A few weeks ago I got an e-mail from a woman who used to teach at the school that I first taught at when I got here.
"Some friends of mine are traveling through Eastern Europe. Can I give them your number?"
If you live in a tourist destination, you've gotten this question. People want to crash on your couch in New York, or take over a tatami in Osaka, or ... try the spare room at Tuckova (it's a nice spare room; do stop by sometime). And if you live in these places, then you have to decide what you think about this. Either you do not like guests, in which case you find a nice little hotel nearby and set them up there, or you remember the time that you were poor and traveling and wanted just once to see the inside of a home instead of the inside of a hotel room, in which case you keep clean sheets on hand and hope the people are decent.
So I said "Sure" because I can handle anybody for about three days ("fish and guests"), and because these people don't show up about 70% of the time anyway. This pair obviously did show up, though, or I'd have nothing to report.
Let me tell you why guests are often annoying. There are the regular guest problems: they don't realize that they're getting some orbs out of orbit; they don't like the entertainment provided but fail to provide their own; they comment on their accommodations as if they were paid, and on the local environment as if they were experts.
Guests in your foreign home also bring special annoyances to the table. They assume that you are interested in their travels; they feel compelled to make judgements of places they have visited briefly (including your home); they fail to recognize cultural differences that might affect their stay.
I am sorry to admit that after several years here and countless visitors, I tend to regard the average visit as a probable unpleasantness. You get enough good visits to make it worth the risk, but in general, at best: stressful.
These women blew me away. Not only were they not stressful: they were purely delightful. I think they were delightful simply because they were smart, funny, interesting humans. Not everybody can be smart, funny, and interesting all at once, but most people could be better guests. Therefore, for the edification of all future visitors anywhere, I will point to specific things they did that anybody could do to make happy hosts.
1. They did not talk about their travels, except in specific anecdotes. Not: "and then we had breakfast in this small town, which was just outside of this other big town we can't pronounce, and the waiter messed up our order and gave her the eggs and me the bacon, and we had to switch plates, and zzzz". Instead: "This weird thing happened in the hostel last night..."
What is different: The first example could happen anywhere and the details are so excessive that it's hard to know the point of the story; the second example is a complete story. Also, stories with masturbators are comedy gold. Think this way: Will this story be funny in a year? Because otherwise: your host is not your travelogue. That is why you brought that notebook.
2. They did not judge places they had visited briefly. I have heard stuff like, "Spain is the filthiest country I've ever seen. I spent three days in Madrid; that place is hell." Comments from our lovely guests were instead of the tone, "We had a bad experience in that place," or "I only met a few people, so I can't be sure what the usual experience is." And most of the stories were of positive experiences, beautiful places, interesting people. But all of the stories were "MY impression, MY reaction." Opinions, not judgements.
This is lovely: it shows an understanding of the pitfalls of generalization, and thus it frees the host to answer questions honestly, because they will be viewed as the host's opinions.
3. Instead of "These people cannot run things on time!" a nicer thing to say is, "Do the trains generally run on time?" Instead of "Why do these people do this?" it is better to say, "We noticed somebody doing this. Is that a regular thing?"
The world does not exist to be compared to your home country, and although such comparisons are interesting and natural to draw, it is wisest and noblest to keep them neutral.
And so: they were different, they were lovely, they were wise, they were noble. In short, the foreign guest behavior was fantastic. And then on top of that, they were excellent regular guests: They demurred on demanding specifics ("Oh, whatever you usually do") but also had vague suggestions to guide us towards their interests ("It might be nice to go for a walk...") . They asked before accessing any facilities, and they asked in a way where "no" seemed a possible response (not "Can I hop on the computer for a second?" while hovering anxiously next to the screen, but "Would it be possible for me to use your computer during the visit?"-- for a woman with two guest-provoked crashes, this is an important distinction). They asked questions that showed awareness of -and interest in- the answer and the answer-er. They thanked often and sincerely. They did dishes. They noticed the small nice things in the apartment (nice paint job!) and overlooked the flaws (so! spiderwebs!). They praised the good parts of the town (the architecture is gorgeous!) and ignored the drawbacks (smoky bars!).
Long story short: We had visitors! We liked them! I wish I could send them to you, so that you, too, could have a new extra-high watermark for visitors.
And now, the forum: What makes a good visit for you? What makes a bad visit? Tales from the front?
If there is anything that will make an expat feel even more like a stranger in a strange land than she already does, it is a tragedy. Especially a senseless one.
Three weeks ago last night was the last time I saw my sweetheart, Hamish, alive. Three weeks ago tomorrow he was out running around in the park with some friends when his heart stopped beating. He was resuscitated and spent the next five days in a coma in an intensive care unit, but the massive and irreversible brain damage he had sustained from the loss of oxygen left him no chance of survival. I spent the better part of five days sitting in the hospital, alternately in a small waiting room with his father and brother (where I met them both for the first time), or sitting by his bed, holding his hand, petting his hair, and crying into the sheets. On the fifth day, his organs were harvested for donation and his life support was disconnected, and his body was allowed to die. His funeral was held the day before what would have been his 26th birthday.
Please forgive me if I have thrown these facts at you too bluntly. When all you have is questions with no answers — why did a healthy, active young man's heart simply stop beating for no discernible reason? how could he be gone only a month before we were to move into a new place together? how could I have someone so loving in my life for only seven months before losing him forever? — facts are one of the few things you have to hold on to. They are cold to the touch, solid and sharp-angled; they are not particularly comforting, it's true, but they are there, and they are all you have to help fill the gaping blank spaces.
One of the things I kept thinking all throughout the days in the hospital was, "Thank god we're in Australia." That's not to say that every other place in the world has such inferior medical care; I was just so thankful to be able to speak with the doctors and nurses in my native language. Had I been back in Prague, I don't know how easy it would have been to communicate with them; while I'm sure many of the staff in big hospitals there speak English quite well, there are always subtleties and sympathies that are harder to grasp across barriers of language and culture. I always have a bit of a cringe over being the typical Anglophone depending on the English of others to help me get by, but this is of course different: in an emergency, who wouldn't find it easier to talk to a native speaker of their own language?
But as glad as I am to be in a place where I can understand, and be understood, with virtually no difficulty, I still am ten thousand miles from home, with a sixteen-hour time difference between me and a familiar voice on the phone. While his family were all here together by coincidence (his brother lived here already and his parents had flown in from England only a week before for a holiday visit), all of my family and my oldest friends are back in New York. At one point in the hospital, a nurse asked me if I had "someone to talk to, for support"; I gestured to the young man lying unconscious between us and said, "Yes, I do — it's him." I'm lucky to have a few other friends here who have been very supportive and helpful, but mostly, I've been feeling very alone, no matter how many people I surround myself with.
When you are an expat, you have to obtain things anew that, living at home, you often just inherit, or have had so long that you don't even remember where they came from. When you moved into your own place for the first time, assuming you stayed in your own country, you probably didn't have to buy hangers or silverware or lightbulbs; your folks probably just came by with a box full of housewares for you, or perhaps you inherited them from a housemate. But when you have moved far from home, far from everyone you've known and everything you've owned, everything in your life must be found, or bought, or borrowed; everything is recent enough to know exactly how you got it, and what purpose — or usually, multiple purposes — they fulfill in your life. A few scrounged milk crates become your bedside tables and your shelving systems; when you're ready to move house again, you use them to carry what few possessions you have.
I had known Hamish in person for only four months, but we had a deep bond that grew out of similar situations. We were both foreigners here, students at the same university; we had both left everything and everyone we knew at home to carve out a new life for ourselves on the other side of the world. When you migrate, you learn to make do with fewer things, fewer people, less money; we helped each other find cheap furniture and cheap dinners. He filled in the gaps in my life where my old family and friends had been, one person who filled in for the absence of many others. We used to joke that each was the closest person we had in an entire hemisphere. In a land where I had no family, he became my family. He was my best friend. My bed warmer. My confidante. My dinner partner. My drinking buddy. My sweetheart.
Now here I am, in this strange country so familiar and yet so foreign at the same time, and wonder if I can stand to stay here any longer. Part of me wants to abandon my school program, leave all the bad memories behind and run back home, but I no longer know where "home" is.
I used to think home was a place; but after spending the last five years moving between four cities on three continents, I now know differently.
Home is not a location. Home is people.