I Had No Diplomat Parents. I Had Harry Potter and a Grandmother With a Travel Company.

At the Coffee with Expats meeting everyone had a story.

From Egypt. Speaks ten languages. Parents were diplomats. Grew up between continents. The kind of origin story that arrives fully formed with its own soundtrack.

I sat there thinking: I have none of that.

And then I thought about it a bit more. And I thought: actually wait.

My grandmother owned a travel company. I grew up in Brazil. São Paulo, specifically, which is enormous and loud and full of people going somewhere, and yet somehow the world outside it felt closer than it had any right to.

I did not travel the world as a child. I want to be clear about that. We did not do gap years or international schools or diplomatic postings. But my grandmother owned a travel company, and what that did was make the world feel reachable in a way I cannot fully explain. There were maps. There was the understanding that other places existed and were accessible. There was a feeling, somewhere in the background of growing up, that elsewhere was not a fantasy but a destination.

My dad was born in Uruguay. We visited sometimes. I wrote about one of those visits here — specifically about my sister ordering toast in Spanish for the first time and adding, completely unprompted, without any explanation before or since, the words “without prune.” There were no prunes on the menu. There were no prunes in sight. Nobody had mentioned prunes. My dad has been asking about it for thirty years. He is asking still.

We also went to Argentina. These were not grand adventures. They were family trips. But they were somewhere else. And somewhere else felt normal.

By the time I was twelve I had been on a plane and I had not been afraid.

Then I read Harry Potter.

The first book. The whole Harry Potter experience for me was magical in the specific way it is magical for a certain kind of twelve year old — the kind who already has a feeling that the world is bigger than the place they are currently in and just needed someone to confirm it in writing. Harry got on a train and ended up somewhere completely different from everything he had known. I read that and thought: yes. That. I want that.

So I started working at fourteen. Saving every penny I could. One day I was going to move abroad and I was going to do it in English because Harry did it in English and that seemed like the right language for the kind of life I was imagining.

The first place I went was Australia.

I was twenty. I had moved there after high school with a suitcase, a working holiday visa, and approximately no plan. My boss introduced me to suppliers as “Jessica, our marketing guru. Came here right after high school and worked her way up.” He called me a guru because I showed up every day and figured it out as I went. That, it turns out, is what impresses people sometimes. I still do not know what to do with my face when I think about it.

I arrived ready to prove myself quietly. To keep my head down and earn my place and hope nobody made too much of the fact that I was not from there. I had packed for the hard version of this story. I wrote about what actually happened here.

At the Coffee with Expats meeting I thought I had no story. Egypt. Ten languages. Diplomat parents.

But I had a grandmother with a travel company and a sister who ordered toast without prunes and a twelve year old who read Harry Potter and decided that was enough of a reason to save up and get on a plane.

The first place I went was Australia. The place I ended up is Switzerland. Neither was in the plan. Both were in the want.

Jessica Gabrielzyk