Life in the Big City

I knew there would be culture shock and yet again, I wasn't really planning to give it much more than a passing glance. I figured, I wasn't really changing cultures, at least I was going from one country in the Middle East to another country in the same region; barely two hours away by plane. So how hard could it be, anyway?

I was about to find out.

I grew up my whole life, more than 40 years, on campuses. I lived, worked, and worshipped on a space of land you could easily walk in 20 minutes. My world was small—too small—as I felt it at times, but this was all I knew. I didn't realize the ease with which I was living as housing was a given, my work commute was often 10 minutes or less, and utilities and maintenance were part of the benefits. 

Suddenly I found myself standing in an empty and rather disheveled looking apartment with lumpy linoleum floors listening to a real estate agent bemusedly answer our question about the missing light bulbs in the house. 

It's your first apartment rental, right? It's common for apartments not to have light fixtures. You install them yourselves and then, when you leave, you take them with you.

What an odd thought. Why anyone would want to clamber up to the ceiling and take down the light fixtures made no sense to me. Unless, of course, their light fixtures were one of the many status symbols I had noticed dominated society here. Thankfully I had a very tall husband whose penchant for fixing things made my life much easier and saved a bit of money too. 

The first apartment we'd seen was referred to us by someone who knew a real estate agent. The apartment was so small, you could sneeze and you would have seen all the rooms. It felt too claustrophobic and, even though it was new and within our budget, I said no. Where would we store our 11 suitcases, let alone all the stuff that we had packed in them? 

The next time we ventured out, we saw two different apartments. The first one was nice but there was mold in the bathroom. The second one we really liked and asked the real estate agent to contact the owner. It was furnished, within our budget, and in a nice area of town. There was no mold and the living room and bedroom were bright and filled with light. A week later, the real estate agent still hadn't gotten back to us and we realized we probably had lost that one. 

Then came the big Seven-Apartments-Day. Armed with Google Maps and a spare battery pack that we traded between our phones to keep them going through the day, we trekked all over several different areas, riding the metro, bus, and walking up to 20 minutes each time to see the different places. At the last stop of the day, the sixth apartment, the real estate agent suggested we look at a slightly bigger place he also had available. 

The building was old, but there was no mold smell in the stairway or in the apartment itself. Three of the four rooms were oddly shaped in the form of trapezoids or quadrilaterals at an acute angle. The bathroom was black, which I hated, and the whole apartment felt like a train compartment. But my husband loved it and there was no mold, which by now seemed to be my only requirement. 

We went back to see it the next day in the daylight and decided it would do. I eyed the crumbling upper balcony dubiously, questioning if was a foreboding of whether the building would hold up in an earthquake. My husband reassured me it would. After walking around the surrounding area one more time, we chorused to each other that we loved it. 

After all, we won't be in the apartment much, anyhow, I reasoned. I was starting to figure out this big city routine and realizing it was going to take up much of my day. Even if we would end up living 45 minutes closer to the school than we were now, if I took a teaching job, that would eat into my time too. We would be out most of the day and only come back to sleep, do laundry, and eat something quick. 

A delicious falafel meal and a metro change later, we were sitting on prized seats on the M4 line heading back to our temporary apartment. We hurried home through the drizzling rain, thankful it wasn't raining harder as I hadn't brought a rain jacket. There was laundry waiting to be done, the room looked like a tornado had exploded, and I needed to catch up on vacuuming, homework, and cooking. If we heard back from the real estate agent, we would need to set up the utilities, sign the rental contract, clean the apartment, and start looking for appliances and furniture. 

Life in the big city. Just one of the many life-shocks I would be encountering. 

How Long?

I sat on the hard gray bench in 207A, tears slowly rolling down my cheeks. My anxious husband asked, What happened?

I don't know! I sniffled. 

Was it something in the security? You were fine before we went through security. 

I knew it had been triggered by the screening agent's demand to take off my belt and put it through the x-ray machine, making me feel super embarrassed. Men were forever taking off belts but it felt humiliating to stand there, struggling to take off my belt in public while people hurried past me. 

Then my husband's backpack got flagged; he had an RFID pocket that often showed up on the x-ray and warranted a secondary search. The lady scrabbled through his backpack, pulling out storage bags, pencil cases, and hard drive cases, opening and poking through each one. She finally decided the x-ray machine had flagged the prongs of his phone charger plug, pushed the bags towards his laptop, and shrugged Everything is okay as she went off to do something else. Most screening agents returned the items to the bag and zipped it up, but no, this one wasn't about to be bothered to do so. So he was left alone, trying to gather all his various sundry items and put them back where they belonged. 

It must have been the straw that broke the camel's back, or the drop in the bucket that overflowed. After 10 days of packing up our lives and then unpacking them, I had finally reached my emotional breaking point. I'd been struggling with severe allergies that refused to abate even with medication. They were just starting to settle down but the wheezing still kept me up nights. My plantar fasciitis was flaring up, even with daily stretches, from the thousands of steps we were walking every day. My hands and ankles were swollen and I looked like a beached whale with the 50+ extra pounds I was carrying. I was tired and I needed a break. 

And so I cried. Thankful for the anonymity of the airport waiting areas, I let the tears fall, knowing eventually they would stop and when they did, I would be okay again. Or maybe not. Maybe some of the tears came from a place of pain and frustration at the injustices we'd been suffering through, and would continue to. Things that would never be righted in this world; and it felt like neither in the one to come. 

I'm Moving On

And just like that, I transplanted my life from one country to another without a tear of regret. Well, there was one time I did cry, when I was saying goodbye to Mona. We were not the closest of friends but every Sabbath when we saw each other, she would smile real big and ask how I was doing. She was sweet and kind and I knew I would miss her. As she hugged me goodbye, she whispered in my ear, You are good for him. You are the best person to support him and be there for him. Tears welled up as I knew she understood. She had seen my romantic drama, years before, and she was one of the few who had supported me when I'd decided to say yes to the man who truly valued me and wanted to share his life with me. 

25 years ago, I took to the skies sobbing my way through the 20-minute flight to Larnaca International Airport in Cyprus. This time, as the plane lifted off, I barely gave a cursory glance to the crowded mountains in the distance. I'd already said goodbye years ago. When Covid and the crisis hit simultaneously, as I lost the community I'd so deeply craved, the connection was severed and never fully restored. I'd gone through depression so dark, I'd questioned my purpose in living over and over again. I'd experienced panic attacks in the grocery aisle; frozen and unable to make simple decisions such as whether to buy the cheese or wait until the next week when prices would likely sky-rocket again. So this time, I was ready to go. 

Then I landed in my new country. 

I tried to place it in some kind of context—the first day that we went exploring our new city. I marveled at the clean streets, easily accessible garbage cans, cars driving within painted lines on the highway, and variety of clean fresh fruit. I choked my way through the clouds of smoke and laughed along with the sea gulls that woke me in the morning. Was it like California, Cyprus, Holland, Lebanon, England? Which one was it more like? 

Then I realized—it was both and neither. 

And I decided that instead of trying to figure out which country it most resembled, I was going to let my new host country just be itself. Like me. 

Someone told me yesterday, Your American accent is really good. I couldn't tell you're not American. I laughed and thanked them. I knew I blended in, no matter which part of the world I was in, until I opened my mouth and couldn't speak the language or contextualize within the idioms of the day. It was okay though. I didn't have to be South Korean, Lebanese, Dutch, Mauritian, British, Kurdish, or American. I could simply be me. Identifying with all while not claiming patriotism to one. 

I sat at the kitchen table and reached for a sugar cube. Expertly popping it in my mouth and swirling it to the corner of my cheek, I sipped the dark tea. For tonight, this was me.