Back in America from Norway, expat mom measures her change

Back in America for a short stint away from her life in Norway, Saleha Mohsin starts noticing what she took for granted while growing up in the US. Huge fruit, paper money, and friendly conversation – being back in America is chipping away at her expatriate enthusiasm.

By Saleha Mohsin, Guest Blogger / February 18, 2013

Back in America, I spent 10 minutes examining the yogurt shelf only to come home without any because I couldn’t figure out which one I wanted.

Saleha Mohsin

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I love how innately friendly Americans are. Our ability to make a complete stranger feel like a long lost pal is our most well-known trait. Ask a foreigner to describe the average American and the first thing they’ll say is “friendly".

Saleha Mohsin

Saleha Mohsin is an American journalist living in Norway with her British husband, Faisal, and their two-year-old son, Mazen. She grew up in Ohio and worked in London, where she wrote for the popular British tabloid The Daily Mirror and Businessweek. Her experiences as an expat living in Oslo are the basis of her Edge of the Arctic blog.

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The first American I encountered as I left Scandinavia a few weeks back confirmed this, although he also made me realize how much I’ve changed. As I settled in on the plane, preparing for the 8 1/2-hour flight, the man across the aisle addressed me. Over the din of the airplane engine I wasn’t sure what he said but my immediate reaction was to become defensive: “Don’t worry, my son is really well-behaved on airplanes.”

I hadn’t been in Europe long before I realized that striking up a conversation with a complete stranger is uncommon and typically done when asking someone to get out of your way or to tell your child to, well, stop behaving like a child. That’s why I was surprised when the man continued the conversation, but as soon as I heard his American accent I softened up – and rightly so. It turns out that Dave (for, of course, proper introductions followed) was simply commenting that since my husband, son, and I had four empty seats all to ourselves, perhaps we might get some sleep. How kind of him to say so.

By the time the stewardess was serving dinner I had gotten my groove back. I learned that Dave was from Connecticut where he has a wife and three kids, and that he had been traveling overseas for work. I shared a bit about myself and by the time we were in the immigration line at Dulles Airport, I had talked him into reading a Benjamin Franklin biography.

Our journey home was smooth. As the plane descended and the pilot made his final announcements in Norwegian (before switching to English), I breathed a little sigh of relief that for the next few weeks I would understand all of the words I heard around me.

My first few days home were a blur. Jet lag takes longer to overcome when you have a toddler, so I was awake at odd hours and hungry at all the wrong times. But I didn’t care. My brother-in-law had stocked up on my favorite American comfort foods and, even though on the first night my son woke me up at 3 a.m. for breakfast, I couldn’t have been happier watching him hungrily stuff Eggo Waffles in his mouth.

The next day a quick trip to the grocery store made me realize exactly how much my day-to-day habits have changed. Sitting in a car felt strange and boring. We don’t have a car in Norway, nor do we need one. Oslo, like most European cities, is built so that you can walk or hop on a train to get just about everywhere.