I didn’t want to return to Mankato. I’ve been a part of the Mankato community since birth, but my new expatriate community was newer, more exclusive and better to talk about at cocktail parties.

Although I missed my family and some other strangely specific homesick pangs (you’ll have no idea how lovely a nonexistent bank line is until you live in Europe), Mankato just didn’t factor into my equation.

For two years now, I’ve been an expatriate, which is an overly sophisticated way of saying I habitually live abroad. I graduated from Mankato East in 2004, and after receiving my college degree in 2008, I entered the work force only to be hit hard by The Great Recession.

After losing two jobs in under a year, I’d had enough. I didn’t want to start over with another job. I wanted to do something bold. On Halloween 2009, I bought a one-way ticket to Ireland. If I was going to work at the bottom rung, I may as well do it in someplace interesting, I thought.

I had no idea of the adventure I was about to enter. Through the benefit of dual citizenship, I’ve been able to live and work in eleven countries. I’ve tended bar in Wales, opened crates for a retail shop in Galway, Ireland, produced a no-budget television pilot for a British audience and led bus-fulls of young people through mainland Europe as a tour guide for my current employer, Busabout.

Being welcomed into an expatriate community doesn’t take much, you just have to live abroad. Living in a foreign city means you’ll have to fight the impulse to approach every person with an American accent and ask give them a “Haay thaare, waare yaa fraam,” (believe me, those long vowel sounds start to sound a lot longer once you’re the only one with our uniquely Minnesotan accents).

Being an expatriate seems to lower the entrance requirements for friendship. The loneliness of being in a strange city makes one much more willing to form a bond with a stranger because of your expatriate status. Last year a middle-aged expatriate in rural Ireland read my blog and invited me to her country cottage and explore Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula. I immediately accepted the invitation to sleep at this woman’s home — a woman I’d only met on the Internet, never in person.

In Galway I met an expat from California at a pub who told me how money was running low for her. I invited her to crash my couch for a few nights, an act she reciprocated when she moved to England’s southern coast.

Expatriate friendships are intense but shallow. Most people only live abroad for a year or two, so there’s certainly no guarantee of lasting friendship. Even if you really click with anyone, chance are one of you will be leaving the country within the year. Maybe that’s why my biggest culture-shock moment came at Mankato’s River Hills Mall, where I found my two years away didn’t matter in the slightest.

I couldn’t walk past three storefront’s before running into my neighbor, my third-grade teacher, or the mother of the kids I used to babysit. Random connections, but deep-seated ones that had been cultivated through decades of saying hello in the church basement, the Sakatah Trail or one of the other places that Mankatoans congregate.

All my relationships were short-term while I lived abroad, but here in Mankato, being away for two years is nothing. This town doesn’t easily forget its citizens.

This holiday season I’ve returned to my old high school job of working at Panera Bread, a place I’m relatively certain the entire population of Mankato cycles through every few months. Every day I go through a half dozen iterations of being asked, “Are you Malcolm’s son?” or asking customers, “Hey, you coached the West debate team, it’s good to see you again.”

I’d forgotten what it was like to be a part of a permanent community, one that values decades of growing up here. It took a while to get used to being recognized after two years of total anonymity, but I’ve grown to appreciate it.

Next month I continue my globe-trotting as I move to Melbourne, Australia, but I don’t think I’ll be as reluctant to return to Mankato next time. Even if I’ve become a perpetual nomad, this trip home has reminded me that Mankato will always be here to welcome me with open arms, long vowel sounds and all.



John O’Sullivan is a native of Mankato and his writing can be found on his blog, Two Passports, at http://www.twopassports.com.