Living in a foreign country is weird

Living in a foreign country is weird.

You go about your day. Your house is all set up to look just like it would back home. The compound is filled with the English language and for the most part, everyone wears familiar clothing and has familiar traditions and habits. There’s variance to that of course, but nothing is so unfamiliar as to seem strange.

You take the bus to the mall, and you shop at H&M, The Body Shop, and Victoria’s Secret. All the women at the mall are wearing black, and a good number of them have their faces fully covered, but you get used to that pretty quickly. It stops being something that you notice. You do your grocery shopping at a real grocery store, set up just like one back home, with a deli and bakery and everything.
And with all this, you get used to just going about your day, and you forget to notice that you aren’t from here. 

Then all at once, the world you haven’t been looking at so closely comes into focus. There’s a man squatting on top of a semi-truck in a dust storm, wearing Pakistani clothing. He’s tying down the top of his load with strips of cardboard. There’s a group of men wearing thobes and keffiyeh (head scarves) haggling over the price of oranges and herbs being sold off the back of a pickup truck and you can’t understand a single word. You pull up at a red light next to a bus with a strip of beaded tassels framing the window. The Arabic script on the store fronts comes into focus. You notice the mosque at the entrance to your compound. You see the blue tile work and the rounded steeple and the crescent moon for the first time in days.

And all of it adds to up to the sudden and shocking realization that you aren’t in Kansas anymore. It’s a surprise every single time it happens. You live in the Middle East, and you wonder, what am I doing here? This can’t be real. I’m not the sort of person who lives in the Middle East, am I?

The answer is yes. You can see the world around you so clearly for the few minutes that this sensation lasts. You can see every difference, every foreign object, and piece of clothing. And it’s all so real.

You turn to your husband and ask, “Are we really here?”

Then the sensation passes and you go back to the compound and hang out with your English speaking friends and clean your house and grocery shop and visit the mall.

It’s another week or two before you have another moment of really remembering where you are, and it’s a shock all over again.

Every. Single. Time.