New friends, and perspective changes. Slash reinforcements.
It's funny what growing up in a place will do to you. I never really thought about it until I moved far, far away, where attitudes and languages and body language are different, and started to see my country in a different way. Part of that difference is just starting to see it as "mine" for the first time. I've been making a lot of new friends. Some of them are French, but a lot of them are anglophone. Some of them are Canadian, and some are Australian, and some are English and Welsh. They're all part of the commonwealth, but the idea of connectedness seems to be one-sided -- that is, the British see Australia and Canada as very loosely connected to them if at all, and the Canadians and Australians I've met seem to feel a lot more part of Britain than the British think they are. These countries all have established national health care, and almost the first thing that happens on meeting someone from a country such as this, where everyone speaks at least o...