No place like...

I've been in Hannover for a while.
In fact, I have not left Germany since early March and that might just be a record. I find myself fantasizing about warm summer nights on the deck at the lake house (smacking mosquitoes in Wisconsin never sounded so nice). I long for old friends and corn on the cob. That's right - we are going back to the U.S. for four weeks this summer.

And the excitement about going home (though, as I have written before, that word is more complicated for me than it seems) has me thinking. Living in another country as an American is a little like seeing the wizard behind the curtain in Oz.

Remember Dorothy and the ruby shoes and her furry friend and metal friend and scratchy friend and her little dog too? Sometimes I feel a little like her, but without the cool shoes.

The U.S. has everything, or everything we think we'll ever need. We believe in it. It's huge and diverse and like a world in itself. We are taught that it's the best place in the great big world and everyone wants to live there.

When you come from the U.S., it's hard to imagine that people can get by on bicycles, with paid vacations, with public health insurance and coalition governments and no garbage disposals. It makes no sense that there are developed countries full of people who don't have closets and sleep peacefully on beds without springs. And that's just in northern Europe.

When I was living in the U.S., I didn't really know what it was like to live somewhere else. I didn't know what I was missing because hadn't quite left yet (caveat - for a signficant time, caveat - as an adult). Now I've had a chance to look behind the curtain. My blissful ignorance is gone. My experience is only in one foreign country in the great big world. It's enough to know there are other ways to go about living. They are better than The American Way, sometimes. Sometimes they are worse.
Now I also know that, no matter where I live, I can never have it all... at least not all at once.

Dorothy probably missed a lot in her quest to find the wizard. She could have hung out in Munchkinland for a while. She could have spent more time getting pampered in the Emerald City. She sure made some great friends, scratchy and furry and rusty ones. What if Dorothy saw that Wizard wasn't what she'd imagined, then shrugged and headed out to enjoy the rest of Oz? What if she looked around for a while before clicking those cool ruby shoes together?

Definitely not in Kansas anymore