Going through the interior journey of being an emigrant changes you forever. Your certainties shuffle around, the cultural shock is something unexpected: as the author says, it's not a big bang, but a continuous stream of small astonishments about where to buy your food, how to turn on the shower, where to throw out your waste. All of these small things remember you that you're not in your place. Oh, hell, if this drains your energy. Then gradually the balance between cultural mismatches and adaptations swings gently, and you start feeling good again. Would you try to go back home at that point? Difficult choice: hardly anyone would understand your backfiring difficulties of readapting to the peculiar defects of your country. You are no longer the same person, you went through the path of change, you are part of the ancestral tribe of human emigrants that always existed in our species, but that nowadays is clearly separated from those who have the luck of knowing their soul belongs to a single place.
Funny, as someone living abroad (alone!) for almost a year now - albeit from one EU country to another -, I wouldn't say it drains my energy; I find it stimulating! You get to see and compare different ways of doing things, and you feel a tiny patriotic sting when something works better in your home country :)
I'm guessing speaking English well enough (even if it's not the country's native language) and the Internet help immensely. I could barely speak in person with my landlord, but emails were fine. And a public service generally has someone who can speak English, but not my native language.
Compare the two times the author came to the US, the first time, pennyless, to a distant unknown country in a "yolo" endeavour, the second with financial security to a known entity. I suspect you experience, like mine, is closer to the second, but the two are so different they barely deserve to be known by the same word.
Well, I was making less than the author and my savings were two paychecks. I did have a job secured, but so did the author. I guess I could say I "knew" the country, having spent two separate weekends there in the past.
Does this make it closer to the first or the second?
I don't know, I don't know your situation, your background nor which countries you moved between. I'd be inclined to maintain my guess. I struggle to think of any two 2017-era EU countries as different as 2000-Poland and Boston, especially when you English is poor, which yours isn't.
Two weekends was basically my experience with London before moving, and I had few savings. But London simply doesn't feel all that strange from Copenhagen when it comes to the basics.
Well, I wasn't trying to one-up the author, or anything like that. I'm pretty sure his experience had plenty of stresses that mine didn't. Not having to deal with immigration alone is great. I was only referring to those daily routines.
I didn't mean to imply you did! I was offering a possible explanation of the difference in yours and GPs experiences (culture shock vs energising).
Not having to deal with immigration is probably the least of it, at least by the time you're actually making the move (the author had visa sorted, that only unravelled several years later).
But yes, daily routines. I suspect those are a lot more compatible between two present day (western?) European countries than it would have been for the author.
Amazing. I love seeing when lcamtuf stuff comes up here. Michal's classic paper on strange attractors in tcp randomness, and later, RNGs is still my favorite security research of all time.
It made some concepts in crypto accessible enough to pursue a career related to it and demonstrated how you can use data viz to reveal information, and not merely to represent it.
His comment about his father being a cinematographer who worked on large productions in Poland made me wonder if his father worked with Kieslowski, owing to his being of the few productions of the time and region that would be considered big ticket. If that were who he was making reference to, in addition to his inspirational research, the indirect impact this family has had on at least my life (as an obscure nerd in Canada) would be extra astounding.
I know that there's an extremely small chance that the author will see this but ... thanks for coming. The current political climate seems to forget, if you go back far enough in everyone's ancestry, everyone here is from an immigrant family. We're richer for that diversity and, in my opinion, if we stop the flow of immigrants, then we'll stagnate.
In my AP European History class, we just now studied the post-war effects and especially the relationship between Poland and the Soviet Union. To stumble upon this essay now makes it all the more interesting; a primary source of sorts to complement the top-down view of my textbook.
