Travel (especially travel without companions, since being alone encourages introspection even in the least self-reflective) prompts one to consider one's place in the world. I don't fit here. How don't I fit? Why do I not fit?

I've commented in a previous post on one (of the many) little reasons that I find in the USA a lack of fit, I'm a coffee snob, US coffee is bitter and far too plentiful, it is 'never mind the quality feel the width' coffee ;) I'm also a poor "fit" in the USA because I am a poor tipper, I neither know how to tip, nor do I understand deep in my bones the need to tip. If someone is doing a job they should be paid to do that job. If they are doing a kindness then they don't want to be paid. But it does not work like that in the USA, the US is like Africa or Thailand or most other parts of the world except NZ, people in service industries live on tips.
Now I'm returning to the land of my birth. The first thirty years of my life were spent in the UK, my ancestors (pretty much all of them as far as I know) lived in these islands in the North Atlantic since before 1199. But in today's UK I am a stranger, I don't know how things work, some basics of life are complex, the culture is somewhat strange. In short, life is harder work than "at home".

This estrangement of my homeland began when we were in Africa, mainly then it was the shops with full shelves, the relentless busyness and pursuit of things, that became strange. A deeply secular materialism that contrasted with a Congolese world, full of personality and powers. Now it's more the dirtiness, busyness and crowds. For though Kiwis are ardent materialists, they relate, and do not as vehemently exclude the others who surround them - except perhaps on Auckland public transport ;)
And yet... a migrant, even a voluntary, self-selected, happy immigrant is a fish out of water. I may have been happy to live and work in NZ for 17 years, I may have been a citizen for over a decade, when someone at SBL asked "So you'll retire in NZ then?" my unspoken response may have been "Duh! Where else?", but yet as all immigrants are, I am a fish out of water in some things. The rugged Kiwi individualism, product no doubt of the pioneer spirit, and boosted by the myth of No.8 wire and the can do attitude it endorses, is somewhat strange to a well-socialised Pom, especially one who was earlier and first a migrant worker in Congo ;) In particular the deep rooted belief in Kiwi culture that "It is better to ask forgiveness than permission." Is one my bones and sinews will never understand.

Again, it's not that I disapprove of this approach to life, actually I rather like it, but it is not my default. As a good Afro-Englishman I wait to be asked. Fatal in a forgiveness not permission culture. Fish out of water - still it was fish that crawled out of the sea that (according to evolutionary biologists) were the ancestors of every mammal you see, successful little beasts fish out of water ;)