It’s the middle of November so you know what that means: it’s time for our monthly virtual four-way blogfest. We are:
North: Linda in The Netherlands (http://www.adventuresinexpatland.com/)
South: Russell in Australia (https://insearchofalifelessordinary.com/)
East: Erica in Japan (http://www.expatriababy.com/)
West: Maria in Canada (http://www.iwasanexpatwife.com/)
This month’s theme? What is the one item each of us can’t imagine living expat life without.
So have a seat, get comfortable and come around the world with us as we explore four different items from four different perspectives:
Here at In Search of a Life Less Ordinary, Maria shares what matters most to her;
At Adventures in Expat Land, Erica demonstrates why paper beats rock and scissors every time;
At I Was an Expat Wife, I ponder whether it’s possible to be too attached to my chosen item;
And at Expatria, Baby, Linda’s all for throwing off the bowlines.
Without further ado, here’s Maria’s post, Have Passport, Will Travel…
I’m madly in love with my passport. It’s a very attractive navy blue, with a very unattractive photo of me on the first page. But what a treasure trove of memories lies within its covers: stamps and visas to wonderful places that I never thought I’d be lucky enough to visit. The few remaining blank pages — which seem so naked and vulnerable next to their more robust neighbours — are calling out to me, each one bursting with possibility.
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| Photo credit: iStockphoto.com/kislev |
Becoming an expatriate means figuring out how to turn a foreign country into a home. Of course we spend a great deal of time in our host country, deciphering the unspoken rules of behaviour, struggling to master the language, and generally going about the business of building a life. But one of the biggest perks of expat life is discovering a hitherto unknown corner of the world — just begging to be explored — right outside your new front door.
When I lived in Singapore, I couldn’t wait to dive into Asia. In the beginning, we didn’t stray too far from home: a weekend in Bintan, a drive across the Causeway to Malaysia. It only whetted our appetite. We started to venture further afield: Bangkok, Phuket, and the beautiful holiday destination of Bali. Then Hanoi, Saigon, Sydney, Beijing.We became travel junkies, constantly searching for our next fix.
Moving to France put the glories of Budapest, London, Istanbul and Barcelona right at my fingertips. With each stamp I collected in my passport, I also collected experiences that would thrill, awe, and change me forever.
The stamps themselves are utilitarian in appearance, clearly designed to expedite, not delight the senses. Yet somehow my pages became the canvas for a dizzying collage of colour and shape. Each stamp is just different enough to let a little sliver of personality shine through. The hues vary from sombre black to delicate lavender. A bright green Indonesian stamp shares space with a cobalt blue beauty from Chiang Mai. The Chinese stamp is so aggressive in its red fluorescence that it makes my eyes hurt.
Shapes, too, differ. The Australian entry stamp is elegantly rectangular in shape, while the exit stamp is round with curved text. The triangular exit stamp from Thailand sits atop its squarish counterpart, forming a tidy little house. The stamps from the EU are disappointingly similar: minimalistic boxes featuring a line drawing of an airplane (First the Euro took away the fun of shopping with exotic currencies such as the lira and franc; now half the pages in my passport exhibit a mind-numbing sameness). And here’s a delicious taste of irony for you: the American stamp has no borders.
The humble stamp pales in comparison to its flashier cousin: the visa. Visas are passport rocks stars. The English and Chinese characters of the staid Chinese visa are printed in a muted green ink. There is a faint watermark of the Great Wall in the middle, which elevates it from merely an official document to a cultural work of art. The Vietnamese visa is vaguely intimidating, the Indonesian one is disappointing in its absence of Bahasa, and the Turkish one looks like a groovy watercolour painting.
Mingling with the joy in these pages is regret for the stamps that aren’t there: the family vacation in India and the house-building trip to Cambodia that never materialized because our time in Asia ran out before we could make them happen. A weekend jaunt to Venice was likewise abandoned when we left France to return to our home in Canada.
There is sadness here, too: my Singaporean Dependant’s Pass has been cruelly defaced by the single word — CANCELLED — stamped across it.
Last weekend, my daughters and I drove to Niagara Falls and across the border into the United States. Our old passports expired a couple of years ago, and we had our new passports with us, pristine and unsullied by the familiar tangle of stamps we’d grown to love. These passports aren’t dog-eared and worn around the edges from years of handling; their pages aren’t smudged and scribbled on by immigration officers in dozens of countries. It pains me to say that they have no visas between their shiny new covers.
The photo, however, is still unattractive.
I couldn’t imagine living expat life without my beloved passport. But I’m not an expat anymore. My scuffed and tattered former passport sits like a relic in a drawer, its corners roughly clipped (If you’d like to draw an analogy involving birds’ wings at this point, knock yourself out. I don’t have the heart to do it myself).
This new passport is like a stranger to me, but there’s one thing that hasn’t changed from my old expat life: the empty pages are calling to me with their siren song. I think it’s high time I did something about it.
Is there anything you can’t imagine living expat life without? Like Maria, is your passport more than just a document to get you from A to B? Share your comments below.
What an ending…. it makes me want to scream TAKE ME WITH YOU!!!!!
LOL. I’m always screaming that. So far no one has taken me up on it, but I live in hope!
I certainly think it’s high time you did something about this situation, Maria. Time to knock yourself out (love that saying) and get some stamps in that blank passport of yours.
And is the photo THAT bad? 😉
Moi aussi (as they say in Sydney…)
No smiling in passport photos allowed these days. I had to keep getting the photo redone, because I couldn’t help smiling — passports do that to me. But rules are rules, and I was told I wouldn’t be able to fly unless I wiped that silly grin off my face. Black and white, grim expression: it’s like a mug shot.
Oh, you. This ending. Lovely.
Passports. It’s funny how we are so attached to them. I’ve kept all mine, and I miss my last one the most. It has, on it’s second page, an amendment announcing my change of name when I got married in Switzerland. And I love that little momento.
My daughter’s passport, containing more stamps than is really just for a 17 month old, is almost due for renewal, and I’ll go about missing that one for her too, until she’s old enough to miss passpots for herself.
I’m hearing you…
Ahh, the lure of the passport. It truly does have a siren song, doesn’t it? Really enjoyed this Maria.
And yes, Russell, official photos can be THAT bad. Long ago I was working for the Navy and had the most God awful ID card photo imaginabl; it made my driver’s license look like a beauty contestant (no mean feat!). One day when getting it renewed, I started chatting with the cantankerous woman who worked there. Just before she took my new photo, she whispered conspiratorially that I should lean back (this after firmly instructing me to lean forward). I did what I was told, and low and behold, my new photo was clear, in focus, and while I was not transformed into a raving beauty, I at least looked presentable. Seems all she’d ever wanted was someone to take the time to talk nicely with her. I’ve carried that lesson with me ever since. Didn’t do a damn bit of good here in Nederland where they insist on official photos showing full eyebrows and both ears. Ugh…don’t get me started!
I used to love the days when my passport was stamped whenever I ventured out of Blighty. The advent of the European Union stopped all of that for travel between union countries. These days my passport is covered in Turkish stamps. The Turks just love a stamp!
I feel sad every time yet another old passport filled with stamps and visas has to be put into the “family history” box (which is getting pretty full by now). Our family has dual citizenship, so you can imagine what a mess it all is. I’ve written about how we have to sometimes travel with 15 passports for the 6 of us, if you include the expired passports that still have valid visas in them. Add some yellow fever certificates and you have a regular stack of documents in your backpack.
Totally agree with you on the blandness of the new Europe. I used to LOVE going on our family summer trips and the excitement of crossing the border. Having to wait, seeing little things change subtly, like the color of the road markings, was it a double or single line in the middle? Were the little traffic lights in the front, like they have them in France? Oh, and all the different types of currency! It was such a treasure trove of adventure driving from Germany all the way to Spain and passing through France and perhaps Switzerland and the Alps on the way. All that magic has pretty much disappeared, even the need to speak rudiments of each language… Or maybe it’s just the magic of childhood that has disappeared?
I haven’t travelled to as many places as you have, but I keep all my old passports, especially the ones with stamps in them, safely tucked away in my ‘this box moves when I move box’ …
It’s good to know I’m not the only passport hoarder out there. As a child I travelled with a British passport, which is as much of a novelty to me now as my Chinese visa is. I, too, have a “passport box,” and I’m pretty sure it would be one of the first things I’d grab if my house ever caught on fire.
Get those itchy feet on the road! My old passport remains one of the few treasures I can;t give up.
It’s not that my passport photos look bad, it’s that they make me look like a 12 year old because my passport is in need of renewal and I’m 10 years younger in it. Time to get a new one, me thinks.
Listen to the many voices of reason, Maria. Time to hit the road Jack!
Probably the latter, Sine. The real world seems less magical as we get older, which is why most of us spend our later lives regularly buried in a book no doubt!
That’s funny, Erica, but I had no idea that a 17 month old had to have a passport in the first place. They don’t travel on yours or your husband’s then?
I’ll jump in ahead of Maria and ask “do the Turks love a stamp?” or is that code for something else entirely? 🙂
This is something I need to do – have a box of old passports. Mine are currently strewn around the house in all sorts of places. It will catch me out one day and I’ll lose them all if I’m not careful…
Do you still have the British passport? I found out the other day that I was in fact eligible for a Canadian passport as a result of my mother’s Canadian citizenship even though she was born outside of Canada. They changed the rules/legislation around 2006 when I moved to Canada as a permanent resident – I didn’t know I could have had the passport, didn’t realise I was eligible when I went through the PR route (and nobody told me otherwise), and now will never be able to do anything about it. Drat!
Absolutely not 😉
I have dual citizenship, but I use a Canadian passport now. I feel much more Canadian than British, so it seemed like the right thing to do. I wish I’d had that British passport when I moved to France, though — it would’ve made things like getting a cellphone contract so much easier.
Sometimes it helps to have as many passports as possible. I’m on 2 and counting 😉
Oh Maria, you are so right. I did a mental stroll through my passport as you were describing the stamps so lovingly and found myself smiling, yet again, as I read this latest post. We definitely took advantage of our time in Dubai to see some of the Middle East we otherwise would never have considered visiting (we got to Oman, Jordan, Qatar, and of course all the Emirates in the UAE). I recently counted up all the countries I’ve visited in the world and it totals 25… so many more to go! Where are you headed to next?
Next I’ll be going back to Singapore, but only for a visit. It’s changed so much since I left, and I can’t wait to see what it’s like these days. And I’m so jealous of your Middle East tour! Someday I’ll get out to that part of the world….
I have lived permanently in Maui, Hawaii since August 1979, having visited on vacation twice prior to that. Family changes necessitated I find a job–in a strange land, on a tiny island, right in the middle of the vast Pacific. My venture into real estate resulted in becoming Principal Broker of my own business for 28 years.
Retirement brought the need to keep my mind occupied, so I took a professional writing course, ending up with a Diploma and the good fortune to have two books published, so far. Mahalo, Maui!
Margaret J. Norrie. Mailto:[email protected]
Jordan is a fantastic place. Headed there when I was in my twenties. Would go back again in a flash. Thanks for your comments, Anne.
Hi Margaret, thanks for your comments. Sounds like you’ve created a great life for yourself and congrats on getting those books published. That’s quite the achievement and I wish you every success with subsequent books. Cheers, Russell