The indefinite alienation of expat life

Cultural divides never quite close

“You can’t just share a joke with the gas station attendant over there.”

Even in a country as similar as the UK, even with a shared language, even after 15 years abroad, my friend was trying to tell me that an essential cultural gulf remained. He had never fully gotten there, and would never get there. Never to the same level of comfort that he had in the U.S.

As we walked down the dirt road toward his house in New Hampshire, he said he was very happy to be back living in this small corner of rural America. Happy, as he approached 70, not to be living in a permanent state of background-level alienation.

Stow and I had known each other for only a few years, but I considered him somewhat of a mentor. He’d taught me to project hard climbing routes at the cliffs, and he was also annoyingly successful in life: long marriage, recently retired from his own law practice, charming, frustratingly good-looking, in great shape, and still climbing just as hard (ok even harder) as me.

A goddamn inspiration, that one.

I’ve been in Spain for two years, long enough to get through the hard parts of moving abroad, long enough to feel some level of comfort about my environment. But when Stow told me the thing about the inability to share a joke with a gas station attendant in the UK, I started to wonder.

What would Spain feel like after 15 years? Am I dooming myself to a permanent state of cultural alienation? Will I one day long to be back somewhere entirely my own, where even the smallest cultural cues are understood without a moment’s thought? What value should I place on that comfort vs. the growth that comes from discomfort?

We walked on down the dirt road. Stow was taking a trip to Spain himself soon, but there was still time to get out climbing together before that.

Barceloneta Beach, Winter

I.

Some days I worry what I’ve done with my life.

I walk through the wide open streets of Sant Antoni, watching the throngs sipping beers on the tables in the street, the Mediterranean sun shining, the life of this beautiful city buzzing, and I can’t help but wonder: will this subtle, low-level background unease ever quite go away?

Since talking with Stow, I’ve become more attuned to it. It’s a feeling I want to recognize, not ignore. And I’m seeing it everywhere. In film, played for drama, on TV, played for laughs. In other writers I follow.

On The Next Chapter, Asia Dawn wrote recently about the feeling of being an outsider in the Italian countryside:

In a village filled with plenty of other immigrants, it feels silly to declare myself as such. I’m not the only person who wasn’t born and raised here, but for a big part of the village, that is exactly what it feels like.

People were born in this village.
Raised in this village.
Have extended families in this village.
Bury loved ones in the cemetery in this village.
Grow old in this village.
Pass away in this village.

The circle of life happens here every single day, and I am on the outside, looking in, even though I am right here in it.

And writing about his time in Argentina, casey wetherbee delivers a kind of specificity that feels very familiar:

Yesterday the cashier told me my coffee and pastries would be $7.580 and I drew a total blank (numbers are hard). There’s a bulk health food store with jars of powders and legumes lining the walls two blocks from my apartment that I still haven’t entered because it gives me anxiety. I’ve had to turn back home several times, tail between my legs, after forgetting yet again that many places are closed on Mondays for some reason.

Similarly, when I go out to boliches, the parties that kick off at around 1:30 a.m. and don’t end until the sun has fully risen, I often find myself smiling self-consciously and fake-singing along to songs to which my friends know all the words. So many years of pop culture to catch up on!

But I will never catch up to what a Catalan has grown up with their entire life.

Or take Castellano—even if I were to binge every Spanish show I can find for the next two years, it would be small measure compared to the wealth of cultural baggage that lives rent free (finally the appropriate time to use that silly phrase) inside each and every one of us who grew up on American shores.

I walk the streets of Barcelona, near an apartment I own, visiting with friends I’ve had for years now. But in some sense I am still just an observer. Which is part of what life has asked of me here: to observe. As closely as I can manage. I feel perhaps I am a journalist again, writing from the outside.

Observing now a fundamental divide that will never be fully bridged.

II.

And yet I think there is a way. Not through it, not to overcome it. But around it.

August 2017 — Medellín, Colombia.

My second night after touching down. A taxi takes me and a new friend from tourist-friendly, gentrified El Poblado halfway across the city, dropping us off on a rundown street corner devoid of much life. The building we’re headed for looks like a closed pawn shop, bars in the windows, dim Christmas lights, half-cracked, flickering outside.

The sign says Son Havana Bar, and I wonder if there is something I must be missing about the translation (They Are Havana Bar).

The new friend says Son is actually a style of Cuban salsa music—a cultural detail beyond the capacity of Google Translate.

We enter: low ceilings, rusty metal chairs, smell of spilled beer, dim lights. But also salsa dancing. And friends of friends. Songs I’ve heard before. I don’t know the words, but I know the beat. Always eight counts in 4/4, and the familiar syncopated accents of the clave.

I watch, I order and down a shot of tequila, and then I reach my hand out to someone I want to dance with. She comes into my arms, and I start on the one. Without words, we are communicating instantly.

For years, I’d been doing this. Knowing how to salsa dance felt like something close to a superpower. Colombia and Portugal, Ireland, Ecuador—wherever I touched down, I could walk into a salsa club, not knowing a soul, surrounded by an unfamiliar language, and immediately feel something close to comfortable.

I don’t dance as much as I used to, but the memory of Medellín did strike me: the way around a cultural divide is by joining a subculture that circumvents it.

III.

In fact, I don’t even know if I want to escape this sense of alienation or embrace it.

Climbing has replaced dancing as my way into new places. The crags or the climbing gyms are home no matter where in the world. But climbing is not all of life. In other facets, the low-level unease remains.

A song lyric that’s never felt far from my soul:

Mommas don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys. They’ll never stay home and they’re always alone, even with someone they love.

I’ll feel alone anywhere, leave it to me. In the U.S. or in Barcelona. Surrounded by people or not. With friends and loved ones, as well as strangers.

Anyway, I don’t know if I’ve ever joked with a gas station attendant anywhere. For me, there’s no Indefinite Alienation of Expat Life. Just alienation in general. Might as well make it somewhere beautiful.