Dealing with homesickness
Photo by Taro416
Ahhh the so dramed trip, you’re already feeling like if you were in that place, you can almost taste that typical food. Any travel at the beginning is pure enchantment with the fresh new things you experience. This can be in a holyday or effectively moving to another country. It’s irresistible to pay extra attention to the qualities of the place and people instead of defects.
But time passes and reality shows a different face, a face that is not in guidebooks, promoted by travel agencies and even less in your dreams of perfect travel, and at this time you ask yourself, what am I doing here? You spend a few days repeating this mantra and voilá you are homesick.
You will miss your people, the food, service, culture, climate, the price and suddenly you’ll catch yourself facing the exact opposite of your dreams, even if for only a short period of time. There are people who cry, get in a bad mood, lock themselves in the bedroom and in the most extreme cases they end up buying a ticket and go home in the first flight.
None of these attitudes will make things more pleasant and here are some tips to deal with this (based on personal experiences and pub conversations):
Be prepared before leaving home
Before going somewhere read about it, try to understand the history, geography, politics, religion. Go through wikipedia. Understand what’s to come and get psychologically prepared to go through certain experiences so you can avoid the cultural shock that may be one of the symptoms of “home sickness.”
Em Português.
Pre-trip updates
Several things happened in the last few days (weeks?), but my days have been so busy that I haven’t been able update you with the news, real time.
Ok, I confess, the Olympics are taking a lot of my free time! Let me open some parenthesis here and tell you that I’ve been watching the Brazilian athletes compete, live, with brazilian narration, online my PC for free! I mean, kind of free, because Internet is still not free over here.
Services like JustinTV, SopCast and live news on the GloboNews website are preventing me from writing in times of Olympic Games, I cannot avoid looking when I hear the narrator saying, in Portuguese, that another Brazilian is on the tatami, in the pools, celebrating a goal or a point in a volleyball game.
Now I am taking a little gap, since Sportv is showing a game between Lithuania and Russia that I am not interested at all and will update the site with 7 tasks from our to-do list:
Tidying up the camera to travel
We took the camera to a specialized shop to have the sensor cleaned. The photos were coming with some little dots of dirt, which would not be nice to happen during the trip. We left the camera at the shop and picked it up 2 days later, clean photos now, task #1 met and $80 less in the wallet. Now with the new lens we won’t have to have change lenses all the time and I hope that the sensor don’t get dirty again so soon!
New backpack or old backpack
We’ve been out several times looking for a new backpack for Felipe. We’ve been to several stores, between prices and benefits we ended up not buying anything so far. We’ve decided that we will first separate our stuff and see how our old backpacks are and if everything fit in them, then we’ll decide if we do buy a new one or not. Task #2 still on the to-do list.
Tidying up the car to sell
Two weeks ago we took the car to a workshop to get the “Warrant of Fitness.” The WoF is a certification that all vehicles are required to get regularly. The car goes through an inspection that will approve or disapprove the conditions to use it. In our car’s case, that is a bit old (12 years), we must renew it every 6 months. The one we had before was valid until October, but we decided to get a new one to sell it, as it also is a guarantee for the buyer that the car is in good conditions. So our car has been inspected and passed in the quality control without any difficulty. Yay, task #3 accomplished and $60 less in the pocket.
Break the inertia
I am writing about inertia and already suffering from it, I took at least 10 minutes get out of the first sentence. But what really prompted me to write about this is a feeling that I am starting to have on this trip. We will be 6 months out of our routine, a routine that even after changing countries remains virtually the same, home-work-home and counting the days for the weekend.
When we bought the tickets we started wondering, how would be the life in the country X, how would be the food, how we would communicate in the language Y, but lately, thanks to the rain and cold in recent days, we’ve been living our routine in a more intense (read as repetitive) than normal, and I am kind of having a special joy with my last few weeks of routine, like trying to have the most of it before jump into a “what are we going to do today” life. This repetition is something that we inevitably seek, is comfortable and easy to know that we will wake up at the same time, have the same breakfast, go work by the same way, see the same people and so on, and how difficult it is to change or to adapt to a new environment.
Many people have told me they would like to make a trip like ours, but always comes shortly after an excuse, “I don’t have time”, “I don’t have money”, “it’s not safe”, “I will lose my job”, “I don’t know how to cook”. The fact is, we all can do it, just leave the comfort zone and make it happen. See how you can make it:
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Quote day
“The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and though distant, is close to us in spirit - this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.”
[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]
A big event
Today I’ll take that Felipe is still sleeping and that my anxiety wakes me up at 6 in the morning, even on a rainy Sunday, to tell you something. Many of you already know it, and who’s read the page “Cris&Felipe” down to the end has probably noticed already.
The Brazilian part of this trip is a very important part. Not only because we miss a lot our country, families, friends and everything else. But also because at the end of two months there, it will be our wedding.
The idea of doing all this now began during Christmas last year, when we realized how we miss our loved ones and decided that for next Christmas we would be in Brazil. It will be the perfect opportunity for the wedding. When we come back to New Zealand next year we want to live in a house only both of us (no flatmates) and start a new life. Moreover, it will be wonderful to reunite families and friends after spending so much time away, and also because we don’t know when we’ll return to Brazil, with time enough to make this.
It was a few days before we went to Samoa. There was no celebration or engagement ring, but there was a video conference with my parents via MSN that was pretty emotional. Then it was my turn to ask permission to Felipe’s mom. I’ve never dreamed to marry like most girls, but suddenly I was sure, I was willing to celebrate, and I did the proposal. Each conversation with our families, was like a click inside and I thought “so it’s true, we will really get married!”. And the butterflies in my stomach were getting more and more intense.
Wellington - NZ
