The romance of living abroad... |
"I went to a postindustrial city in northern Poland to really find myself spiritually." I don't know about you, but I can't imagine anyone ever having said those words. People go to South-East Asia or India for that sort of thing. So how, then, did I find myself living in Poland? The short answer is: work. Since Poland I've lived in Sicily (for about two months) and Prague
(for about two years).
Most Brits leave their country of origin to escape (whether for two
weeks or a couple of years) the "daily grind". I went to
find it, and in that regard my travels have certainly been a success.
In my case at least the defining fact of living abroad has been the necessity of work. In that sense it's no more exciting than
living anywhere else (unless, of course, you're unemployed).
I don't
mean to play down the positives: I've met some nice people and done
some nice things, but probably no more than you would if you lived
in, say, Swindon (actually maybe a few
more - sorry, Swindon). However, there are some big differences
between living in the UK and living "on the continent".
Some of them are great (I can go to Germany by
train in
about an hour!)
but a lot of them, while not awful, are just a bit annoying. So here
are some things that are annoying, shared in a spirit of collective
misanthropy. Come, be miserable with me!
1.
People
Other
countries are, shock horror, full
of foreigners. People are basically a bit annoying everywhere, but
culture plays a big part in how annoying they seem. Thus there's an
irresistible tendency for outsiders to bracket the inhabitants of the
"host country" together as one amorphous blob of odd habits
and poor social etiquette. This, of course, is a complete fantasy, a
sort of knee-jerk reaction to being stranded in a place where custom
operates at a slightly altered symbolic level. People don't hold
doors for each other here. They don't say thank you as much. They
don't smile politely when they make eye contact with strangers. But
so what? Basically, every Czech person I know is perfectly nice. What
needs resisting is the urge, as a foreigner, to curl up in a ball of
outsiderdom. As Descartes (probably) said, it's only by encountering
the eccentricity of other cultures that you realise the eccentricity
of your own. A bit of estrangement can be a good thing. That said, I
don't know if I can stand having another door slammed in my face.
2.
Language
I love
learning Czech. I love its rigidly systematic grammar (although,
thankfully, I haven't had to do anything too mind-bogglingly advanced
yet). It's a language in which every noun has fourteen possible forms
(seven cases; singular and plural in each). Add to this the fact that
different nouns fit in to different patterns of declension, sometimes
but not always determined by their gender (if, say, they're regular
nouns these can be fairly predictable but get pretty weird if they're
irregular). To give an example (from the admittedly tiny amount we've
covered so far in class): Praha
(Prague;
nominative) becomes Prahu
in
the accusative,
as in Mám rád
Prahu ("I
like Prague") because it's regular and feminine. In the locative
it becomes Praze
as
in Jsem
v
Praze
("I'm in Prague") because the last consonant in the
nominative form is "h" (nothing to do with gender). Then in
the genitive it becomes Prahy
as
in Přijde
do Prahy
("She/He's
coming to Prague"). Still following? Excellent! Admittedly,
that's just the first few (there are four more cases and for most
nouns you need to learn the plural forms as well). Then there's the
preposition-noun conjugations; perfective and imperfective verbs; the
irregular genders of nouns; when to actually use all these cases; the
fact that relative and normal pronouns also decline ("Who"
is rarely just "Who" but changes with infuriating
regularity), along with the declination patterns of adjectives when they conjugate with specific nouns, and so on.
All
of which is fine. I think with time and effort and patience I might
just about get my head around 50% of all this, give or take a few
years. That would be pretty good. Not being an ambitious language
learner (nor, given past precedent, a particularly successful one)
I'd be happy with that. But the fact is, most daily encounters - in
shops, on trams, buses, trains and metros, in offices, at the
doctor's - can spare neither time nor patience and take a dim view of
effort. Met with so much pig-headed refusal
to understand my pronunciation (I can't roll my rs
in the prescribed Czech fashion), it all becomes a bit dispiriting.
Plus, my ability to stop my brain panicking and actually listen
to people speak
is only just catching up with my reading skills. So now I can get my
head around simple sentences if caringly enunciated by a sympathetic
speaker. All too often though, the speaker just wants me to go away
quickly. What's galling about this distaste for my Czech abilities is
that it's
my job
to listen to people garble, mispronounce and frankly ruin
my language. I put up with it as
a job.
I have to listen to it all
day, every day.
Is it too much to ask to be allowed, just occasionally, to garble
someone else's language a bit?
The joys of travel... |
3.
Work
My job
is probably no worse than anyone else's. On the one hand, I get to
talk to lots of people and make five year-olds race each other whilst
pretending to be crocodiles. On the other, it pays awfully. Wages are
low here by European standards anyway, but apparently no one at
school has had a pay rise in fifteen years. Wages haven't even risen
in line with inflation, which, assuming the school's income has
remained steady, amounts to a pretty big saving. Partly it's the
market: there's a lot of competition, prices are very low, and
there's no shortage of labour. I know very little about my school's
accounts (maybe a little more staff involvement in this area would
help us understand the situation?) but can't help but feel it's also
an industry-wide attitude problem. I'm in no way singling out my
school (others are far worse) but EFL teaching is built around total
flexibility: expectations of teachers are low and expectations of
schools are low because
the work is short-term and staff are easily got rid of. I can't help
but feel this filters down to students. If your underlying attitude
to your workforce is that they are eminently disposable (to be taken
maximum advantage of while they last and to be let go lightly the
moment they express dissatisfaction) then naturally teachers will end
up being demotivated. How can this not
affect students' perceptions?
Old Town Square, Prague |
4.
Shopping
In
Britain supermarkets are decadent banquets swollen with delights
plundered from the far corners of the earth (in my mind at least).
There, saffron is sold by the bucket; caviar costs the same as baked
beans; an infinite variety of herbs and spices spills from every shelf.
They're so multicultural, in fact, that even Papua New Guinea gets
two aisles at the local Tesco Express (in my mind). The average Asda
is a sort of apocalyptic Noah's Ark of world cuisine, the kind of
post-nuclear utopia of fat first-worlders imagined by sci-fi writers
since the fifties. Except they're here
and now.
Not so in the Czech Republic (or seemingly anywhere else in central
or eastern Europe). By comparison, supermarkets here are deeply
austere places, stocking strange jarred meats in jelly (not
dissimilar to cat food) and tangled, tough-looking roots with
scary-sounding names. Maybe it's because Czechs like to grow
vegetables in their out-of-town gardens, but city supermarkets often
just don't have much interesting veg. For those of us without a
"connection to the earth" this means puzzling over wilted
cabbage and already-mouldy tomatoes as a weekly ritual. I want my
post-nuclear utopia back.
5. Getting things done
Admittedly a vague sounding category, it's really quite simple. When something breaks and you live near home (as in real home - where your family and friends live) someone will usually help you out on the cheap. Broken washing machine? No problem because someone always knows someone else who can fix it/scrap it/sell it for parts/give you their old one or relegate it to some dank corner of a garage. But when you don't know anyone (other than equally unhandy Humanities graduates) that gets a bit harder. Without the support networks you simply take for granted at home, you are left stranded in a hostile sea of unpronounceable bedroom fittings and inexplicably complicated shop return policies. This ties in with shopping. To my dismay I've realized that not only do I lack basic manual skills - like being able to drill a hole - but also, as a foreigner, I lack the social and language skills to successfully complete even simple tasks. When I was at the Czech equivalent of B&Q I found that I kept staring over the shoulders of the concerned women at the counter, looking for distant words, before eventually saying, 'Does she return?' in Czech. I waved my bag of light bulbs in front of them, 'Where is bulbs for return?' Then, despairing, I staggered off into the cavernous warehouse, all the more alone for having asked someone a question. The sad thing is that being a foreigner - even someone with a basic knowledge of Czech under my belt - inevitably makes you look a bit of an idiot. So after two years of living here my main achievement has been to reinforce the impression of myself as a bumbling, awkward, ill-at-ease Englishman of the old school variety. In that sense I suppose I have "found myself" after all.
Admittedly a vague sounding category, it's really quite simple. When something breaks and you live near home (as in real home - where your family and friends live) someone will usually help you out on the cheap. Broken washing machine? No problem because someone always knows someone else who can fix it/scrap it/sell it for parts/give you their old one or relegate it to some dank corner of a garage. But when you don't know anyone (other than equally unhandy Humanities graduates) that gets a bit harder. Without the support networks you simply take for granted at home, you are left stranded in a hostile sea of unpronounceable bedroom fittings and inexplicably complicated shop return policies. This ties in with shopping. To my dismay I've realized that not only do I lack basic manual skills - like being able to drill a hole - but also, as a foreigner, I lack the social and language skills to successfully complete even simple tasks. When I was at the Czech equivalent of B&Q I found that I kept staring over the shoulders of the concerned women at the counter, looking for distant words, before eventually saying, 'Does she return?' in Czech. I waved my bag of light bulbs in front of them, 'Where is bulbs for return?' Then, despairing, I staggered off into the cavernous warehouse, all the more alone for having asked someone a question. The sad thing is that being a foreigner - even someone with a basic knowledge of Czech under my belt - inevitably makes you look a bit of an idiot. So after two years of living here my main achievement has been to reinforce the impression of myself as a bumbling, awkward, ill-at-ease Englishman of the old school variety. In that sense I suppose I have "found myself" after all.
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