BLOG NAME CHANGED!

Hi lovelies! Today I come to you with some pretty big news: my blog's name has changed. The URL stays the same old so no need for panic - or frankly anything from your side of the deal. So why did I change it?

If you want to do a little exercise, you can type in "Terra Incognita blog" to Google Search and see if you find me. I bet you don't. That's because there are so many blogs or travel agencies around the world with that exact name that I drown in this mess called Terra Incognitas. The domain name isn't free in any form, the blogspot URL isn't free, there's at least 5 Terra Incognita Twitter accounts... you get the drift. It wasn't original enough and seriously affected my SEO.

So we here at ex-Terra Incognita are now called The Strayling. What's that? It's a real word, believe me or not, combining the verb 'stray' with the suffix '-ling'. A strayling is someone who wanders, a drifter, the one that strays.

I have aggressively changed my social media account names today. Make sure to follow me all around internet so you won't miss the rest of my adventures! 

(If you're already following me on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest of Bloglovin', don't stress, you're still on board)

Twitter: @thestrayling

Facebook: @thestrayling

Pinterest: thestrayling

Bloglovin': The Strayling

But more importantly: I HAVE A NEW INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT! And I mean completely new. I wanted to separate my blog activities from my personal life, so go ahead and follow my new only blog-related Instagram account:

Instagram: the_strayling

I'm so excited. Are you? I hope you are! Tune in for new posts in the near future, including a fresh story in Melissa's Misadventures series - this time it's me causing public disturbance in a Hare Krishna mass....

Do you like the new name? How did you come up with your own blog name? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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WHEN FAR AWAY IS TOO FAR AWAY

There are times when living abroad feels like the best idea ever, and then there are times when you wish you never left. This is a story about the latter one.

Emigration is fun when things go as planned. Life goes on in your new country, and your entourage back home doesn't have much to report about - nothing negative, at least. It's easy to fall into this expat bubble where everything else outside of it kind of stops existing. My problems are in Dublin, my errands are in Dublin, my worries and duties are in Dublin. The thin linkage back to Finland only reminds of itself when I occasionally have a chance to skype or whatsapp my friends and family in Helsinki. When there's not much happening in Finland, I'm content, because I can be sure I'm not missing out on anything.

Living abroad gives you so many things: independence, confidence, experience. I have had the chance to see the most marvellous of things - the snowy mountains of Greenland piercing a carpet of clouds moments before I landed in Reykjavik, the people of the huron-wendat tribe perform a traditional Native American hunting dance during their 3-day dance festival. I have stared at the vast emptiness of the Pacific Ocean at the coast of Western Canada and admired the silhouette of skyscrapers of New York from the top of Empire State Building. But in the end none of that matters, because despite all of the different wonders of the world I have seen, all hospitals look the same.

And there is something so indescribably terrifying, something so excruciatingly painful in that moment when you follow a nurse pushing your loved one's hospital bed into the room where you know she will die.

A month and a half after receiving the news of my 71-year old grandmother's cancer diagnosis I find myself back in Finland, having booked the last possible flight still available with a week's notice. I have next to nothing in my bag: a tooth brush, a pyjama and a set of undies and socks (which of course looked slightly suspicious in the airport security check and probably was the reason I was pulled aside for a "random swabs test" for strains of chemicals in my luggage). I only brought myself, my stuttering Finnish I haven't had a chance to speak in 4 months, and my heavy guilt of ever having left my family.

She died 2 days after my arrival. The moment I heard about her death, 3 hours after visiting her in the hospital, I had this film-like rewind of all of those brief moments we had together during her last years - and they are few, as I spent her last Christmas in Canada, and I only saw her once between my return from Québec and move to Dublin. I found myself asking "what if": what if I had never left? What if I had spent the last 3 years in Finland with my family instead of travelling in god knows where? Would I have more memories with her? Would I have more to cling on to now that she's gone, when everything I have left of her are those few whatsapp messages she sent me to Dublin?

My last message to her says "Always." I stared at this word for quite some time afterwards, trying to realise there will never be anything after it.

Time is limited when you live abroad. Every moment spent away is one more moment for you to live the life you wanted, and one moment less to be close to your loved ones. Finding the balance is painful.

Have you lost someone while living abroad? How have you found the balance of living your own life and visiting your home country? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Next Stop Dublin: Plans for the Future

My adventures in Canada are over, but my emigrant life is about to continue in 1,5 weeks. What's up next?

I'm moving to Dublin, Ireland, on the 14th of July. Unlike in Canada, my stay in Ireland will remain permanent until stated otherwise, since being a EU citizen grants me the right to stay and work in the country for as long as I want. Hooray! Good bye endless piles of forms and phone calls, I'm ready to sit back, relax and immigrate like never before.

The reason for my relocation is slightly different to Canada too, as I'm about to start my Postgraduate Degree in Trinity College Dublin. Not only is my country of residence changing, but my subject of study too - which actually makes me much more nervous than moving to a new country! Ireland surely won't be too different from England, where I've previously lived for 8 months, but taking on the challenge of studying sociology as a former literature student feels a little scary. My MPhil program is called Race, Ethnicity and Conflict, so more ponder and research about cultural questions are on their way. I couldn't possibly be more excited to start my studies in TCD! (and not only because of their ABSOLUTELY STUNNING LIBRARY) My postgrad degree will only last for a year, but if it turns out I'll fall in love with Ireland like I did with Canada, my plan is to stay there and seek employment in Dublin. I have no plans of returning to Finland. I often find myself explaining this decision, either to myself or other people, but all in all the core reason for emigrating from my home country is a very fundamental need and will to simply live somewhere else.

I chose Dublin for my Postgraduate studies because of multiple reasons:

1. The language -  I want to study in English in an English-speaking country. I often joke about being too old for mastering new languages, but it's partly true: I speak six languages, but studying in any of the countries where these languages are spoken (excluding English) didn't appeal to me. My second option after Ireland was the Netherlands, but realizing I would feel guilty for not learning any Dutch while living there made me quit the plan.

2. The cost - studying in Ireland is much cheaper than In the UK, for example. Well, it would have been if I had chosen any other school than Trinity College... 8000€/year better be worth it.

3. The culture - I love the Irish. I've visited Dublin once, and fell in love in an instant. To my experience, they're like the English without the unnecessary sea of courtesy and politeness, which often made my life a little difficult while living in Leicester. (in other words, I will never forget that one bus I missed because the confirmation email for my ticket didn't say anything about the means of redeeming my e-ticket, but instead was filled with courtesy phrases of different lengths about how important my satisfaction was for their company)

I expect the challenges of living in Ireland to be quite different to the ones in Canada. Instead of struggling with the language, I think I might get in trouble for not remembering to be friendly enough - I'm seriously bad with the please and how are you. Taking on the challenge of studying after working full-time for a year troubles me a little too. Onwards to new adventures!

Other news: I'm featured in expatsblog.com in the form of an interview about my expat life in Canada. You can read the interview HERE. If you're interested in learning more about the struggles of this potato face in Canada, I recommend you read it! Questions about language, transitions and favourite spots in Canada have been answered.

Other news no. 2: Remember that shitty flippy thing I called a phone in my post about MY EVERYDAY LIFE? Well, our ways have parted and I now have an actual phone. This means I now have an access to a camera on my phone, and apps, and stuff like that. So in other words, I now have an Instagram account. I'll use it to record little adventures in my immigrantish life, when things are fun but not worth a blog post. Stay tuned @melliais!

As a conclusion I'll answer a few questions addressed to me during the past 1,5 weeks in Finland: No, I don't have an apartment in Dublin. I'm staying in AirBnB for 2 weeks and hope to find a flat by then. No, I don't have a job in Dublin. I will apply for work when I get there. No, I can't use my Finnish phone number in Ireland. I have nothing in Ireland, and that's the best part. That's immigration - you have nothing, you start from scratch, and managing to build a fully functioning life out of nothing is the best reward there is.

She's From Québec

I'm standing in a queue to enter Vancouver Art Gallery, chatting with a friend, when suddenly the man standing in front of us turns around and strikes up a conversation:

"Do you mind me asking where you're from?"

"From Québec", my friend answers for us. "Québec City."

"Québec! How delightful! I've been there once, and I'm actually planning on returning later this year. Well, quebeckers, could you give me some tips? I'd like to visit some smaller cities on my next trip, but I don't really know the province..."

"Well, you could start by Sherbrooke I guess?", I suggest. "It's a little to the South from Québec. Or Lac Saint-Jean in the North."

"Or Trois-Rivières!", goes my friend, being a little patriotic about his hometown. "And there's Granby."

"How about the Gaspé region? It's by the Atlantic", I say.

"And well, there's always Montréal, not really small but..."

I give a little look at my friend and smile. "... Or Lévis."

We both laugh, and the man looks confused.

~ * ~

I first landed in Québec in June 2014, taking my first step to the continent of North America. I was a Finn in Québec, and to keep it simple, I hated it. I hated pretty much everything about Québec from the attitude quebeckers tend to give me when I couldn't speak French to the architecture and food. It was my first-ever culture shock. Needless to say, I was more than terrified a year later when I realised I had made the decision to immigrate into this anomaly.

Seven months later I'm paying my hot chocolate at Second Cup in Banff, Alberta. I'm slightly exhausted from all things English Canadian happening around me - but then I stick my debit card into the reader and see the machine automatically change the language into French. I smile, grab my cup and return to my table.

"Cette machine me parle en français!"
"Pour vrai?", goes my friend.
"Ooouuiiii!"

In seven months my hatred triggered by the fear of the unknown had turned into tender affection. Instead of pouting at home, I found myself seeking ways to adapt, learn and understand my new homeland. The uncomfortability (discussed more in THIS POST) had turned into unconditional curiosity. Thoughts like "Why is everyone always trying to talk to me in public places?" morphed into "So what if I sound like an idiot when I say the word 'la porte' - I want this door open!"

Seven months ago I never would have thought that there will be a day when a man from Vancouver addresses me as a quebecker, and that one tiny word, that absolutely irrelevant little term of a definition, warms up my cheeks and frees the butterflies in my stomach. Seven months ago navigating through a payment process in French was my absolute nightmare, but today it makes my heart long for my new home when I'm lost in the western prairies.

A Christmas gift from my spouse

To be called a quebecker doesn't make my heart skip a beat because it somehow erases my identity as a Finn. My identity as a Finn might take new forms in the upcoming years, but nothing will ever take away my childhood eating rye bread and feeling awkward about other people in the elevator. To be called a quebecker hits the right spot because it means I belong - that after months and months of struggling, fighting, tears and frustration I have reached such a peace of mind with my new home that being addressed as one of its residents feels right.

A Local is something that every immigrant seeks to become. A traveller, however, voyages on in the crowd, bumping into people she will never meet again, sitting in cafes observing passersby going about their lives - and in the end, catches the train and leaves forever as all the locals go on with their routines, never having known about the girl who was there for that blink of an eye. I was sitting with my backpack in that Starbucks in Vancouver, watching those people desperately trying to catch the bus, being an outsider from somewhere else. Their routines were my adventures.

To become a local asks for more than catching that same bus with everyone else: it asks you to want to belong. Becoming a local means you have to stop observing things by asking what is different, and instead address things with the question of why does it even matter. The showers are really different in Québec compared to Finland - but so what, since I can very successfully wash myself in both? Door knobs might be a bit confusing for someone who has turned handles all their lives, but so far I have been able to enter and exit every room I wanted. Quebeckers wash their dishes with sponges, and so will I.

Seven months ago I was a Finn in Québec, comparing my every step to all the steps I had taken in Finland. As months passed, that hunch of bitterness and sickening I felt for my home country slowly turned into nostalgic memories and distant contacts as I dove into the mystery called French-speaking Canada. After the first shock passed I proceeded to explore my new home with a never ending hunger, to a point where my colleague once told everyone that "Mel probably knows this city far better than any of us, so if you need directions, ask her".

Rue du Petit Champlain, Québec City

Then I made a trip to British Columbia, to the shores of the Pacific Ocean - to the very other side of the world from Finland. At that moment, as Finland is so very far away, Québec is my home. I experienced the same distance I took to Finland by moving to Québec by travelling across the whole country to Vancouver, and it made me realise exactly how much I have fallen in love with Québec. I now sweep its streets with routine and breath in its damp winter air every morning as the snow keeps on falling, and it feels like with every inhale I absorb a little piece of this land within me.

~ * ~

I sit at my desk at work, Facebook open, when my friend sends me a message. It's a link to THIS YOUTUBE VIDEO about people answering to the question "What is it to be a quebecker". I watch it, little teary-eyed, and then proceed to ask him if he thinks I will one day become a quebecker.

"But Mel", he says. "I think you already are."

Featured Interview and Other Little-Big News

Hi everyone!

It has been a busy few weeks for me: working full-time while simultaneously applying to multiple universities in another country has turned out to be quite time-consuming.

Recently I had a chance to share my expat experiences in an interview for expat-blog.com, an exchange network and blog directory dedicated to life abroad. It provides free information and advice to those living or wishing to live overseas. I answered questions regarding my life as a Finnish expat, my experience about Canada, and all things in between. You can read the interview HERE!

Apart from that, applying for Master's programs in another European country while living in North America has really stressed me out big time lately. It's officially my Reason #1 to stress. Reason #2 is the unbearably unstable life of an immigrant with a temporary employment contract: I don't speak the language, I don't have contacts or local work experience. I got hired for a 2-month temporary contract in August, and since then I have dreaded the final day of my employment in the most amazing job I have ever had.

Well, good news: my contract was renewed!

I now officially have a job at least until Christmas, and I could not be happier. My colleagues are incredibly helpful with my French struggles, and even if I'm still absolutely terrified of speaking the language, my understanding has improved tremendously. It all really depends on the accent now: at times I'm able to understand the whole sentence word by word, while sometimes there might be only one phrase I'm able to recognize. Learning to say "Nowadays I'm fed up with...." must be one of my favourite recent lessons.

Longer posts will follow!

Of Diaspora and Me

Québec City seen from Île d'Orléans

I'm sitting in a bus with someone I vaguely know, having a chit-chatty conversation in English. After a moment of silence this person starts speaking again, this time in French:

"You know Melissa, you really have to start speaking French. You're in Québec now, in here we speak French. It's not any harder than Spanish, Italian, German or any of those languages. You just have to start talking."

"All diasporas are unhappy, but every diaspora is unhappy in its own way", as my favourite literary theorist Vijay Mishra puts it by mimicking the famous opening sentence of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Anyone who has been even vaguely around me during the past spring semester is aware that my Bachelor's Thesis was about this very topic - not due to any selfhelp-therapy-reasons, but out of pure academic interest. However, now that I find myself more or less dislocated, it feels natural to return to the topic from a more personal point of view (by ruthlessly quoting myself from aforementioned thesis).

Diaspora - a sense of existent or imaginary cultural dislocation - is a phenomenon which applies to masses and individuals on the moment of migration: cultural clashes create readjusted and redefined cultural identities as solid habits, traditions and values are getting inevitably questioned. To live in diaspora is to live displaced. The people of diaspora are more or less migrants, drifters, travellers and people with a problematic understanding of ”homeland” and ”belonging”. Whether the dislocation is an existent state or an imaginary displacement, ”a sense of self-imposed exile” (thnx Mishra), it affects an individual's positioning within their own culture as well as their perspective of the postmodern, globalized world.

Diaspora is to leave your homecountry to escape the terrors of war to an unknown land, as much as it is to sit next to a local and get lectured about my imagined reluctance to integrate into their culture. It's the clash that happens when the culture you're living in is no longer your own, it's the hunch of discomfort and fear in your stomach as you're willingly or unwillingly stepping out of your comfort zone. It's the opposite of filtered Instagram-pictures and #wanderlust hashtag - it's what they don't tell you about migration.

Canada is my Terra Incognita, the Land Unknown - for a Syrian refugee it's something else. Every diasporic experience is different, but the very fundamental feature of all these experiences is the sudden lack of contextual knowledge and understanding of cultural resonances needed to fully adapt to the new environment. Here, have an example:

This is a picture of me lying in a pile of corn leaves. Corn tastes good. However, I must've made an amazing impression on my mother-in-law when she handed me a corn and I proceeded to ask "So uhh.... How does this work?"

Never before had I thought about it, but now that I encountered such a situation, I found out I have no idea how to handle corn.

I ask a lot of questions. Questions that make my quebecois partner look at me with a weird face and go "...huh?". So far I can remember asking the following huh?-questions:

1. "But how does the state know you've moved if you don't send an announcement about your new address to the postal office of Canada?"
2. "Can't you just go and vote anywhere in the city during the pre-election dates?"
3. "But how on earth are you supposed to wash your windows if you can't OPEN THEM?"
4. "How can you ever receive mail that's in an A4-sized envelope if your mailbox can only fit postal card-sized mail?"
5. "... You don't lock your front door for the night?!"
6. "How come you can only make a new rental agreement once a year in July??"
7. "You don't get money from returning old glass bottles?"
8. "......... You don't use a knife?"

I have no idea how this society works. In Finland I return my old wine bottles and get 20 cents in return, keep my front door locked at all times and happily open my double-glazed windows so I can wipe them. I stand silently in an elevator and seek for the last empty seat in a bus to avoid sitting next to a stranger. I forget to say "please" and ask "Ça va?". I use a knife. I eat a salty breakfast. I fucking love my salty breakfast.

Diaspora is not about going for an exchange semester in Leicester to rave in The Revolution on New Walk every Friday. It's about the helplessness you feel when you face the everyday reality of a society that isn't yours, and suddenly you feel like a second-class citizen. You're excluded. Diaspora is about getting dislocated, literally and figuratively. A semester in England with all its International Offices, tutors and mandatory orientation soirees could never have prepared me for the solitary life of an immigrant, who tries to ramble on with her life even when she's standing in front of her bank's office with an actual 90's-style cheque from her employer in her hand. Seriously Canada, cheques?

There is nothing to hang on to. The cities look different, the culture is different, you're afraid to open your mouth in the fear of saying something inappropriate (to this day I'm still not sure if I should in any circumstances refer to Quebeckers as Canadians). No matter how much you enjoy adventuring, exploring and get positively surprised when people start chatting with you in an elevator or when suddenly no one owns Marimekko, at times you get this little feeling of helplessness.

A very English cityscape from Shakespeare's hometown, Stratford-Upon-Avon, UK.

Good news: it won't last forever. One's cultural identity is an ever changing pallet of evolving, transformation and crises. We indeed have a shared history, a past, with a certain community and this history can hide in the core of our very (Finnish) cultural identity, but the relationship we have with this history can be redifined, questioned and even denied. The approach we have to our own communal culture can be readjusted by the way we position ourselves in relation to this history. I develop my identity by questioning, redefining and rejecting the images I have of my own individual or collective cultural identity as a part of the Finnish society. I see, I compare, I realise the differences and assimilate new habits in relation to my new cultural environment.

A migrant's cultural identity becomes a hybridized mosaic of fragments, a mosaic where I might forget to say please, but still frequently exclaim "cheers" as a remnant from my times in Leicester - and who knows, maybe after a year in Québec I've gotten hooked to my overly sugared breakfast cereals and caramel paste. This is hybridity: it's what happens when we start to assimilate features from the culture we have migrated into, blending these features with the ones we already hold.

One day I might hold a different citizenship. On that day I might look at myself from the mirror and see all the rambling, the diaspora and the past dislocation, but I will no longer forget to say my "please".