kellycrull.com - expat life in Spain

I recently worked in Amsterdam for a week. At the end of my second day at the office, I decided to go on Instant Messenger and see if any of my friends were online and in the mood to chat. I found one. Kelly, a friend of mine from Madrid.

We chatted for a few minutes, playing catch up, until the clock in the corner of my computer screen caught my eye, and I realized I needed to catch the metro in order to be home in time for dinner with the couple I was staying with.

“I should go” I typed, “Dinner will be ready in half an hour.”

“Dinner?” Kelly wrote, “At 6?”

“Yuck!” she wrote.

I typed in a smily face and hit return.

The eating schedule is only the beginning of what make Holland and Spain different from each other. I’m sure to Kelly, and to me too if I had been in Madrid, eating dinner as early as six seemed ridiculous. The restaurants in Madrid don’t even open in the evenings until after eight. Even then, the restaurants are empty until nine or ten.

But I wasn’t in Madrid, I was in Amsterdam. Knowing that in the home of the friends I was staying with dinner was served every evening at 5:45 on the dot, I expected to have no appetite. However, somewhere in the last 48 hours my stomach had gone Dutch on me. I was hungry.

That evening I ate food with a passion one rarely finds in Olympic athletes. It wasn’t only the eating schedule either. I was craving Dutch food. I had visited my friends in Amsterdam on several occasions, even lived with them for a period of three months. My stomach knew Dutch food, and it wanted it now.

To, the name of my Dutch friend, and the one who does the cooking around the house, prepares a traditional Dutch meal almost every night. This night was no exception. I served up my plate with boiled veggies, a mound of boiled potatoes which I mashed with a fork and doused with gravy. I speared two floating sausages out of a pot the size of a small spare tire, and I even found room on my plate for salad. Best of all, I finished the meal with a bowl of vla, a dairy product served for dessert that unfortunately I haven’t found anywhere outside of Holland. The Dutch have somehow managed to come up with a diary product to cover every step of the dairy process from skim milk to cheese. Vla is somewhere in the middle, close to being a pudding, a custard, a yogurt, but definitely it’s own convention. I finished my first bowl of vla and poured myself another.

I ate food that night like there was no tomorrow. Somewhere inside myself I knew that while I love a traditional Dutch meal when I’m actually in Holland, when I’m in Madrid I simply have different tastes.

For example, in our kitchen in Madrid April and I have packages-worth of Dutch stroopwafels, a favorite coffee companion, which have worked their way to the bottom shelf where all the other forgetables are left for one of those rare days when I go through the cupboards Tazmanian-devil style and throw out food we’ll never eat.

I love stroopwafels, but you’d have to force feed one to me in Madrid.

My tastes are so different when I’m Holland that I’m willing to say I feel like a different person when I’m there. It’s not just the food. When I’m staying with To and Steven in Holland, I do all kinds of things I never do in Spain. I drink lots of tea. I watch TV after dinner. I go to bed and get up early. I enjoy petting the cat instead of wishing I had a dog. I like living in the suburbs. I have a daily routine!

Each place I go, I find a new me. I’ve gone the way of the chameleon.

Some of my American friends who recently headed back to the States for the first time after being in Spain for over a year asked me if it was difficult for me to adjust to being in the States when I go back every year for a couple weeks over Christmas. I told them that without fail the most surprising part about going back to the States every Christmas is how easily I can change colors to match the wallpaper in American culture. By the end of the two weeks, Madrid seems like a fairy tale, a story that took place in a land far, far away.

I find myself wishing it wasn’t so easy for me to blend into American culture every Christmas. I’d like to think that the longer I live in Spain, the more Spanish I become. It scares me to know how quickly my colors can change. I fear I may lose track of my true self. Have you ever wondered if chameleons actually have a true color, maybe a shade of blue with green specks or something that they wear when no one’s looking?

Recently I met an American at a bar here in Europe. It was his first night in Europe, and there weren’t any surprises. On cue, he told me he couldn’t believe how many people smoke here, and he asked whether they know about the risk of getting lung cancer. He also told me he didn’t drink alcohol because he didn’t like the taste.

Only two days later when I walked in the bar his colors had changed. He was a new person. He had a cigar in his mouth and a pint of beer in one hand.

We are creatures of context.

Still, I’d like to think there’s something positive about all this chameleon business. In a way, I believe we do lose something of ourselves when we adapt to another culture (and another, and another), but in the process, we also discover even more about ourselves than if we had never left home in the first place. One day we wake up and look in the mirror and see that we’ve taken on a color we never would have imagined possible. New cultures bring out new shades of who we are, the unexplored rim of our personalities, a flourish of unknown emotions, a decoupage of experiences, even jailer’s keys to the dungeons of our souls. We begin to see the horizon come into focus, the line of our limitations and possibilities.

I’d like to finish up with one last lesson from the chameleon. In researching this article, I learned that despite what people think, chameleons cannot camouflage themselves by matching their surroundings. The implication is this: chameleons aren’t able to use their ability to change colors to protect themselves from predators. Instead, chameleons change colors as a way of expressing their mood, health, temperature, and emotion.

For those of us who have gone the way of the chameleon, there’s both a warning and an opportunity here. While we do well to avoid the temptation to use our colors to protect ourselves, intentionally frightening others or distancing them with colors they don’t know, or even worse, hiding who we truly are by always coloring ourselves like the ones around us, we also have an opportunity. The opportunity is the freedom to express ourselves, continuing to cover the canvas of our lives with new colors from our ever-expanding palette, trusting that along the way, we are painting portraits that begin to look more and more like who we know ourselves to be.