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A Sense Of Belonging... Somewhere Else

merricat said:
and feeling this very strong, painful longing for ‘home’. All that was certain to me at that time was that this home was not my usual place of habitation, but somewhere colder and ‘far away
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I've had much the same feelings through childhood, then I visited Iceland for the first time and I had the sense of "coming home". Hated having to come back to the UK
 
I have never been to Finland, but I've been interested in the country for a long time, especially its music. A few years ago I heard I had ancestors going back to Finns who migrated to the Swedish/Norwegian border and settled on the Norwegian side a few hundred years ago. Coincidences? Perhaps.
 
Vardoger said:
I have never been to Finland, but I've been interested in the country for a long time, especially its music. A few years ago I heard I had ancestors going back to Finns who migrated to the Swedish/Norwegian border and settled on the Norwegian side a few hundred years ago. Coincidences? Perhaps.
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Maybe not a coincidence? I am interested in Finland too and am even learning the language (well, trying to) but I don't feel any sense of belonging. In fact, being rather short and dark I expect I will stick out like a short dark person in a country full of tall blondes. :buck:
 
Min Bannister said:
Maybe not a coincidence? I am interested in Finland too and am even learning the language (well, trying to) but I don't feel any sense of belonging. In fact, being rather short and dark I expect I will stick out like a short dark person in a country full of tall blondes. :buck:
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Maybe you're a menninkäinen? ;)
 
I have listened to Korpliklaani (due to Yithian I think), does that count?
 
Another thought. For reasons too long and involved to go into and which probably don't really belong here, I've been writing a cycle of stories featuring "South African" characters.... now all I really intended to do originally was to write a character who embodied what you might think of as all the worst, hardest-to-love, manifestations of "White South African-ness" as a minor player in a larger tale. She was deliberately written as somebody who her friends and colleagues would find exasperating and hard to love - although with one or two redeeming characteristics. That would or should have been it: everything you suspect about Afrikaaners taken Up To Eleven, as fitted the black humour of the story. Except that wasn't it and I started writing more and evolving the characters. And it dawned on me that, as a white Brit with no previous connection of any sort with South Africa and certainly no national or family links, that I'd better do the bloody research concerning that about which I was writing and it might not be a bad idea, if my central characters were Afrikaans-speaking, to stop winging it, and move on from my deplorably cavalier practice of hopefully throwing in something that was vaguely Dutch/German, to illustrate that language. And thus your author started to learn a new language and its idioms and found it surprisingly easy to get into. Nowhere near fluent, but languages in the Afrikaans/Dutch/Flemish arc really do make intuitive sense to me, far more so than French ever did.(total immersion in things like "Salamander" on TV help with Flemish, I have to say...)

And that childhood feeling, discussed earlier in this thread, about Australia and its magical sunlit wide-open spaces and sense of wonderful expansion... damn, I'm feeling that now about South Africa, another country I've never visited. Is this just a result of immersing myself in a country and its culture or is something deeper going on here?
 
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