region. Therefore, a move to Zurich means starting ‚a new life’. Exiting your patch of quilted fabric & resettling in a patchwork very different from your own.
A patchwork that, even for a Swiss person who knows this nation’s history, speaks its language, & is accustomed to its mores & traditions, can be very isolating and seemingly impossible to overcome.
Which is why, like most boys & gils on Rumspringa, they usually return to the world they know.
And, when viewed from this perspective: from the loving perspective of one who understands the value of home – meaning among friends, navigable support systems, your favourite place to go when you need to laugh or cry – perhaps this is why, when expats complain about how difficult it is to live here, locals reply: “Go home.”
Perhaps …
For those of us who have travelled much further than that hours train ride, however … a question remains, Darling: “Where’s home ?”
XO
AS