Wherein this avatar's fates, adventures and experiences in, his thoughts and feelings about and his reactions to his first and second life are depicted with written messages, images and other audiovisual tools.
I am Bock in SecondLife and Bock is I in first life. We share thoughts, opinions, feelings, actions and reactions. We are one and the same and inseparable. On this blog I choose to share both my realities.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
For Nostalgic Reasons
Nostalgia is great sometimes. Today - as so many times before - I suddenly get the tunes and words of the Pakistani National Anthem on my mind.
I lived eleven of my first twelve years in real life in Pakistan together with my father and mother and my two sisters. I totally loved the people, the culture the food - well everything except the radical Islamists. Even as a child I can remember myself thinking "What the hell is this about?"
Well things changed as we moved back to my homecountry Sweden when I was twelve. As a truely Punjabi boy with the bad fortune of having all-Swedish ancestry I felt totally out of place in Sweden. I had a total culturecrash that lasted for about four years.
All those four years I hated being in Sweden, being Swedish, hearing Swedish and eating their lousy, Swedish, bland, awful food that tasted like paper and nothing else. I wanted to go "back home to Pakistan" with every fiber of my body.
Relearning the social codes of human interaction was the hardest.
Everytime I talked to a Swede he/she would think I stood to close and wonder why I was holding on to him/her. As they tried to back away from me I would merely follow not understanding what was going on. This kept on til someone finally asked me right out and the problem was made clear to me.
In Sweden we always stand at arm´s length from the person we are talking with, and there is definetly no reason at all to hold on to the other person.
Pakistan still means a lot to me, although I can no longer say I love it as I used to.
P.S. Close to 29 years later I still remembered the first verse of the anthem correctly, the second verse not so good and the rest felt like complete news to me...
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Kram!
ReplyDeleteKram Apmel!
ReplyDeleteGood one! Language is not all it takes, the social codes are much harder to crack and I'm not sure that they teach you about those in SFI? So no wonder a lot of people moving here from abroad feel alienated.
ReplyDeleteHugs
/Sofie Snowbear
I can so relate to your story, have been thinking about it off and on all morning. I lived in New Zealand as a child and know the feeling of not belonging when we returned to Holland.I was 'homesick' for years and the first chance I had to return I did. By that time I was 21 and tried to imagine me living there and just couldn't see it.So that did help but I still can get emotional when I see something about New Zealand or like recently when my cousin, who is maori, was over here with a maori group doing a haka at Leiden railstation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoxhO4iG3IU
ReplyDelete/me sighs....
LOL Sofie, "Swedish For Immigrants" may scratch on the surface of the codes, but it takes awhile to learn them all..
ReplyDeleteLoved the video, Suteruni, thanks for sharing it and your story!
Hugs both!
Bock; Yeah very true, you can't learn everything from a book ;-) I'd like to see a system of... hm, not like a mentors but some kind of support-people whom you can discuss with and ask questions about every day living. I know some libraries offer language cafés where you can come and practice swedish and talk about stuff going on in society - newspapers are often a good source to pick topics from and you can talk about similarities and differences and really dare to ask questions.
ReplyDeleteThat´s a great idea as a starting point, Sofie!
ReplyDelete