14 Expatriate Years

Ten days ago, on June 20th, was our 14th "anniversary" as expatriates in this country.

We arrived from Brazil with student visas and kept on studying, and staying, and here we are.

There are no regrets, I think we made the right decision, there are only a few little things that we could have changed here and there.

The one thing K regrets is that he could have done his PhD research in one of the top ranked department in polymer science in the country (that's not his area, so I can name it, no problem), but he didn't because back then we were supposed to go back to Brazil and he couldn't possible pursue research in that area in the small college we were going back to. It turns out we never went back because the sponsorship we had ended and K went on to a postdoc while I finished my own degree.

Oh well... there's nothing K can do about that now! Except to hope that he will able to write grants and get funding to continue doing research in the area he's currently working on. So he can get tenure. All fingers crossed for six (or seven if we move) years and lots of hard work. I hope it pays off. Or else... oh no, we don't want to think about that.

Fourteen years is a long time and at this point I don't think I want to go back to Brazil anymore. If anyone told me ten years ago that I'd be saying this today, I would have become FURIOUS! :-) "NO WAY!" I would have said, "I want to go back to Brazil, I don't like it here!"

Well, I guess time does change things, doesn't it?