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There’s no place like home.

Growing up, all we know are the little things that make up home. For most of us the world is made up of the streets where we learned to ride a bike, the school yard where we met up with friends, the dinner table where family gathered around to share a favourite meal or the first pet we lost, never to return. No place is like the home you knew because no place is as safe or as familiar.

For me that home was a small hockey town on the north shore of Lake Superior in Canada – freezing cold in the winter, lovely and green come summer. Five years ago I said goodbye to Canada, making Australia’s Northern Territory home.

Helping to push a “tinny” or small tin boat into the water, I took a lazy moment to soak in my surroundings, standing shin deep in the river. It was quickly pointed out that this was a good way to lose a limb to a local Croc – like unwittingly driving too fast at dusk in Northern Ontario and running smack bang into a moose.

Tokyo, too, became home for a while. It’s a funny place where you’re always welcome. Walk into any shop, restaurant or department store and you’re nearly deafened by ‘Irashimasen!” welcoming you into their place of business. It’s much like in Canada where restaurant and retail workers will say hello and how are you? The difference is that in Japan there is no need to respond to ‘Irashimasen’, you simply carry on with no fear of being rude.

Home is where the heart is.

Most recently home is the Big Smoke or more commonly, London, England. It is here where home has really taken root, not in a geographical sense but rather embodied in the form of a boy who hails from a small town on the South Island of a country on the other side of the world. This lovely antipodean is a New Zealander who is missing home. The noise and excitement of London has lost its lustre for my Kiwi boy. So a residency application was started to sponsor my move to New Zealand and hopes were laid that home would become a house in Wellington for me and my boy.

All the comforts of home.

I spent some time in New Zealand a few years ago. I remember apple orchards, sky diving, rugby games, windy weather, great walks, rolling hills and lots n’ lots of sheep. But my most lasting impression was that New Zealand is just a pocket sized Canada. Don’t believe me? Shall I illustrate? OK.

The two countries share a good natured outlook on life and people, such that we can have a healthy chuckle at ourselves. Both countries have an obsessive compulsion towards a specific sporting activity. Finding somewhere to commune with Mother Nature is always just around the next corner – mountains and glaciers and trails. The sheep is to New Zealand what the beaver is to Canada. People always expect Toronto and Auckland to be the national capitals, when really it’s Ottawa and Wellington. We’re both known far and wide as a friendly race of folk. It’s a wonder people can tell us apart at all.

You can never go home again.

Life has made an expat out of me. I’ll always miss the bits of home that I only knew as a wee one but embracing the wonderful new surprises that help to make a new place a home, the gripes as much as the likes, make me happy to be nowhere but where I am.

Elissa Jordan

Tags: ex-pat, good news, home, positive news