The Honest Truth About Life Abroad When the Novelty Wears Off

Every couple of weeks, my brother sends me a message. Not "how are you," not "miss you," just a "happy X week". Week 1. Week 3. Week 13. Week 17. Week 20. Week 27. Week 30. Week 35. What was a single digit has now morphed into two. My brother is not one for an emoji or sentiment of any kind, so I have chosen not to read too deeply into the counting. Mainly because the alternative interpretation is that he is running a very organised sweepstakes on when this whole thing comes undone and I have to slink back to Australia with my dignity in my carry-on. He has said nothing to suggest otherwise, so I choose love. He has not confirmed love, and so we continue.

Current count is 42 weeks since I left Australia, and I'll be honest with you, I didn't entirely expect to still be here. Not because Florence hasn't been wonderful, but because I've done this before and I know how quickly a dream can get complicated by reality, regardless of how carefully you'd imagined it unfolding. The first time I moved here it lasted four months before life intervened and sent me home. So the fact that I've now doubled that, then added some, feels like a personal achievement worthy of at least a small trophy.

What nobody tells you about this length of time living abroad is that the novelty has worn off but the love hasn't, and that combination produces a very specific kind of contentment that is quiet enough to miss if you're not paying attention. The city no longer surprises me the way it did and the rose-coloured glasses are well and truly off. Unfortunately, all I see now are the flaws; the crumbling infrastructure, the overflowing rubbish situation, the tourist menus with photographs of the food just in case you've never seen a plate of carbonara before, but that was bound to happen when one lives within the cracks of a city rather than glazing over it as a tourist would. I have opinions now, about neighbourhoods, which parts of the city belong to locals and which have been quietly surrendered to the tourist economy. I have decided that having opinions about a place is its own form of belonging. That is not disillusionment, it is just what knowing a place actually feels like.

But there is something to be said for seeing clearly, because once the haze lifts and you've made your peace with the flaws, the beauty that remains is the beauty you've actually chosen. Nobody handed it to you. You found it again yourself, on an ordinary Tuesday, in the specific way late afternoon light falls across a particular stretch of rooftops, or in the ten seconds of church bells that interrupt a completely unremarkable moment and remind you, that you live here. That kind of beauty lands differently. It's quieter and less showy than the version that hits you when you first arrive, but it has weight to it, the weight of something real rather than something imagined.

I have also learned things about myself that I could have gone a lifetime not knowing, but more accurately, Florence has had absolutely no impact on certain personality traits that I had quietly hoped it might fix. I arrived with the optimism that immersing myself in a culture built around slowness, pleasure and the long lunch might gently reshape me as a person. It has not reshaped me, and if anything, it has simply given me a more scenic backdrop against which to be exactly who I already was. Chief among my unchanged qualities is that I am constitutionally incapable of walking slowly, and whilst I have always known this about myself - if you saw the pace my mother sets in a shopping centre you would understand - Florence is a city that saunters. It invites people to stop mid-pavement to check their maps if they are a tourist, or if a local, have a twenty-minute conversation with someone they know. I, meanwhile, walk like I am late for something that hasn't been scheduled yet. I've been trying to fix this for nine months. I am still trying, but I feel that my chances of success are slim to none.

I have also discovered that living alone in a foreign country is the fastest route to knowing exactly who you are, which sounds wonderful and it mostly is, but some weeks it is extremely inconvenient. There is no one to help share the burden of misplaced Italian, no one to break the awkward silence in a taxi on the way home late at night, no one to fix a blocked drain or put up the reflective cover on the bedroom skylight that turns the room into something resembling the seventh circle of hell. Solitude does serve to teach you skills you didn't think possible, picture 10pm and a 1L water bottle cut in half repurposed as a plunger, but it is tiring all the same. Some nights it is just you, the apartment, the neighbour doing whatever it is they do at 11pm that sounds like furniture being rearranged by someone who has never heard of socks, and a fairly honest conversation with yourself about what you actually want from all of this.

When you remove every distraction, prop and comfortable excuse, the answer to my happiness is less complicated than I spent years making it. I need work that means something, a coffee that is served at a temperature above tepid, enough quiet to write when inspiration strikes and enough life happening nearby to not mistake the quiet for loneliness. I need friends, real ones, the kind you can call when the bureaucracy has won a round and you need someone to confirm that yes, Italy is insane, and no, it is not your fault, and yes, you should absolutely have that glass of wine. These are not lofty ambitions. They are, it turns out, entirely sufficient.

The work has been the biggest revelation. Stepping into something new, in a new country, in your forties, while still occasionally conjugating Italian verbs in a way that makes native speakers visibly sympathetic, is not the smoothest entry. But I am doing work that matters to me in a way that restaurant management, for all its adrenaline and camaraderie, never quite did. I don't take that lightly, and I also don't take for granted that most people spend the better part of their lives waiting for this to happen and I somehow bumbled into it by moving to Florence two years ago, missing home and running into some fellow Aussies, which is either a very good origin story or a terrible business strategy, possibly both.

Whilst some days I miss the connection with people that hospitality enables you to make, a large part of this change was the ambition to cultivate my writing. I hoped that being immersed in things that inspire me would spark some unknown creativity and finally get the novel finished. Florence, with its beauty and its history and its endless supply of atmospheric cafés purpose-built for a person with a laptop and lofty ambition, has had every opportunity to deliver on that front. The novel still exists. It is being written, in the same way that a glacier is technically moving. I am choosing to frame the pace as "considered" rather than "glacial".

Every few weeks, without much warning, a reflective mood descends. Not melancholy exactly, more like the mental equivalent of stopping mid-walk to check how far you've come. I never plan for it and I can't predict it, but I've learned to recognise it, usually because I find myself writing a blog post at an hour when a sensible person would be watching television. This particular mood has been assisted by the fact that I have just booked my flights home for Christmas, which has produced the specific emotional cocktail of pure excitement and the sudden acute awareness of everything I've been quietly missing.

Being 42 weeks in, the things I miss about Australia are specific and surprising. Not the big abstract things I thought I'd miss, but particular ones. The ease of a conversation where both parties understand all the words immediately without anyone having to check their phone. The way my parents' house smells. The particular quality of afternoon light in Queensland that I didn't think to appreciate until I stopped being able to see it. I miss my house plants. I miss my black leather tote bag and cookbooks which are neatly packed into boxes yet to be shipped here. I miss seeing the lives of my friends unfold in real time. I miss being a sister in the same time zone, which brings me neatly back to my brother and his weekly dispatches, which I have to admit I look forward to in a way I would never tell him, because then he'd stop doing it out of sheer principle. And I am fairly certain he doesn't read what I write, so they are safe.

Week 42. Still here, still walking too fast and still learning. Still ordering the pasta even when I've told myself to reduce my carb intake, but I live in Italy and I'm not an idiot, so yet again I order the pasta. The city has settled around me in the way that places do when you stop treating them like a test you have to pass and start treating them like somewhere you actually live, which is, I suspect, the whole lesson I came here to learn.

 Life lately (the fabulous food shots are by my wonderful friend Katrina - she has a talent for food photography but doesn't believe me when I tell her this).