Comments on: Nostalgia

By: natalija

natalija — Tue, 18 May 2010 07:05:24 +0000

Bevare meg vel,Stavanger e jo verdens beste byen, tro ei jenta frå Moskva,koss klara du å flytta derfrå i det heile tatt?! Eg ska dit i august og glede meg så faen te det!! Javel,eg kjenne ingen og e jo russisk,men det å melda meg inn kan ikkje vera tungt med nogen så snakke denne dialekt!!

By: Sunkyoung

Sunkyoung — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:08:10 +0000

I happened to read this post and the comments Carleen and your mom had left. It seems that three of you are tightly connected to the same feeling of nostalgia and multicultural identity.

As a person who hasn’t moved to as many other countries as you and not stayed in foreign countries more than a year, I have always admired the nomad’s life. Even with the two chances of living abroad, my life has been full of desire to escape from where I am now ever since I lived in Geoje island.

Even if I live in somewhere in Europe one day, I don’t think I will live in the place for the rest of my life. I’m now at the point where the new road will be in front of me soon. To whichever direction the path leads me, one thing for sure is I will make the best of it and fall in love with the place.

By: Carleen

Carleen — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I know this feeling well and sympathize. I’ve experienced the same thing ever since leaving Norway when I was fourteen. For the entire first year I spent here in the states I thought of nothing but going home to Stavanger again. Then, when I arrived there for your graduation the following summer, I realized that I didn’t really have as much in common with that life and culture anymore. Each time I go back I feel more and more like a visitor and less like a native so I keep wondering how it is I can keep telling people I’m from there when they ask and continue identifying with a culture I obviously know less and less about. This is all exemplified by the fact that I can’t speak the language very well and communicate very little with the locals when I’m there, finding it easier to just pretend I’m an american tourist. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that when I was living there, I was living the life of an expatraite, not a native. I went to a private school with other expatriate children. We were supposed to be an international school but in truth it functioned and depended more on the American school system than anything else. We had lockers, we had basketball and baseball, we had choir and band, we had only two recesses per day, etc. For me, once I no longer belonged to the school, once all my friends had long gone, I no longer belonged to Norway. I was hoping I could move back there one day and find a way to get in better touch with that part of me again. But I’m at the point now where I refuse to identify myself with one culture or the other. I will never be anything but something inbetween and I’m slowly learning how to be happy with that. Despite how foreign I feel when I’m there, one thing will always be true. I was born in Stavanger, Norway. No matter how much it has changed or will change in the future, it will always be a very important part of my life.