January Journal: Living abroad

[liv]

ceb is another person who's given me several really excellent prompts for this meme. Today's is What was different about living abroad and would you like to do it again? (if so, where?)

I put this post straight after the imaginary travel one, because the truth is that I like living abroad for a substantial amount of time, having a mundane life, doing a job and all the rest, much more than I like travelling as a tourist. When I decided on a science career I thought to myself that it would take many years to get a permanent job (if I ever made it at all) and I'd probably be underpaid as well as insecure, but to make up for that I'd be in a position to look for jobs in just about any country in the developed world. In fact it didn't work out quite like I expected; I landed a well-paid, tenured job when I was just 30. And the price I've paid for that especially good fortune is that I'm committed to staying in England, and not even a part of England I'm much attached to. But before that I lived and worked in Scotland for 3½ years, and then in Sweden for about 3 years.

OK, whether Scotland counts as "abroad" is a political question, but I think culturally it gave me many of the same experiences that living in an actually different country would! Even the language aspect is not as straightforward as you might think; Scottish English spoken with a strong Dundonian accent is just barely mutually comprehensible with the English of SE England I grew up with. But at the same time, there's kind of an assumption that my dialect of English is "correct" English, so there wasn't really an expectation that I would learn Dundonian. OTOH, the proportion of adults who are functionally literate in English is higher in Sweden than in Scotland, so there's that. And many Swedes are kind of surprised that anyone would bother learning a language with barely 10 million speakers when "everybody" speaks English anyway.

In many ways I had a similar experience in both countries, of moving from not really understanding what people were saying, but having people politely speak in (standard) English in order to include me, to eventually understanding the dialect / language quite well but missing nuances. The difference was that in Sweden I was applauded for attempting to speak Swedish, whereas if I'd tried to speak Scottish English people would have thought I was taking the mick. In both cases I really enjoyed gradually getting my head round a new(ish) language, and being in the really comfortable position that I didn't absolutely need a language I was poorly fluent in to be able to survive.

Beyond that, in both cases I've really enjoyed meeting new people, and actually meeting them, getting the chance to become friends, not just having a fun conversation once and then moving on. Of course you can meet new people by staying in the same place too, I hardly claim to know everyone in in my city, let alone everyone in England. But somehow being an expat, particularly working in a university, gives more opportunities to make new friends; being somewhat of an exotic novelty worked to my advantage. What I didn't enjoy was living places where it took a whole day of travel to be able to see my English friends. I managed to end up dating people in the south of England during most of my time abroad.

The other thing I really enjoyed about living abroad was discovering that some things I thought of just the way things work are in fact culturally specific. I found Scotland to have a much stronger sense of community than anywhere I've lived in England; people look out for their neighbours in smaller and larger ways. There tend to be much better cross-generational connections, too, people are friends with people of all ages and you're much less likely to see age-segregated social groups. Also, Scotland has a completely reasonable and sensible system for buying and selling property, something I would have assumed was impossible if I hadn't lived there. The other thing I really liked was that the smoking ban was introduced much earlier in Scotland than in England, and the experience of being able to go out for a meal or a drink and not end up with asthma or my hair smelling of smoke was a revelation to me. Plus, and it may seem a little thing, Scotland doesn't close pubs at 11 pm. This meant that I felt perfectly safe walking around the city at just about any time of night (possibly less so in the real small hours, but definitely any time between 11 pm and 2 am). There's no crowd of drunk people chucked out onto the streets at 11:05 feeling bored and aggressive. Instead, people stay in pubs until they've had enough to drink and are tired and actually feel like going home, and then they go home rather than hanging about looking for a fight. And there's enough late-opening places that the streets aren't deserted at midnight.

I think in many ways the best thing about Sweden is that childcare is assumed to be the responsibility of the community, rather than being 90% left up to mothers. You wouldn't think that would make a difference to a childfree person, but wow. It was amazing to have three years when I never heard the kind of conversation where women fret about whether they can combine motherhood with their careers, whether the cost of childcare negates the money they can earn. There is simply no discussion about whether it's damaging to children for mothers to return to work when they are young; it's just assumed that that's the default. The state, not employers, pay for up to two years of salary (which is flexible, it doesn't have to be two years in a solid chunk) for people who take parental leave, and just that phrase "parental leave" rather than "maternity leave" was a revelation to me. Given the opportunity, and in the absence of it being financially punitive or socially weird, it turns out men take parental leave. So men are involved in childcare, childcare and childrearing are part of general conversation and are mainstream political issues, it's not seen as a woman's thing. It's assumed that affordable full-time, regulated daycare for children of any age is a baseline part of normal social infrastructure. At the same time, there is very little in the way of adult-only (which defaults to men and young single women only) social life: there's no prudishness about bringing children to events where alcohol is consumed, for example. Workplaces are structured in genuinely family friendly ways, not the kind of family friendly that assumes a male paterfamilias and his wife and kids mostly staying in the domestic sphere. This relatively small cultural difference means that there are swathes of sexism, which I'd taken as pretty much inevitable until 2006, that are simply absent. Not that Sweden is a perfect non-sexist society, by any means, but take away the idea that women have babies / men have careers, and all kinds of doors are open to women, including childfree women.

Other things I liked about Swedish culture: the work-life balance, where people work hard from 8 to 5, and then go home and have a life. People don't take work home or work weekends, unless it's a real emergency. And everybody takes a whole month off in the summer. Equally, people don't slack off during work time, if you're working you're working. You have regular coffee breaks (fika is a real Swedish institution), but you don't goof around on the internet when you're not on your break. Also there's no real concept of trespass; everybody has the right to walk on any land and sail on any waters and land on any beach, no matter who owns the land / sea. (People can have private gardens surrounding their actual houses, and obviously it's illegal to damage or take away stuff from other people's land, but if you own a tract of forest or farmland you can't prevent people from simply being in it.) I loved the universal design of cities. Accessibility isn't a generous concession to those poor unfortunate disabled people, it's just a given that public areas should be usable by the public. Including people with kids in pushchairs or people carrying heavy luggage as well as people with temporary or permanent mobility limitations. Colleagues were horrified when I asked about planning accessible routes for when my brother was visiting; obviously you don't have to make special plans, because the standard routes are accessible!

Would I live abroad again? In many ways I would love to; I've very much enjoyed the challenge of carving a niche for myself somewhere different from my culture of origin. Still, I have more ties here in England than I ever imagined I have, not least a husband who's pretty keen to continue living in country where he's spent his whole life. I think Scotland and Sweden were particularly good places for me, because they're culturally different enough to be interesting but are broadly anglophone and the culture is still northern European. I was a massive francophile as a kid and I always imagined I'd spend some time living in France, but now I'm not sure it'll ever happen. I could picture living in Canada or Australia, because similar to Sweden and Scotland they're primarily anglophone, mostly northern European influenced cultures, even if they're scarily far away from the UK.

I have considered the option of going to somewhere more different from what I'm used to, and part of me would still like to but part of me isn't sure if I'm brave enough. One possibility would be to find a job at a partner university or an overseas branch of a British institution; there's starting to be some really exciting stuff happening in higher education in emerging economies and I could well imagine a secondment of a year or two to help get a new college established. Part of what puts me off is, apart from not being sure I could cope for a substantial period somewhere English isn't really spoken, that most countries I know of are worse places to be Jewish than the UK. Sometimes because of active antisemitism, sometimes because the Jewish community there is simply too small for me to have a satisfying religious and community life.

I would jump at the chance to return to Scotland or Sweden; I think both countries suit me better than England. Indeed I am thinking about the potential for devolution and whether I ought to make sure I'm north of the border if that happens. On present form I think Scotland is a much much better place to be old than England, so in as far as I have any plans at all I'm seriously considering retiring there. But if Scotland leaves the UK and then England leaves the EU (which I really hope won't happen!) I might no longer have the freedom to just up and move to Scotland if I feel like it.

[January Journal masterlist. Anyone want the last empty slot?]

Comments

[hatam_soferet]

I think you'd be a good influence on Montreal.

[rmc28]

Wow, you make Sweden sound FANTASTIC.

[jack]

There are definite problems with Sweden, but after hearing Liv describe some of the good things, I feel frustrated that people stand around arguing about things like childcare, parental leave, and good schooling when Sweden's model works so well. Can we just hurry up and copy them, please?

[vatine]

Sweden's, on the whole, great (with some black spots).

[jack]

FWIW, I do _like_ the idea of living abroad, but I'm not sure I could overcome the hurdles of:

1. Restarting a career.
2. Learning how to navigate a whole new bureaucracy.
3. Finding somewhere that wasn't (a) prone to -30 temperatures (b) gambling on being able to become fluent in a new language as an adult (c) America.

[rysmiel]

We're not prone to -30 temperatures, we stand up and walk about in them to keep warm.

[pretty_panther]

This is fascinating and I really loved hearing about Scotland from your point of view. I do think it is good that pubs don't close at 11. Some will do if they are low on business but yeah, it definitely stops a hoard of aggression spilling out onto the streets, or at least lowers it. One of the strangest things to me when I'm visiting friends in England is how everything shuts. Shops open nearly normal hours on Sundays as you will have seen so the idea of having to clock watch to make sure you can get a pint of milk on time is always weird to me.

[igmansfield.co.uk]

This is really interesting, particularly how you make Sweden sound. I love the idea of anyone having the right to roam anywhere. I'm living abroad at the moment in the Philippines and have both some of the easier things you experienced such as language (the Philippines markets itself as the third largest English speaking country in the world) as well as some things being entirely different, ranging from the good (the friendliness of people - to the extent that I've really noticed it when going to other countries that people say hello much less), the bad (private healthcare - which I really don't like even though I'm in the very fortunate position of my employer paying for anything the NHS would cover) to the simply very different, such as living in a country where having domestic help is still commonplace.

Like you, friends and family back home are the hardest things to leave and I wouldn't live here permanently, but it does make me curious to try other countries.