Bradley departs. He\u2019s the reason I ended up in Scotland in the first place; he invited me, told me Edinburgh would suit me, and gave me a place to stay on my arrival. For the past year-and-a-bit he\u2019s been my friend-from-home. (Which is not to forget Blair, who did the first few months, and Cal, who did the last few, nor all the friends-from-home based in London and other places.)<\/p>\n
The clich\u00e9 of the Kiwi on OE (non-Kiwi readers, OE = Overseas Experience = the reason why middle-class Antipodeans are working in your local pub) is you get a job and a flat and then sit tight with your circle of Kiwi mates in whatever city you\u2019re in (i.e. London) and embark on the occasional bus tour through Ireland, drinking trip to Prague, caf\u00e9 trip to Amsterdam and mission to a Germanic beer fest to keep your travelling hand in. And then two years later you go home, wondering if you did fit in enough travelling, really.<\/p>\n
There\u2019re reasons for this. Take the travelling one. Once you have a job, it\u2019s harder to disappear off the beaten path and go randomly travelling for a month. If you don\u2019t have a regular job, it\u2019s hard to get enough money together to live on, let alone fund a trip to the continent. The old catch 22.<\/p>\n
The friends-from-home thing is a bit less of a logic game and a bit more of a psych undergrad\u2019s 1am theorising. What\u2019s indisputable is that for most folk, staying close to friends from home becomes a big deal when you\u2019re on the other side of the world. It\u2019s not just about using people from home as a crutch or safe haven, but something a lot more enigmatic – something to do with perspective and scale, and with identifying what we value in life. Not to say safety and ease aren\u2019t part of the equation, but it\u2019s too easy to sneer at this trend.<\/p>\n
Most New Zealanders will fall into some variation of this trap when they travel, unless they have chosen destinations more exotic than the big, obvious cities. I\u2019m certainly in the trap. Of course, and this is also the standard cry for mitigation, \u201cI\u2019ve also engaged with the locals!\u201d (Such as they are in Edinburgh. Scotland\u2019s capital city is a large swirl of immigrants and travellers anyway. If you want Scots, it is commonly understood, you\u2019re on the wrong coast – Glasgow where you head for that.)<\/p>\n
I have a bunch of friends who are not from South Africa, or Australia, or New Zealand, and we get on fine. But I\u2019ve had almost as many friends here who are New Zealanders as friends who are not. Almost all of them I didn\u2019t know before arriving here – the other obvious fallout of travelling, that if you meet someone from home on the other side of the world, you have an instant conversation starter and enough common ground to make friendship easy.<\/p>\n
Sometimes this has bothered me, this business of being in Scotland and passing time with New Zealanders. Then I realised something, and now it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
I realised, simply, that when I look at my friends, I don\u2019t see any difference between the Kiwis and the locals (not to mention the travellers from other lands again). It\u2019s so obvious I hadn\u2019t even realised it – they\u2019re all in the same big category of \u2018friends in Edinburgh\u2019. And if that\u2019s the case, then the only way the from home\/not from home distinction matters is in justifying to myself, and others, that I haven\u2019t squandered my travel by spending too much time with people just like me.<\/p>\n
So I\u2019ve realised that now. And I\u2019m not going to give the matter another thought, because I don\u2019t need to justify anything to myself. They\u2019re all friends. They\u2019re all just people, and I like \u2018em. Och.<\/p>\n
(Note: this point of view does nothing to mitigate the \u2018didn\u2019t travel much\u2019 thing. If I believed in New Years\u2019 Revolutions, that would be one – to have travelled to enough places that I\u2019d look back this time next year and feel like I hadn\u2019t wasted a moment on this side of the world.)<\/p>\n
Anyway, Bradley departs. He\u2019s heading back to New Zealand, for at least the immediate future. Wellingtonians, watch out for him. Buy him a beer for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bradley departs. He\u2019s the reason I ended up in Scotland in the first place; he invited me, told me Edinburgh would suit me, and gave me a place to stay on my arrival. For the past year-and-a-bit he\u2019s been my friend-from-home. (Which is not to forget Blair, who did the first few months, and Cal, … Continue reading Over ‘Ere<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8D9ZE-h","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6029,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions\/6029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}