Immigrants on the Move

At the moment I’m back in the UK, after 10 years overseas. I’ve been back for visits, a few days here or there but this is the first time in many years that I’ve spent time in the UK alone. The thing that occurred to me last weekend in the middle of a busy Birmingham St Patrick’s day parade was this: I might be too European to be back in the UK.

I giggled the minute it dawned on me, not ever having thought of myself as European in behaviour, quite the opposite in Europe I’m often too British. As I approached the parade, late and hoping to catch a glimpse of the last twenty minutes, there was music and noise and a large crowd standing beside the road where the parade was passing. I couldn’t see anything over the heads of the five deep crowd. I moved this way and that, finally finding a break in the barrier I could slip through, and it was at this point I realised I was in the UK. The people were all stood almost arms length apart. In France or Spain they would have been breathing down your neck, and my reaction wasn’t the usual oh it’s so nice to see space, it was there’s a gap, I can fit in that. So I manoeuvred my way in and finally got a spot that allowed me to see a little of the event.

When we were looking into the idea of moving to Baku, we went for a reccie to check out the city, the place we’d be living and my husband’s work. It had been a five am start, I am not a morning person, and the queue to check in was lengthy and unmoving. My husband stayed in one queue and I joined another to see if it would move any faster. It was at the point that a woman (Russian I believe) came to simulate getting a piggy back from me, she was so far into my personal space that in a very uncharacteristic move, I turned round and squared off against her. She clearly saw that it was not the morning to start with me and moved away. The rest of the flight involved similar space invading moments that raised my blood pressure and had me ranting to my husband.

Yet here I was being the type of person that was glared at as I squeezed myself into any small available space to get a glimpse of the show. In Spain at the very very many festivals that take place there is no extra space, every inch is taken up and you get to know your neighbours well. There is also a camaraderie that enrichens the experience, chatting to people you don’t know, getting involved in conversations, I tried that on Sunday and was pointedly ignored more than once.

Culture makes people understand each other better. And if they understand each other better in their soul, it is easier to overcome the economic and political barriers. But first they have to understand that their neighbour is, in the end, just like them, with the same problems, the same questions.

Paulo Coelho.

Living overseas requires you to be adaptable to survive. You adapt to the culture, adapt to the climate, adapt to the language, adapt to the facilities, and of course adapt to the people. Sometimes letting go of that adaptation can be harder than it was to learn it. I still find myself wanting to get into Bolt taxis in the UK and say Salam, as my only experience of Bolt was in Azerbaijan. When we moved from France I still met sales people with the aggression that is often necessary to earn respect in France, I tried to mould the Spanish language into its most polite form as I was used to horror from the French if I didn’t address them with all the particulars of maniacally polite sentence. The Spanish of course would look at me like I was crazy, their approach to communication is simple and direct. The reality is that we become imbued with the essences of these cultural lessons we learn, who we are becomes something different. That’s not to say we won’t bounce back to original form, but it is unlikely I’ll instantly revert back to my original British/Irish form.