Feeling At Home?

(I wrote this post in reply to a post Maija wrote on her blog concerning the Latvian Independence Day and her concerns about young Latvians leaving her country for a ‘better’ future…)

Thank you for the interesting post, Maija :). It’s sad that many Latvian people seem to leave the country for a future they think and hope will be better. It is indeed a worrying question whether Latvia will be able to grow economically and socially when her children are slipping away from her. Belgians like to…

…stay for long times at the same place, so most Belgians either stay here or when going abroad are gone for good. I’m pretty patriotic myself and will let no opportunity pass to cheer for my country, so if I had the choice I would definitely want to stay in Belgium, both because I love my country and its people but also because it is a very safe country to live in socially. But alas I was not born in a country famous for its astronomers, so I have to seek my future elsewhere… :(

The Netherlands is a nice country, and I’ve grown to like it more than I ever expected, probably because of all the prejudices that exist concerning each others countries. I’ll never feel really at home here though. Once I was driving back to the Netherlands with my mom, I started feeling excited seeing the landscape change to the one I’m used to around Leiden, and it surprised me that I would feel as if I’m returning home, feeling all warm and fuzzy inside. However… the feeling that I get when I’m sitting in the train and hearing my local dialect again, spoken by those high school and college students is so much more stronger…

I’ll always be a foreigner here, no matter how friendly I’m being treated. Maybe I’m not doing my best. Maybe I should watch more Dutch TV for example. I think only about 5 % of the time I watch TV I’m watching Dutch TV. Yet when I’m watching Dutch TV I feel distant, out of place… I don’t know why. Belgian TV and radio is probably my most important link to my country. In a way it’s sad to feel a foreigner, but I have no choice… I think… Not if I want to have a shot at doing exciting work as an astronomer…

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 20th, 2005 at 21:30 and is filed under Daily Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

Thoughts On The Matrix »
« Guilty of Red Bull?

  • Author

    Tijl Kindt aka Quicky - HeadshotTijl Kindt
    Netherlands
    Hey there :), welcome to my homepage/blog. Named after Tijl Uilenspiegel, I'm a 22-year-old Belgian astronomy student, also known as Quicky, living in the Netherlands. In my free time I enjoy spending my time with movies, my computer, photography and chatting with friends all over the world. My main characteristics are probably... More »

  • Categories

  • Copyright notice

    • Creative Commons License
    • All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
    • This site is best viewed with Firefox 2.0 or higher.

    • This blog is protected by Spam Karma 2: 81438 Spams eaten and counting...

One Response to “Feeling At Home?”

  1. Maija says:

    Nice feelings you have for your country :).

    I also believe that we can feel comfortable living abroad, but it depends on the goals, some personal qualities, I guess, and yes… we must try as well. :) Though, I’m not completely sure what this ‘try’ includes. I think it is important to respect the place and people, their culture, traditions etc., but it doesn’t mean that foreigner/emigrant must become one of them. Though, it is more complicated than it seems… if cultures differs a lot, for example. I’ll give it a thought some other day :).

    Myself I believe that my home is wherever I am. :)

    Ouch, very sleepy. Good night :)

    November 22nd, 2005 at 0:28