Springtime

Post number two.... :)

My profile pic shows me enjoying my first Spring for nearly a decade.  In Thailand we had three seasons... wet and hot, dry and hotter, dry and cooler!  Spring in New Zealand is exquisite!  The colours, the scents, the clean, clean air (I hope I never take this for granted).

After not seeing my #1 son for nearly a year, he flew down from Auckland for my birthday so I was with all three sons for the weekend.

One of the things about living in another country is losing your kids to your passport country once they are finished with school.  It felt like #1 had been banished from Thailand.  Of course he hadn't, but he couldn't get a job there without a work permit, university there was very limited in English and he was extremely restless and lonely.  Restless as it was definitely time to move on and grow up, lonely cos most his friends had already left for their respective passport countries.

When he left, I was very happy and very sad all at the same time.  Happy for him that he was able to go back to New Zealand and enjoy life there, sad for him that he was facing so many issues with repatriation, finding employment and having to make new friends in a new culture.  Very strange thing this realising that your culture isn't really your culture... growing up definitely Kiwi in an expat culture only to find out that you're not really a Kiwi anymore!

People here in NZ say that people leave here too and you miss them... I acknowledge that but - here we go with a rant - we have friends in Thailand, England, France, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, Australia, China, South America, North America, Canada and of course New Zealand.  Doesn't look like much does it?  Many of these people have been more than just friends, living in an expat community your friends often become pseudo family... so we actually have family in all these places!  Remembering also that when you say USA that that is a huge place and we could indeed write Kentucky, Illinois, Michigan, California and so on...

Face Book and other electronic ways of keeping in touch are great, but the reality is we may never see any of these people again.  It really hurts at times, other times we feel extremely privileged to know so many wonderful people in so many places!  If money ever falls out of the sky we have many countries where we have free places to stay!

Back to Spring.... time for walk, time for inhalation of that clean, clean air... main motivation being desire to lose weight that living back here in this non-Asian country has put upon me!