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Melanie Van Orden,
Jet Set Now Editor
May
3
Homesick for NYC
May 03, 2008 by Melanie Van Orden
Jason and I have been struggling with a bit of homesickness for the first time since leaving NYC for Argentina a few months ago. It is currently spring in our beloved city, which is our favorite time of year to be there. Boy, do we miss it. We LOVED being New Yorkers and have always looked forward to visiting or living there again someday, but it is beginning to be painful that we can’t see our family and friends and enjoy Manhattan right now.
Don’t get me wrong, we love Buenos Aires! We couldn’t be happier that we embarked on this new jet set lifestyle that will take us to a new country every few months. We’re enjoying learning Spanish and soaking up the local culture. It’s just that our friends and our city are doing things without us, and we feel like we are missing out.
Our homesickness has brought to my mind that many jet setters must experience the same thing! And how do we handle this homesickness so that we don’t get depressed or miss out on all the fun things that we can experience at our current location?
I’m not sure what the answer is, but I have a few ideas. I’m going to try a few of the ideas listed below and see how they well they work in alleviating our homesickness.
1) Meet and hang out with more people in our current location.
Our usual workaholic ways keep up somewhat isolated from meeting more local people. We have met a few people through an awesome listener to Jason’s Internet Business Mastery podcast. We’re lucky that this listener, Fernando Maclen, heard that we were moving to Buenos Aires through the podcast and contacted us to meet up. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have met anyone else so far besides our Spanish tutor! (Oh, and my sister’s inlaws, who happen to live in Buenos Aires as well.)
Pretty much, all the people we have met have come to us, which is pretty sad. I pledge to get out there and meet some more Argentine peeps. I’ll tell you how it goes.
2) Keep in better touch with our friends and family.
Whenever we move, Jason and I usually do a decent job of letting all of our family and friends know where we are moving to and that we’re still alive once we get there. There are a few friends and family members that we talk to once or so a month, and fewer still that we contact more regularly.
I’ve been a little lazy in keeping in touch while we are away. This blog will give us more of a chance to communicate our experience to our loved ones (which we haven’t really done so far), and give our loved ones a chance to write back to us about their lives. We’ll see if I can open up the lines of communication again with those near and dear to my heart.
3) Get out and see more sites in our current location
The afore mentioned workaholic nature of our personalities also makes it a little difficult for us to plan out time to experience our new city of Buenos Aires on a regular basis. We seem to have gone on a massive site-seeing spree when we first got here, and now we rarely venture out to new areas. I pledge to plan an execute one awesome “day-out-on-the-town” in a new area of the city every other week. We’ll see if this helps us forget a little bit about the city that we just left.
4) Start a membership site for jet setters here are Jet Set Now.
This is something that I’ve had in the works since the idea for Jet Set Now was first formed in our heads. I always thought that a membership site full of fellow jet setters would be the ultimate travel tips resource as well as an antidote to occasional loneliness. Talking with others who are going through what you are going through always seems to be a soothing balm on our aching problems. But building a membership site is no small endeavor, so it will take a little time for this dream to come to fruition.
5) Just wait it out.
I think it is just par for the course to experience some homesickness while on your jet set adventures; especially when you first embark, as we just have. We’ll see if time will lessen our longing for our New York City home and all the people that we love who still live there. AND, my dear friend from NYC, Ariel Hyatt, is coming to visit us here in Buenos Aires in a few days, so that should help the homesickness in the meantime. It’s a good thing, because we need it!
What about you? Have you ever been homesick while living or traveling abroad? Do you have any suggestions for a cure to our homesickness?
Photo credit: kenyee
Comments
5 Responses to “Homesick for NYC”
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We have been traveling the world for almost 2 years and so far we have not felt homesick at all.
We loooove webcams and we talk to family and friends almost every day, certainly every week. That makes it feel like we haven’t even left. In fact, between our blog and webcam calls I am actually MORE connected to family and friends as we roam. They know more about our daily lives now than when we lived 5 minutes away.
There is something about seeing a loved ones face that makes it much easier. My daughter even does show and tell, including the progress of her loose teeth that she lost in several countries.
Skype is free and even my 80 year old mother is an expert at webcams now ( & she had never been on a computer before we left).
I gab for hours with old friends around the world and have no problem with my child being silly with friends on webcams.
I do remember getting homesick the year I lived long ago in Italy, but today’s technology allows one to keep connected with home while you make new friends as you roam.
I think you are just adjusting to the realities of expat living. Get skype webcams and go meet the locals and the expats there.
You know what’s great? Meet locals who have been expat’s in an English speaking country. We have met a family like that here in Spain and they are our best friends. They understand and can help you bridge the gap.
Good luck!
(I am glad you followed us on twitter so that I found your website. )
@soultravelers3 - Thanks so much for sharing your experiences and suggestions! They are like gold and greatly appreciated! Please continue to update us on your travels around the world. I’m so glad that we are twitter buddies!
Hi Melanie,
You sound as if you have a few strategies to get over your homesickness. I think the secret is to find the mixture of things that works for you and then stick to it, certainly in the short term ..
I grew up on a Scottish island, so finding somewhere locally where there is water ‘like at home’ - wherever I am in the world, including land-locked Switzerland! - has always been a great crutch for me to get over being homesick. At university in Edinburgh, it was climbing to the top of the Scott Monument, and seeing how close I was to the Forth Estuary. In Geneva, it was finding similarities between its bay on Lac Lemain and my home-town Rothesay Bay. Here in Bavaria, Germany, its getting out to the local lakes at the weekends to walk, swim and sail, or even just visiting the many outdoor swimming pools here can pretty much do it now …
In the long term though, take heart from the fact that by the time you have left BA, and moved on to a second, third, or more locations, you’ll have started to collect lots of friends and memories to treasure from all around … and you’ll be ‘homesick’ for more than just New York, but be better equipped to deal with it!
Ronna
I agree with the others, it will definitely pass. I had much more trouble leaving the new places I’d lived (you start to get multiple-home home-sickness, and it’s impossible to solve because you can’t actually live in multiple places at the same time!).
In Germany I was teaching English to locals who were about to be relocated to work in other countries for 3 to 5 years, and they had to some preparation training where they had this big impressive graph to show the emotional state of ex-pats as they adjust to a new city (very much a German precision kind of thing here!) - The first weeks are the honeymoon period but at 8 weeks, you should reach your lowest point … and then it’s make or break, according to the graph, you either hate it so much you leave or you gradually adjust and love your new home too. So technically speaking you guys are well over the hump and on your way to feeling much better, don’t worry!!!
@Ronna - Thanks for your advice! I’ll put it into use in our next jet set location, as we are back in NYC for a short stay.
@Amanda - Very cool info about the “trajectory” of homesickness among expats. Yeah, I think we hit the lowest point around the 8 week mark, but we DID love Buenos Aires! We are soothing our homesickness with a short stay in NYC and then we’re off to who-knows-where!