My husband and I are both Brazilians living in the US for about 12 years.

Meaning we’re foreigners everywhere.

In the US because it is not and it will never be the place we grew up, where we find the culture that is so deep-rooted on us that will never go completely away, regardless of how long we’ve been far from it.

On the first years we were also easy to spot in the cold, or even mild, weather days because we would be the ones dressed with the biggest amount of layers. Any sign of cold, we would be covered head to toes. In snow even worse!

Covered head to toes, January 2004, 3 years of living in the US, but still not used to the cold

But also in Brazil, where the very same culture that is so deep-rooted starts been seeing from the distance, hence, having some aspects of it questioned.

And the weather, oh the weather, becomes soooooo foreign after 12 years. Having got used to the mild temperatures of the American Pacific Northwest (and even dropped a few layers), every time we go to Brazil now we feel like melting. Too hot, too humid, too uncomfortable.

For our kids it’s the opposite. They were born here, natives of the PN, so if we, who were born and raised in Rio, feel like melting when we go back home, they get to the point of stopping having fun.

This picture was taken about a year and a half ago, on the last time we visited Brazil. In a hot hot afternoon, we decided to go for a walk in the park that goes around my mom’s apartment building and at some point our then 3 1/2-year-old had to stop, sit at a tree shadow and drink lots of water. And she would say:

Mommy, here’s too hot. I have to wear a pony tail all the time because it’s too hot. I like cold.

Here it’s too hot. I like cold!

This post was written in response to the Weekly Photo Challenge: Foreign