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Welcome to our family website, a look into the lives of the Walker-Smith family, well thats the idea

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Being left by ...

Being left by family at an airport is nice, but as they leave, as they must to journey back to their homes, I am left with almost a physical sense of loneliness and isolation; airports just do that to me, when I am alone. If it was not for the family that waits for me back in Antofagasta, Chile I would almost feel despair. It’s been three weeks since I have seen my wife and child. Indiana is three and half months old, he will have changed an awful lot in that time I am sure. Andrea, my poor love has been alone with Indiana for all this time looking after him, she is a mother warrior. I am not sure how Andrea copes, but she does.

So I sit here at London Gatwick in fact, connected to the electrical supply in some semi-comfortable seats whilst I wait for the two hours to pass before my plane. People for a while become familiar, a family to my right, some youngsters to my left, and in front of me there are some golden oldies, all in their traveling gear with their, special bags. Ooh, the armed Police have just arrived patrolling the airport for us. That makes me think of the terrorist threat we are living under nowadays, it is real and you can feel it. Everywhere you go in London you see signs “Don’t leave you belongings unattended”. What is the world coming to?

England has changed over the six years I have been away. I am not sure if I like the changes I see. I cannot always put my finger on it. The youth seem a lot more bolshie than they were in my day, god does that sound old or what – “in my day”, break out the slippers. Spending and money seem to be high on everybody’s agenda, what can you buy with what label. This seems to be leading to waste, so much rubbish is produced everywhere. Everything is packaged. How many English people know how to make a soup for themselves? If it weren’t for Andrea I would not know. So it’s packaged, expensive, angry and wasteful back in the UK. But it’s still a great place to live. Culture, schools, NHS, TV, Radio, baked beans a real social system are things I miss. Just watching “whose line is it anyway” can be cool.

With one flight under my belt, and the time zoned already changed the journey is well and truly begun. I chat on the plane to a chap who was travelling back to Canary Island where he lives, he is an expat too, owning a bar in a small sleepy town. We discuss being ‘expats’ what we miss, funnily enough he said he gets sick of the pure sunshine and was pleased to get some bad weather whilst he was back home. He informed me there were telescopes on the island, several in fact, I will have to investigate this on my arrival at home.

As a sort of seasoned traveler, or really an expat I get to see the differences between countries. Take for instance landing at airports. Here in Santiago the people I saw today collecting the trolleys for us “seasoned travelers” looked like elderly people. In the UK it was spotty youths in uniforms. I am not sure what this means, it’s just something you see. Book covers, I notice whilst looking around the nice book store in Gatwick that they differ from country to country, and not just when they are in the different languages, even in the same language. Films are edited differently as well, I was re-watching Snatch at Jool's house, it seemed different to the version I had seen in Chile, which probably came from the States. There are many other differences, I just cannot think of any at the moment. I just got off an eleven-hour flight; the mind is not yet working so well. One more flight and I shall be in the arms of my family

Posted by iwsmith at May 9, 2004 02:11 PM

Comments

Bienvenido a Chile, bienvenido a casa mi amor!

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