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25/02/2011My home is full of expat memories

My home is full of expat memories Blogger Maria Foley takes a look around her Canadian home and notices her decor is a taste of all the things she acquired as an expat.

“One of my friends told me once she loved coming to my house because ‘expat’ houses were always more interesting than local houses. The multi-cultural, eclectic (okay haphazard) furnishing style of many of our homes becomes our signature design – and tis one I am very comfortable with.”

When I read these words from a post on the Great Expatations blog, my eyes were drawn immediately to my living room, which I can easily see from my usual perch in the dining room office.

Like the rest of my house, the living room is not so much decorated as thrown together in a mishmash of styles. This is partly because Chef Boyardee and I are not very good at the interior design thing, and partly because most of our stuff was bought in different countries.

Photo © 2010 Maria Foley. All rights reserved.When the time came to pack up our shipping container, we took a look around our house and realised that pretty much everything we owned was crap. (With two small children, buying nice things had felt too much like asking for trouble.)

It didn’t seem worth the effort to ship this depressing array of hand-me-downs and low-end IKEA furniture to the other side of the globe. We ended up sending a small shipment -- consisting mostly of toys -- and starting from scratch once we arrived.

Because Chef Boyardee moved two months before us, he was tasked with getting the basics in place. For the first week he slept on a cheapo mattress from IKEA. (And believe me, I’m not knocking IKEA in this post. It saved our bacon more than once. When we moved into our house in France, our shipment was delayed because of a strike (what else). We slept on IKEA mattresses, ate off IKEA dishes, and made endless cups of tea in an IKEA kettle until our container arrived.)

Chef Boyardee would email me photos of things while he was shopping, and I’d give him the virtual thumbs up or thumbs down. He did a pretty good job, and once my jetlag had worn off we filled in the gaps together.






Shopping -- usually an abhorrent chore for both of us -- became a sort of cross-cultural adventure. We trolled the teak shops along Dempsey Road, sorted the wheat from the chaff at Lim’s in Holland Village, and developed an obsession for a store named Barang Barang (it means “stuff” ) in Tanglin Mall.

The rest came from our travels. I tend not to buy souvenirs as such (t-shirts and tchotchkes don’t really do it for me) but I always like to have a little something to remember the experience by. The older I get, the more I need these visual prompts to get the memories flowing.

Photos © 2010 Maria Foley. All rights reserved.
This Tibetan cabinet got the thumbs down from me. He bought it anyway.

So, back to my living room on this grey and dreary day. It’s decorated with things from Singapore, Canada, Indonesia, Scotland, Turkey, Mexico, Vietnam, France, Australia, Cuba, China, Japan, and Korea. (Today I can also include Pakistan, because Elder Daughter has left her pashmina, a gift from a former boyfriend, draped over the couch.)

My dad would refer to this hodgepodge as “a bit Heinz 57”. Marie from Great Expatations calls it “eclectic” and “multi-cultural”. I have a friend who tactfully describes it as “fusion.”

To me, it’s a reflection of the countries I’ve had the good fortune to visit; all the places I was happy, made friends, nurtured my family, learned, and evolved. In this room, I feel as though I’m finally home.

Maria Foley is a Canadian who lived and raised a family as an expat for many years. Aside from writing for Suite 101, Foley still writes about her expat life on her blog, I was an expat wife.

Photos © 2010 Maria Foley. All rights reserved.


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