When Fiona McCanngot back from four years in Buenos Aires, Ireland wasn't quite how she'd left it.
There's no place like home. Sometime during my infancy, somebody - it's a toss-up between Judy Garland and my mother - implanted this mantra in my developing cerebrum, and, despite my restlessness and constant ramblings, it has been wedged there ever since. But, returning recently from four years in Argentina, I discovered its alarming truth: there really is no place like the soft-focus home you've carried with you across continents - no place at all, least of all the place you left. Nobody thought to warn me of this as I set off for South America. It turns out that leaving is the easy bit. It's the coming back that's hard. Even after I touched down in Buenos Aires, and began to negotiate my way along its sweeping avenues and cobblestone streets, the much-touted culture shock never packed the promised punch.
There were occasional thrills, such as when a twinkle-toed tanguero swept me, under groaning chandeliers, across a scuffed ballroom floor, or when I found myself carried along as thousands of demonstrators piled towards the city's biggest plaza, in one of Buenos Aires' regular protest marches. There were also moments of jaw-clenching frustration, such as when a simple purchase somehow necessitated three queues, seven receipts and an hour-long wait for a cashier to finish flirting with his colleague, or when a leering passer-by was a little too graphic in his attempts to show his virility. These were the daily details that reminded me I was in Latin America, and they and other experiences coloured my time there a different hue from anything I had seen before. Croissants and coffee on rickety outdoor tables as the sun crawled across the cracked pavement. Extravagant hand gestures as Porteños, as Buenos Aireans call themselves, argued loudly over the beeping horns of taxis. Steak that had been hacked from a cow's behind and slapped momentarily on a makeshift barbecue before landing on my plate. That was after 10 years of vegetarianism. And still I wasn't shocked.
After a while certain things became second nature. Eating dinner at 10pm. Drinking mate, the bitter local equivalent of tea, which you sip through a metal straw. Kissing everyone as the universal greeting. Dreaming in Spanish.
Four years passed before I'd really intended them to - my plan had been to spend only 12 months in Argentina - and all the time I'd vaguely intended to end up back home. Threats from my family regularly came over the line, but I buried them under bar-hopping in Palermo, sunsets by the River Plate and Sundays at San Telmo market. Then I read an alarming and possibly entirely invented statistic about a virtual brick wall that erects itself after you've been in a country for five years. According to this theory, a high percentage of expats return home by then. Go beyond half a decade and your chances of ever leaving plummet. I was scared. Events in Ireland were also conspiring, and suddenly it was time.
So I came home. Or, at least, my ruby slippers told me I was back. But, unlike Dorothy, when I returned to Dublin I found few echoes of the place I had guarded so jealously - and painted in sepia tones for my Argentinian friends. The home I'd left was gone, and so was the me that had left it.
Reverse culture shock. It's the panicked, isolating feeling you get when you return to your country of birth expecting that everyone will come to meet you, arms reaching, smiling sweetly, just as they did for Tom Jones in Green, Green Grass of Home. But then you realise that the hero of that song ends up swinging from the gallows - and that your own carefully constructed image of home will meet a similar fate.
First there were the physical differences. When I left - or at least as I recall it now in my unreliable memory - the IFSC was a building, and the docklands were warehouses that you passed on your way to the Point. But a Legoland of buildings has sprung up, SimCity style, turning the IFSC into an entire neighbourhood while my back was turned. And it's not just the docklands that are different. Smithfield Square is smaller and swisher, with organic groceries and Kalamata olives replacing the wooden crates of tangerines of the markets that once framed it. There's a Calatrava bridge crossing the Liffey and another on the way. And Dublin, monocultural backwater of my youth, now has an Italian quarter.
Getting around the city is different, too. "We'll get the Jerry Lee," a friend told me recently when I asked about transport options. Excuse me? "The Jerry Lee. The Daniel Day. The Lewis." Puzzled pause. "Lewis. Luas." Ah. Dublin has trams now, too, it seems. And slang for them.
I had foolishly believed that a shared language would be one of the comforts of coming home. Now not only do I have four years of slang to catch up on, but the chattering voices that surround me when I get on a bus or stroll through the shopping streets are all speaking different languages. We even have foreign-language newspapers, I'm told, as Dublin has changed so dramatically that about 10 percent of its population comes from eastern Europe. Which does wonders for our notably stagnant gene pool but little for someone who has spent four years becoming fluent in much less useful Argentinian Spanish.
The broad brush strokes of the new Dublin I'm seeing are easy to identify. Some of the details make me feel like a bumbling foreigner in my native land. What are the little green dots on the calendar? Recycling days, dummy. And what's everybody doing outside the pub when it's below freezing? Doh: smirting. Smoking and flirting. Smirting. Recycling. All new to the old Ireland, and newer still to me. Not to mention lore that is permanently lost to me, such as who Mickey Harte is or what rioters did to Charlie Bird.
Then there were the inevitable changes to my social circle. I left them all in their late 20s, drinking cosmopolitans in the Octagon Bar at the Clarence and stumbling home to rented apartments with mismatched furniture and anonymous guests. When I returned my footloose friends had become thirtysomething managers, parents, home-makers and ball-breakers with job titles, mortgages and full driving licences. I had some serious catching up to do.
But they weren't the only ones who had changed. Having joked at the height of World Cup fever that I was one-eighth Argentinian, having spent four of my 32 years in Buenos Aires, my calculation began to show signs of truth when I returned to embrace the other seven-eighths. I just wasn't as Irish as I used to be. It wasn't only my cavalier attitude to timekeeping and my use of hips when dancing. I also found myself coming at subjects, and people, with a new directness, and I seemed to have lost the distinctly Irish trait of permanently apologising. I used my hands more when I spoke, stood on ceremony less, accepted offers the first time around, and was infinitely more spontaneous in my actions and less guilt-ridden about their consequences.
But I missed Buenos Aires. I still do. I miss the accordion-like iron grids stuttering closed on ancient elevators. I miss jacaranda trees in November and empanada pastries ordered by the dozen. I miss the shrug that indicates I have abdicated all responsibility and I miss the things I could say in Spanish that can never really translate. And I miss, if I'm honest, being foreign and always on the fringes of things constantly fresh to me.
As time passes the fractions are changing again, and I am growing back into my Irish skin. I've stopped trying to kiss everyone I meet and have learned to dine before 9pm. And the longer I'm here the more real this new home becomes and the more Buenos Aires takes over the place Dublin once occupied in my dusty mental attic. Most days I love being back. But every now and again I have the urge to slip into my tango shoes, click my heels and whisper, "There's no place like Buenos Aires," in the hope that it will take me to my one-time home. Even if I now know that you can never go back.