Learning to adjust…

It is not easy to live in a place that is different to the place that you used to live before. I covered the cultural shock aspect of our immigration experience in my last post but there is more.

We catch ourselves living our lives as if we were in Germany, I can not remember now but we must have had the same sort of issues when we moved to Germany. People try in vain to replicate a life style that is no longer suited to their new environment. I have seen it happen many times over in Germany but also in other places where immigrants were trying to just keep on going with their lifestyles and expectations as ever before. They judged everything, it is human nature, with a set of criteria in their minds that is simply not in the right place, literally.

It is our responsibility to change and adjust to our new home, anything else is an illusion and ultimately time lost with only a sad outcome. No one will change in Australia because we arrived and it would be sort of pointless as we came here because we like the place for what it is, that includes the way of life. I am not saying that immigrants have not changed this place, every wave of immigrants has brought changes but they are done on a collective level and they are gradual.

It is the small things though, the subtle differences that we have to accept and ultimately adjust to for our sanity and well being. A great example is that people here meet outdoors a lot more than they do in northern Europe.  In fact when we were here to visit a few years ago and people kept meeting with us in places other than their homes we thought it was strange and a bit distant. We thought in some cases that we were not really welcomed and that the people wanted to keep their distance. Of course by now we have realized that this is not necessary the case, people here meet in parks, at the beach or wherever else and maybe once in a while at each others homes but that seems to be the exception rather than the rule. This is after all an outdoor country, the weather is good most of the year and people love being outdoors, they go for picnics and generally are outside whenever possible. Back in Germany because of the cold, the less than favorable weather conditions and maybe because the parks are just not the same, we rarely met with people somewhere other than in our homes or somewhere indoors. We did not go for picnics, I only remember one time in 14 years and it was just Beth and me. So we caught ourselves judging and commenting with our German eyes on our new reality and we were wrong. We were sort of disappointed and ultimately not enjoying ourselves. Of course that changed some time ago.  We have now equipped ourselves, we have bought our esky and we go go for a barbie in the arvo to meet with friends or just meet strangers because people here are open and very easy to talk to, especially around the barbie in the park. There are other examples but I do not want to bore you, you probably get the idea, suffice to say that we still catch ourselves looking at the world with the wrong set of eyes and we are working towards adjusting ourselves, it is getting better by the day.

So long…

Related articles

• Germany Welcomes Immigrants From Europe’s South (albanytribune.com)