Separating the wheat from the chaff.
Dear Auntie SAM: In your post about Fasnacht, someone told you that you’re weird & wouldn’t be welcomed in Basel. What happened to her? Is she still living in Basel?
People say that, as expats, you make friends with anyone – people you wouldn’t normally like, but do in a foreign land because you speak the same language & are experiencing similar things.
Perhaps that’s true for many.
To some extent I must be like that … surely? But people who truly know me agree: I don’t suffer fools & I’d much rather be alone than with someone I don’t like.
So, when I make a friend, we tend to be friends for life. Family.
One day, by chance, I met a woman also from Seattle. Like me, she came to Switzerland for love. We met for a drink & discovered we had friends in common. We went to a show. Met for coffee. Chatted online. She was game for a lot of things I enjoy. We even created a couple events together & I wanted to take her to some of my favorite places.
We had plans.
Not just for work; not just because we happened to be in the same country & spoke the same language; but for our pleasure.
The adjustment to expat life, though, was not easy for her. She didn’t feel comfortable not understanding her world anymore. She didn’t sleep well. She often postponed or cancelled dates. When she was able to meet, she was sometimes hours late.
These things were OK for me, though. She was suffering. Things like this happen when people suffer.
One day, after not hearing from her for a little while, her husband told me he had discovered her lifeless body in bed. Her body was cremated, then transported back to Seattle where he lovingly set fire to her ashes in a raft on the Puget Sound.
The woman in last week’s post who tried to belittle me? Not her. That woman left a year or two after she had arrived. I could go on at length about how people who feel they are on a 1-3 year holiday can be cruel. But, at the end of the day, that’s not who matters.
It’s the rest of us who do.
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I’m not going to tell you where to go this week, Basel. I have to go to my dead friend’s memorial.
TagesWoche gave me this forum to start a dialogue about the issues facing expats in your city. I truly believe that most of you want us to succeed here. But, I also believe you don’t know what that means. It isn’t about us taking jobs, or increasing housing prices. It is about a group of very well educated & socially conscious people who are used to being well connected, capable, & able to do incredible things struggling to find their way here.
Don’t ever think for a moment that I’m not one of them. It’s tough being an expat; an immigrant. And we need to start talking about why.