So recently I’ve been thinking about the challenges of living here and especially of getting married when lots of my friends and family live in England. With that in mind, I thought I’d explain for the people back home, and my Arg readers, to give y’all some more insights about what my experience of living overseas has been like. Then you can all validate my feelings and tell me what a brave girl I am and give me a (virtual) pat on the back 😉
There are various reasons why, for me particularly, it feels important that we get married first in England (if we actually can. It will all depend on COVID obvo). They all kind of link into the same thing so I will try and explain as succinctly as I can without tooo many tangents (although no promises. Love a good tangent).
The main one- life for me in Argentina has involved a fair amount of sacrifices. Now, coming out and living here has been my own choice. No-one forced me and it was completely my decision, but that’s not to say that at times it’s not incredibly challenging and at times it has weighed on me heavily. It’s a tricky thing to manage, as there’s not actually much I can do about it to make things better, especially now there are so many question marks around traveling. It’s also tricky to express it, because I am so so incredibly grateful for the way Noly’s family/church/friends/people here generally have accepted me and helped me in so many ways, and I don’t want to overlook those things and seem ungrateful, but it still can be challenging. Anyways, as well as the more obvious things like not being with my family and friends, missing out on family events, birthdays, weddings and all of those joyous things, it’s also been a challenging time for me in terms of my identity. One doesn’t tend to realise it, but a huge amount of one’s identity goes back to your culture. When suddenly you’re in a different country, surrounded by different cultural norms, values, traditions etc it can feel quite bewildering and also lonely. The way that things are done are different, the things that society values, the expectations. These are all probably things that people who live in that culture don’t even think about, but for an outsider, you learn quickly that you need to abide and learn by these new set of rules and that you have to leave some of the things you’ve always lived by, behind. You have all these observations and things that you’ve noticed that you are comparing with your home culture, but you can’t really share them as people are unlikely to understand, unless they themselves have spent a long time in your home culture or at the very least, overseas.
It does however, mean you learn a lot about yourself! One of the things I’ve realised about myself in this time of being away, is how much I value either: making people laugh or getting people to open up and having a nice good DMC. Since being here this has now changed a little as – sense of humour is different here so it’s hard for me to achieve a good laugh (though I have managed it at times!) and it’s hard for me to have the language for a DMC, but it was interesting for me to learn this about myself!
Along this same line, it’s sad when one culture doesn’t line up with the other and people won’t even realise. This year, I completely forgot about pancake day until it was too late! (I had it belatedly though, dont worry!). Here, they don’t have pancake day. Isn’t that bizarre, from an English mindset?! Last year, I remember Noly mentioning it to someone saying “oh and maybe later we can do pancakes because it’s pancake day in England today!” and the person responded with “Yeah, but we’re in Argentina, not England.”. I understand this line of thinking, but this is hard for me! I may be here in Argentina, but I’m still British and my roots are important to me.
This also feeds into the wedding thing. I remember when I went to Poole on my internship year, one of my friends there one day met my sister and was completely baffled by the realisation that I wasn’t just a lone Nadia- I have family too! It’s just that I’d popped up in his world, without my family there, and so whilst he of course would have realised that there would be some other Glover’s knocking around in the world, he hadn’t ever really thought about it. So again, whilst people knowww that I have my family back home and I talk about them all the time, they’re not really faces yet, just names. (On a sidenote, I always think it will be quite funny when Noly’s family sees him interacting with my family as they’ll see a different thing from him. Nolz, on his best behaviour interacting with the in-laws ehe, it amuses me).
And another one- as I’m sure is the case for many people, especially girls but also boys (don’t wanna be too stereotypical but I think generally speaking this iss the case), I have dreamt of my wedding day my whole life! The things I’d get to do with my mum, my sister, my gal pals and all my lovely people from home, the kinda venue I’d like to have, the dress etc… whereas Nolz doesn’t really have this to the same extent as I do. If he had, I think it could have been a difficult thing for us to navigate! But given the amount of things I’ve given up to be here to help us to move forwards, I think it would be sad if I couldn’t get to do at least a few of these things.
Anyways, I’m sure there are other things that I haven’t put down on paper (well, technically, keyboard to laptop I suppose), but I don’t like to drone away for too long. I’m also mindful that this post could potentially read quite negative. It’s not my intention to be a downer! I just want to be honest with how I’m feeling. And in between all the challenging and hard moments, there are equally amazing and completely joyous moments and everything else in between. I find it staggering, looking back on who I was when I came the very first time around and the various times I’ve come here over the years to who I am now and how much more comfortable I am here, not only in terms of the country but how I feel in my own skin too. True, there are days that require me to grit my teeth and carry on but there are other days of crazy happy fun adventures and I wouldn’t change it.
Okay, this time round I’m actually gonna finish ! Not to be like all the youtubers and influencers and things but #likeandsubscribe… lol joking, but I actually really love knowing who’s reading my blog posts etc so do say hello in the comments/message me if you fancy it.
That’s all for now, xoxo
Nadia's Adventures 