Him indoors

Wherever I lay my laptop ...

Most of the time, like most people, I live indoors. And most of the time, while living indoors, I am online. Yet I am supposed to be "living" in a foreign country far across the great wide sea. What would life have been like for me these past six months had I, as was the case in the first week or so, not been able to live in my virtual country ? It would surely have been unimaginably different. Would I have bought a TV and watched endless hours of terrestrial Brazilian television, mind-numbing opium ?

Before the internet, the zombified couch-potato is often what happened, and pathetically it somehow counted towards "life" in a foreign clime. But post-internet there can be no such fakery. Of all the minutes, hours, days, weeks and months I have "lived" in Brazil, I suspect only a small fraction of that was outdoors and offline. Being online does of course allow me to read about  Brazil, to learn its language, to "talk" to Brazilians (who may or may not be in Brazil); it allows me to blog about my thoughts and impressions of what I have "seen" here (both indoors and outdoors).

But the essence of pre-internet travel and sojourning was the rupture with the old country, indeed with any country other than the one whose air you were inhaling. There was the perceived need to "go native", the disappearance from view as far as your old-country family and friends were concerned, making the subsequent reappearance all the more tantalising. The weary traveller returns, full of (tall) tales. Would I prefer to go back to such times ? Well, life would also have to return to a much more formal pattern, things would have to be much clearer and more circumscribed; none of this "wherever I lay my laptop, that's my home" mentality.

Maybe our current illusion of godlike ubiquity tempts us into being everywhere but nowhere, and maybe this is a dangerous game. Travelling without moving, living in a country called Online and merely "visiting" everywhere else. But, of course, the most foreign country of them all is The Past, so what's the point in spending any more time worrying about a way of life that has gone forever ?

Here, there and everywhere, for better or for worse, I am simultaneously at home and abroad.