Guest blogger

I’ve arrived in a foreign country, knowing no one, to do a university year abroad, and it will be another tear-stained fortnight before I speak to anyone back home in my own language. When I finally do, it will involve finding fistfuls of pesetas to feed into a phone box on the street corner, while a dubious-looking drunk batters the glass pane at my back. “Right, whitey, you’ve had long enough!” Sobbing my way back up to the flat, I hunker down for several more weeks’ radio silence.

Barcelona, spring 2011. Reply to texts from parents, answer emails from friends, update Facebook status to something approaching accurate, phone my gran back on her mobile, speak to my sister on Skype, catch up with ex-colleagues on Linkedin and, for the love of god, write something fresh for my blog. Is it just me, or do you ever wonder if all this accessibility is ruining your living abroad ambience?

Incommunicado

Every time I hear the Arcade Fire song ‘We Used to Wait’ I think it sums up the old days (a mere decade ago) perfectly poignantly. “It seems strange”, the singer points out, “how we used to wait for letters to arrive. But what’s stranger still was how something so small could keep you alive.” I have to smile at this point, remembering the intensity of my 19-year-old vulpine-haired self. The highlight of my week was interrogating the buzón downstairs for a letter from my boyfriend, recognising the handwriting, tipping out the newspaper clippings about, most probably, a Highland cow that had got itself trapped off a cliff somewhere or, more prosaically, the latest football results.

I sound like a veteran of yore, I know, but my year abroad came at a time just before the internet age was upon us, when most people still didn’t have a home PC. And needless to say no British TV. I was cocooned in an environment of utter Spanishness, without a clue about what was going on in the wider world, with letters from loved ones the only umbilicus that kept me going.

Sunny little mystery

Seriously, can you imagine that nowadays? Since you’re reading this on an English-only website, I’m assuming you’ve moved to Spain from another country. And I don’t know about you, but I sometimes long for the days when there was still a bit of prevailing mystique about travelling and living abroad. Having all knowledge at your fingertips seems to strip the experience of what made it appealing in the first place—the pull of alterity, other, over there—and the breaching into the unknown. Now you can just look it up on Street View and see your soon-to-be neighbours hanging out their washing. Barcelona, done.