Home

[popcorn]

Do you think you can have more than one home? I know some people make jokes when others ask or point out that home is where they are now, not where they grew up or where their family (mostly) is.

I guess I've just always felt like I can call both places home. Seattle will always be my home. It's where I spent the majority of my childhood Even Madrid is somewhat like home to me even though we are no indefinitely in Frankfurt.

What about you guys? What is home?

[anna7602]

You can definitely acquire a new home. New York is home to me, even though I didn't grow up there. I spent nearly a decade there with DH, own a home there, gave birth there, had a lot of life-changing experiences in general there and feel a lot more connected to it than I do to the city of my birth. But, I also have a love-hate relationship with the city of my birth and felt kind of out of place there growing up. New York was the first place in my life that I truly felt I belonged in.

Also, my family is scattered all over the place, so that makes where they are irrelevant to the home concept.

[aMrsin09]

DC is I guess is sort of home. I lived there for 20 years and still have a property there. But where my family lives, isn't really home. I haven't been there in 20 years!

Pretty much home for me is where we make it. As much as I am not fond of it here, this is home.

[GilliC]

I'm not particularly tied to geography, so I guess I think of "home" as wherever I have a strong support network.

I used to feel like I had two homes. Indiana was where my family is and where I grew up. But Oslo is also my home, because it's where I have the most close friends, it's where I have my apartment (my "space"), and it's where I feel the most relaxed and calm.

Since I found out that I don't have much of a support system in my parents, I don't really feel like Indiana is much of a home anymore. My grandmother and my best friend's parents are there, but other than that, I don't really have much in the way of a support network. If my best friend's parents moved to North Carolina to be with her, I might actually feel like Raleigh was more of a home than Indiana, even though I've never lived there.

(I guess it helps that the US is relatively homogeneous, so the differences between the states are not so drastic.)

[anna7602]

Jun 4, 2012 7:54:56 GMT -5 GilliC said:

(I guess it helps that the US is relatively homogeneous, so the differences between the states are not so drastic.)

Really? There are large parts of the United States I don't feel like I can relate to at all. To me, California feels a lot more different from New York than Paris does, for example. And Miami is practically a separate country, even from the rest of the state of Florida.

[azure]

I think you can have multiple places to call "Home". For me it is here in France and Saigon, most of my adult life was spent there. I don't really feel like my hometown is home anymore though. It's changed a lot and I've somewhat lost the connection to that place and know that I wouldn't go back for visits if my parents and brother didn't live there.

[popcorn]

Jun 4, 2012 8:03:48 GMT -5 anna7602 said:

Jun 4, 2012 7:54:56 GMT -5 GilliC said:

(I guess it helps that the US is relatively homogeneous, so the differences between the states are not so drastic.)

Really? There are large parts of the United States I don't feel like I can relate to at all. To me, California feels a lot more different from New York than Paris does, for example. And Miami is practically a separate country, even from the rest of the state of Florida.

I think I have to agree with you on that point. The southern states I grew up in before moving to Seattle when I was 9 are not like Washington at all. Even Eastern and Western WA have big difference in culture/thought proccesses. And we used to make jokes all the time about differences between East Coast and West Coast.

I think there is a rather large chunk in the middle of the country that is fairly homogenous, but then you have the south, the north east coast, and the west coast which all have varying idealogies, forms of speaking, etc.

[crimsonandclover]

I have 2 homes. One is the area where I grew up and where we are currently for the summer, and the other is in Germany. No matter where I am, when I talk about traveling to the other place, I say I'm "going home in x days/weeks."

[Deleted]

My hometown will always be "home" at some level, however I feel passionately about NYC being our home because the life we have here we have built all on our own. Here we have chosen our lifestyle and achieved freedom to actually live it. Way too many aspects of life in Italy made it impossible for me (us) to ever feel like we were actually at home. It's hard to explain.

[GilliC]

I remember being terrified of moving to Texas for my first internship, but honestly I didn't find Austin to be all that different from Indiana. There are many of the same stores. They spoke the same language. The way you pay bills and deal with the government are vaguely similar. Shopping happens generally the same way, and even the store hours are fairly alike. Having visited my best friend in North Carolina, her daily routine seems mostly unchanged from when she lived in Indiana or Texas.

Obviously there are some subtle differences, both in terms of people's mentalities and day-to-day things, but I never felt them to be as pronounced as the differences from Paris, Beijing, and Oslo.

I guess by some coincidence I've only spent significant time in parts of the US that are roughly similar: central Indiana, north Austin, the Dallas suburbs, and Raleigh just happen to be a lot alike? I don't know.

ETA - I always figured it was because it was so easy to move from place to place. At least half of my graduating class has moved to other states, and they brought their culture and mindset with them and blended it with the places they moved. And considering the fact that big-box corporations have completely taken over a lot of the suburbs and some smaller communities, they've started to evolve in very similar ways.

[popcorn]

I see what you're saying and it makes sense Gilli.

I also have moved around between many states as has most of my family and you're right, day-to-day things are manageable and you can adapt very easily.

[anna7602]

Jun 4, 2012 11:02:10 GMT -5 popcorn said:

I see what you're saying and it makes sense Gilli.

I also have moved around between many states as has most of my family and you're right, day-to-day things are manageable and you can adapt very easily.

How would you compare it to moving from Spain to Germany, though? Because I feel like some parts of living in France are easy-peasy after having endured endless bureacracy living in Spain in my previous life. I think some could generalize that large parts of Europe are similar in the same ways large parts of the United States are (except for the language), but there are still some marked cultural differences between, say, Lisbon and Berlin, the way there are between Boston and Los Angeles.

I'm not trying to be hard on GilliC here. I honestly just think that saying the U.S. is homogenous is like saying Western Europe is homogenous. In some aspects, they are, but in others, I feel like there are very marked differences.

[mrsukyankee]

When I talk about NEPA as 'home', it's not really my home any longer - I haven't lived there in ages and will most likely never live there again...it's more my childhood home. Home is where I am now. So in a way, yes, I have more than one home - the home of my childhood and the home of my adulthood. I lived in places in between but none of them felt like home.

[oneslybookworm]

I have several "homes" so I totally think it's possible to have more than one. The place where I was born and grew up will always be home to me, but so will the town that DH and I lived in before we moved to Europe. And now...I think of this place as home a lot too. So, yeah...maybe I'm just a home whore...I'll love it up for anything.

[GilliC]

To be fair, I've only lived in two places in Western Europe (Paris and Oslo), and I find that they're much more different than any of the places in the States I've experienced. There are certainly similarities, but I find the differences to be much more noticeable than the similarities. Especially working for the same company in both locations, the personal priorities and attitudes are extremely different (and my French colleagues here certainly comment on them).

[loveday]

The UK will always be "home" to me, no matter how long I live in the US. I still have very strong ties to friends and family there.

I've been in the US for almost 16 years now and have made my life here, but it's just not quite the same. IDK, does that sound weird?

[clickerish]

I'm not geographically tied, and sometimes that makes me sad since I actually don't feel like I have a "home" at all. For me, home is more about a person or people.

That being said, it makes sense to me that you might feel that way. If home is the way you feel about a certain place, and you have put some sort of energy and roots into more than one, it would feel like "going home" in either.

[Wanderista]

I have a number of places that are like homes to me. Definitely 3 or 4 and then I have memories of a lot of others. I like The Beatles song, "In My Life," to describe how I feel about these places. I'm definitely connected to them and to a wide network of people whom I've shared different moments with. The people that I know are all scattered all over too. Most of them are expats or very internationally-minded not unlike the people on this board.

I had a Japanese photography teacher once who said that when you live abroad for a significant period of time that you are never really home anywhere. I don't know if I agree with that, but it is true that by being exposed to so much, the way that one thinks about the world changes very significantly from how people who spend all of their lives living in more or less the same area think.

[popcorn]

Jun 4, 2012 12:01:18 GMT -5 anna7602 said:

Jun 4, 2012 11:02:10 GMT -5 popcorn said:

I see what you're saying and it makes sense Gilli.

I also have moved around between many states as has most of my family and you're right, day-to-day things are manageable and you can adapt very easily.

How would you compare it to moving from Spain to Germany, though? Because I feel like some parts of living in France are easy-peasy after having endured endless bureacracy living in Spain in my previous life. I think some could generalize that large parts of Europe are similar in the same ways large parts of the United States are (except for the language), but there are still some marked cultural differences between, say, Lisbon and Berlin, the way there are between Boston and Los Angeles.

I'm not trying to be hard on GilliC here. I honestly just think that saying the U.S. is homogenous is like saying Western Europe is homogenous. In some aspects, they are, but in others, I feel like there are very marked differences.

Actually, since I spoke the language in Spain the beauracracy never got me down. Really, I never understood what the big fuss was about concerning visas, renewing visas, etc. Just look it up online before you go and you'll generally find everything you need!

On the other hand there's a billion things to freakin find here in Germany and not speaking the language makes it so much harder. For example, we still don't have our tax numbers (which apparently are supposed to be sent to us) even though we registered at the finazamt the day after we moved. And we don't have our health cards (also to be mailed to us) even though we got coverage the week we moved. Everything is supposed to be mailed, not done in person because (and I quote a woman in the kindergeld office) "this is Germany, we don't speak English." I think I've had many more difficulties with red tape here so far than I ever did in Spain, but I don't know how much of that is to do with knowing the language.

In the end, I think you both make good points. ;D I'm a little buzzed so I have no idea how to make this end intelligently. Good night!

[americaninoz]

yes absolutely!! Home to me is where I grew up, where my parents are. But also I consider where we live now our 'home' as well.