Trine Blogs: What’s a sister to do?

When you live abroad, you sometimes end up losing touch with the folks back home. I mail my parents maybe every week, but I only talk to them on Skype at most twice a month. We’re a family of few words, really, but it works for us. We always know that the others are there, just a phone call or e-mail away, and that they will update us on the most recent and important news so that we’re never completely out of the loop.

Except my brother. He has been working full-time for the past 1½ year to save up money for one of those “finding yourself while trekking up a mountain in the jungle accompanied by seven other hungover youths, half of whom you have slept with” trips. I originally thought he was going to Hawaii (which seems to be a place more for surf and sand than exchange of body fluids and tropical illnesses) but I recently found out – through Facebook, no less – that he has changed his plans and will be going to Thailand for a month. Oh, and as he informed my dad the other day, he will probably be moving out once he gets home because a friend of his will have found a big enough apartment for their dude triad to chill out in. So that rent installment he just paid will be his last, m’kay?

Wait, what? Okay, so no Hawaii (which I’m actually a bit disappointed about; I planned to live vicariously through him), but all of a sudden he is moving out? My dad didn’t even know it was on the table before my brother and his friends had made it come together. Geez. You’d think a brother would keep his big sister updated on what was going down. But I think I lack the vocabulary to always keep up; maybe that’s the problem.

When I found out about these crazy new plans, I told him that I wouldn’t be going back to Denmark after all – so I guess he’s not the only one changing his mind from one day to the other (maybe it’s a genetic thing?). See, I was meant to go back for my thesis research, but it fell through. Instead, my boyfriend’s mother has gotten me a gig, and secured it within two days. Seems ridiculous when I’ve spent the past month trying to get someone to feign interest in my project. But bless nepotism, my thesis is secured, and that’s all that matters. Except I would’ve liked to see my little brother before he goes off to Thailand doing gods know what with gods know who. As long as he comes home with all his limbs and STD-free (and with a large souvenir for me, preferrably a hand-painted sarong), I’m happy.

But that’s the thing about living abroad. The lives that used to be so intertwined with yours are slowing untangling themselves and heading their own way. Or put in other words… my baby brother is growing up and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it when I’m stuck in windmill-tulip-and-crazy-cyclist country.

Trine Larsen (23) from Denmark studies Management of Cultural Diversity at Tilburg University and blogs for Univers.