Where is home?

[Brah]

I am still in my early 40's, so way to early to start thinking of retirement.

I would respectfully disagree with that, as I wish I started it for myself earlier.

Now is the time.

[RobSg]

I am retired. I get US$5,000+/month in retirement income, and it goes up a little every year. My job is to stay healthy, and I get paid for that. As mentioned in a previous post on this thread, I lived in Singapore most of my working career, but felt compelled to NOT retire there. It could never be home when after all these 25 years I still did not feel a part of the country. There is a whole list of reasons for that if you like me to list them.

I needed a feeling of home. I decided to return to the US and bought a house, perhaps too quickly, but I wanted the feeling of permanence. As mentioned, the mindset here in the US just doesn't appeal to me. However, never having to worry about health care trumped my anti-American feelings. It's very difficult if not impossible to get private medical insurance when you are 67, and this cause one to return to his home country where he gets it.

I'm going to be determined to make Washington state my home base. I will close the house up for three or 4 months and investigate Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama and other places. I might even try Thailand.

Rob

[Fortan]

I am still in my early 40's, so way to early to start thinking of retirement.

I would respectfully disagree with that, as I wish I started it for myself earlier.

Now is the time.

Might have given the wrong impression with what I wrote. I do save for my pension and have been doing so since me early 20's. What I meant was, it is too early to start retiring yet.

[kilang]

Reading this topic makes me think it'll always be quite hard to find a place I can call home.. My current expat "tenure" started at age 0, having been a Russian in Uzbekistan (USSR) for 7 years, followed by 7 years in Russia (which was the closest to what I could call "home"..though getting back there recently felt quite strange), then 14 years in Italy, almost a year in NYC, a year in the Netherlands and most likely moving so Singapore in November. Will I call it home? Not sure, but it's still nice to find people with a similar feeling of "uncertain belonging".

[chris_pilgrim]

Home will always be ....http://www.buzzfeed.com/elliewoodward/t ... had#cisn0u

[JR8]

Hehehe! ^+1 so true.

[sundaymorningstaple]

That could just as easily be SanFran, LA or NYC couldn't it!

[the lynx]

Actually, it could be Singapore too! To certain degree...

[Wd40]

"Home" is the place which you can relate to the most. If you spend a significant amount of time in a place and have assimilated then its easy to call that place a home compared to your real home.

Some people need that kind of social connections and yearn for a place called home. Others dont. I think I am a kind of person who can just live anywhere because since childhood we have lived in different cities, although in the same country, yet different cities. So I have never had permanent friends. I can retire anywhere as long as my family is with me.

[JR8]

I think the bulk of it might be generic, but it has some things that feel specific to London, the daily 'signal failures' being one of them. Another is '43. I’m at the front of the DLR and I’m pretending to drive it and it’s the happiest I’ve ever been in my whole life.' - The London Docklands Light Railway has driverless trains... and so on.

Other pieces are generic but just well observed, and true...

'32. Oh god, is she pregnant?
33. Or…not?
34. Pregnant or not, pregnant or not, pregnant or not?
35. Should I offer her my seat?
36. Or pretend to be asleep?
37. I’ll offer her my seat.
38. Nope. Not pregnant.'

[the lynx]

I think the bulk of it might be generic, but it has some things that feel specific to London, the daily 'signal failures' being one of them. Another is '43. I’m at the front of the DLR and I’m pretending to drive it and it’s the happiest I’ve ever been in my whole life.' - The London Docklands Light Railway has driverless trains... and so on.

Other pieces are generic but just well observed, and true...

'32. Oh god, is she pregnant?
33. Or…not?
34. Pregnant or not, pregnant or not, pregnant or not?
35. Should I offer her my seat?
36. Or pretend to be asleep?
37. I’ll offer her my seat.
38. Nope. Not pregnant.'

In my experience, I've received on my end
1. One stare-down
2. One b*tch/lynch mob
3. One dressing down

Why?
1. I thought that woman was pregnant, and offered my seat. She wasn't happy.
2. I thought another woman was pregnant, and offered my seat. Her friends and her weren't happy.
3. I thought the other 'elderly' woman needs a seat, and offered mine. Turned out she was blessed with vigour and EQ of a 20-year old, despite having a 70-year old physique.

Moral of the story:
1. The most sensitive adjectives to women is (1) pregnant, (2) old and (3) fat (refer to 1).
2. Never stop being kind to other people.

[zzm9980]

Home will always be ....http://www.buzzfeed.com/elliewoodward/t ... had#cisn0u

So much #44. Every. Single. Time. I visit London.

[JR8]

Home will always be ....http://www.buzzfeed.com/elliewoodward/t ... had#cisn0u

So much #44. Every. Single. Time. I visit London.

Raise Cockfosters, and lay your Hooker, Oklahoma ;

http://googlesightseeing.com/2009/12/to ... n-america/

[Primrose Hill]

I honestly do not know where home is anymore.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... aries.html

Dont quite fit in here. Didnt quite fit in in Msia either. London? No idea

[Brah]

+1 & +1, but I sure would like to see how well I'd fit in to London

So-so book by a good writer whose books I read at the time this came out, a great idea not executed as well as his other books, covers this pretty well for many of us:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Soul

"I'd often referred to myself as homeless — an Indian born in England and moving to California as a boy, with no real base of operations or property even in my thirties."

.......

"For more and more people, then, the world is coming to resemble a diaspora, filled with new kinds of beings — Gastarbeiters and boat people and marielitos — as well as new kinds of realities: Rwandans in Auckland and Moroccans in Iceland.

One reason why Melbourne looks ever more like Houston is that both of them are filling up with Vietnamese pho cafés; and computer technology further encourages us to believe that the remotest point is just a click away.

Everywhere is so made up of everywhere else — a polycentric anagram — that I hardly notice I'm sitting in a Parisian café just outside Chinatown (in San Francisco), talking to a Mexican-American friend about biculturalism while a Haitian woman stops off to congratulate him on a piece he's just delivered on TV on St. Patrick's Day. "I know all about those Irish nuns," she says, in a thick patois, as we sip our Earl Grey tea near signs that say City of Hong Kong, Empress of China.


http://januarymagazine.com/nonfiction/globalsoul.html
The Global Soul is a noble experiment, often intriguing, sometimes entertaining and insightful, but one which never comes to a satisfactory conclusion. but still a worthwhile read, and while I agree with that conclusion, it's a difficult subject to have a solution, we are a generation of new kind of pioneer