Is the Expat Lifestyle Really for Me?

Just the word “Expat” sounds so exotic and perhaps high flying to people who don’t know much about it. Or maybe to some it seems like the “in thing” to do; maybe you have friends doing it and you think you should be doing it as well, because well that’s what lots of young people seem to be doing. You can have this attitude to travel and easily spend a fortune on travel, just to be able to say “yeah I’ve been there and done that, too” but it’s not so easy to be an expat and becoming an expat is a much bigger decision.

Like any decision in your life there are consequences, there are advantages and disadvantages. Here I’ll delve into a few of them…

Why am I doing this?

You can’t become an expat without a real sense of purpose otherwise all the heartache and pain just isn’t worth it. You make the choice to become an expat; it’s not like being a refugee where you have had to flee your country to survive. You should see being an expat as a privilege or else you shouldn’t be an expat at all. Why might you do it?
Because you believe you can give your family a better future in another country
Because the career opportunities don't exist in your own country 

·      Because you are working for some cause and to do it you have to be overseas

·      Because you are passionate about multiculturalism and world peace and you think living overseas will have a small impact on people’s tolerance of foreigners if you can be a good ambassador

·      Because you have an insatiable appetite for knowledge, you need to continually be learning, meeting new people and having different experiences

·      Because you are addicted to challenges and setting goals. You want to prove to yourself that you can “do this”

·      Because you are a fanatical traveller and you figure you’ll have a smaller carbon footprint by living overseas and exploring in close vicinity to your new whereabouts.

·      Because you are a natural anthropologist and you are only happy when you are living in strange places meeting amazingly different people

·      Because you want to learn another language, probably for love or for your career, and you believe the only way to learn it properly is to live in the country where it’s spoken

Culture Shock

In my experience it doesn’t matter how many times you move, inside or outside your country, you will always experience some level of culture shock usually in the first six months.

There’s a nice summary about it on Wikipedia I recommend. What is it? So there are phases of adjustment when you go somewhere new; there’s the Honeymoon, Negotiation, Adjustment, and Mastery phases and essentially 3 possible outcomes;

1.     You don’t adjust and you go home. Back home you struggle to fit back in, too initially.

2.     You relocate once and you feel happy there so you stay and totally adapt to the new culture.

3.     You take on board what you like about a culture, but you also maintain the values you see as important from you former culture. In this way you are able to adjust again and again, ultimately becoming an “expat” I guess.

Even if you are lucky enough to count yourself in the third category it doesn’t take away from the fact that you still will experience culture shock again and again every time you move. Believe me it is not fun at all! You feel alone, alienated, confused about who you are and what on earth you are doing, little things seem stressful and difficult and there’s a point where it’s so painful and you don’t believe the feeling will ever end. At this point lots of people go home, only the very stubborn continue to exist the way they are, or those that know they have an end date in sight.

Some people who think they have travelled a lot may think they aren’t susceptible to culture shock. The point is that you don’t get culture shock when you travel usually because you are always moving so you are always in the Honeymoon phase enjoying new experiences, etc. It’s when you stay someone more than three months that you start to experience it.

All you can do to survive culture shock is first recognise you have it, accept you have it, be willing to talk about it to your friends and family and know that it won’t last forever! This sounds much easier than it is in practice!

Family

Maybe some expats are lucky enough to have a family they despise so being away from them is no problem! But most normal people miss their families immensely and are missed immensely, and remember: absence makes the heart grow fonder. This means even those of you sick of your families after a few months away from them start to realise how important they are to you and how much you need to maintain them in your existence.

Thankfully these days there are a million and one ways to keep in touch with our families and a regular Skype chat and daily emails make it bearable. But do you have the support of your family for your Expat existence? For those who don’t it can only make the experience even more painful with the added sensation of guilt that you are perhaps abandoning your family.

Cost

Being an expat is extremely costly, especially for those who like to move around. Every time you move you have to either pay hundreds to thousands of dollars to relocate your possessions or buy them all over again, unless you think you can live on the very basics for extended periods of time, which becomes painful believe me.

Visas can be costly and time consuming and you can spend months unemployed waiting for visas to be approved, which could be days earning money in an easier situation back home.

Visas, red tape and shit

Every time you move to a new country there is a new mountain of red tape to get through before you can live there legally. Believe me this is a huge pain in the bum and alone enough to put lots of people off from trying to be an expat. It doesn’t get easier if you’ve done it several times; it just gets more loathsome!

Lack of contacts and networks

You have know idea how important the people are around you to your own sense of self worth until they all just miraculously disappear from your life and you have to start again from ground zero. This is both liberating and daunting; the people you meet in a new place have no idea that you were that embarrassing guy in high school that got bashed up by the school bullies or whatever so you can carve a totally new identity for yourself. But you might grow tired of trying to recreate your former identity or you might get confused about your new one, is this really me? If you are living in a country that doesn’t speak your native language, you might find it impossible to replicate your former self in the new language, say because you don’t know how to replicate your humour in the new language.

Some people may exist in very tight knit social circles with clear hierarchies. Someone may be well regarded by their peers at home, but feel themselves to be “nobodies” out in the big bad world. An expat situation is extremely threatening to many people’s sense of self-worth and self-image for these reasons.

My recommendation is to build up a network of friends at home that you value and respect and a network of expat friends who know what it’s like to be an expat and who you can relate to when things are tough in the expat lifestyle that your friends back home can’t understand. For many people initially this seems a less than ideal situation, but it’s the best you can hope for. It is important for you to keep in contact with your friends back home for many reasons, but most importantly it gives you that sense of identity you lose in your new home. But the support from your expat friends is as equally as important to stop you feeling alienated and alone during culture shock, etc. It is good to know you are not alone and others understand what you are going through.

A sense of groundlessness

Literally, when you live somewhere new it can be like you have come unattached from the earth. This is especially true if you come from a smaller town and you’ve thrown yourself into a big city lifestyle. Beyond culture shock, there’s an “environment shock” – you can have sensory overload as you adjust to the new sounds, smells, tastes, sights and so much unfamiliarity makes you feel like you aren’t connected to the environment anymore. It is a horrible feeling of loss as your old connection to the land so to speak gave you so much pleasure you were hardly aware of, as it was so natural and unconscious. 

Perks

Well the perks are better known than the blows, which is why I’ve chosen to concentrate on the blows in this article. But if you can put up with all these challenges and stresses of course you can be well rewarded in your expat life. You get to meet interesting people regularly, being outside your comfort zone helps you understand yourself and the world better, and you will have the memories forever of the beautiful places you have seen and all the experiences along the way. As well, the sense of achievement having conquered all those challenges only sets you up to fearlessly take on other life challenges! So you decide now if you think it’s the lifestyle for you! 

Le feminisme: C'est quoi?!

Le mot « féminisme » dans l’ensemble a une connotation négative dans mon pays et dans beaucoup de pays. Il y a une connexion entre ce-mot-la et le mot « misandrie » (comme la misogynie) malheureusement. De plus, il y a une perception que une féministe est quelqu’un masculin, hostile et moche.

J’étais une féministe depuis mon enfance. Je suis née la cadette avec deux frères qui me regardaient comme la petite fille, inutile et pathétique. Depuis toujours, j’ai voulu prouver que j’étais aussi intelligente et aussi forte que mes frères, mon père et en fait tous les hommes dans ma vie.

Pour moi le féminisme est le droit d’être moi-même. Je peux choisir une profession traditionnellement masculine ; l’ingénierie. Je peux jouer au foot. Je peux porter des jolies robes au bureau et dans la rue sans harassement.

C’est la reconnaissance que je suis aussi intelligente et aussi forte qu’un homme dans quasiment tous les domaines. Oui, je cuisine bien comme mon stéréotype. Mais j’ai des autres talents traditionnellement masculins, par exemple le mathématique, la négociation et le sport.  Par ailleurs, j’ai des talents au bureau qui sont utile et féminine en fait comme l’aptitude pour collaboration.

Pendant les premières 25 années de ma vie j’ai cru que c’était inconvénient d’être une femme. Maintenant je crois que c'est davantage ! Les femmes sont fortes, flexibles, créatives et belles. On garde le paix et on peut jouer plusieurs rôles à la fois sans problèmes ; femme, mère, collègues, amie, sœur. On est incroyable !

Le féminisme : c’est belle, dynamique et davantage pour tout le monde ! 

The Boy Who Took His Life

This is a story about a boy, but it could happen to anyone. Maybe because it happened to a boy, when boys are meant to be so tough then we realise just how hard what happened to this boy was.

He was a boy from a big cattle station in remote Australia. He had lived there all his life, but in his teen years his parents had to sell the station and moved into the city. Shortly afterwards he took his own life because he couldn't bare the change.

Anyone, who has ever had to move (unless they are almost inhuman) will know how difficult the first six months are - whether you are moving to Paradise or Hell, the feeling is pretty much the same. Anyone, who has persevered and not run home will also know that this pain ends, it is just part of the journey of adjustment. But how many people are aware of this? How many people find the pain so unbearable that it feels like it might never end when it drags on for months and months? And everyone is different, everyone can cope with this pain if different ways. But there are some things you can learn from people who have been through this before that might make it easier for you. Even just to know that you are not the only one who finds major changes difficult. Before I go into more detail on advice, I want to say the first thing that you need to accept is that change is inevitable. The world is constantly changing, as much as we dislike new developments will always be proposed, weeds will keep infesting new forests and the more we understand our own families we realise that nothing was ever as perfect as we were led to believe as children. If you can come to accept that change is always going to happen and we can't do much to stop it (unfortunately maybe) then this is the first step in accepting change in your life and accepting your status as a newcomer.

It's a total tragedy that this boy took his life. I don't know all the details of what happened. What I do know is that maybe just the words "your pain will pass in time" could have saved him and he might have one day learnt to love and embrace the exciting differences in his new home.

Not everyone is sad when they have to move. Many of us want to move and go on adventures. But many of us go on these adventures and realise they aren't as much fun as we imagined when we read about them in books, so we ultimately feel the same feelings of alienation, rejection, etc of someone who never wanted to move without understanding why this happened when we were 100% certain that this was what we wished to do and saved all our money for! Then you feel ashamed - yes you - to tell people what you really thought about a place! You say it was fantastic and you had a wonderful time, because that's what people want to hear. If you say it was a nightmare then everyone might think you were selfish and pessimistic. This can happen if you leave a place right in the middle of your culture shock when you haven't had time to settle in and get over the big bump in your otherwise amazing experience. The truth is everybody has these bumpy months at some stage in their adventure - there's no need to feel ashamed, like a failure who was incapable of fitting in properly - you are only human - or animal as I will discuss later on as I believe it is more the animal in us then the human in us that can explain these mixed emotions when we are displaced...

Long Haul Flying Advice

Yes, this is a post with advice on long haul flight advice. I've been on over twenty long haul voyages so I'd like to think I've learnt something in that time that I can share with less experienced long haulers. Have you only been on a few long flights and at the end you've had terrible jet lag, possibly a migraine and vomiting and you've arrived to meet your long distance boyfriend looking and smelling like... you just got off the long-haul flight from hell?! ...You sit in the waiting lounge in a major international airport like Singapore, Heathrow or Abu Dhabi and you see others, especially the airline hostesses, who look immaculate and you can't understand how it is possible! If this is you, then this is the blog for you.

The main thing to bare in mind is that the flights dehydrate you badly; the strong air conditioners for hours on end dry out your skin and everything excessively and this excessive dehydration is your biggest challenge.

Long Haul Flying tips:

1. ANTI-HEADACHE TIPS
DO NOT DRINK THE ALCOHOL! Now this is one of the hardest rules to follow, but it's also one of the most beneficial. It is so tempting to drink the complementary bevvies (alcoholic drinks), but trust me it's not worth it; you can always slip a bottle in your handbag if it's your last leg of the journey for another day. Alcohol will dehydrate you, which will only lead to oilier skin and increased headaches later in your journey. The same applies for the tea and coffee, you can have a little but don't overdo it.
Even when you think you have drunk enough, believe me you still need to drink more.

You might be angry about losing your water bottle at the beginning of the trip going through security, here is your plan:
Fill up a water bottle and take it with you to the airport. Drink it gradually and aim to finish drinking the whole bottle just before the security gate where they don't accept water bottles. Then you present them an empty bottle and they will (at most airports) allow you to keep your empty bottle.
As soon as you are through security, refill your water bottle. If there's a second security gate that rejects bottles (I've seen it before!) you have to drink it all, all over again. But at least then you can save money on buying expensive fluids in transit and stay more hydrated.
Then on the plane, I choose soda water instead of soft drink, because soda water is water that will hydrate you, whereas soft drink is much less hydrating.

2. ANTI-SMELL TIPS
Bring spare underwear and a spare t-shirt on your flight. I usually change half way through the voyage, so by the time you arrive at your destination you are not too smelly.

At your stop-over go to the bathroom and wash-up at least. It's so nice to at least wash your armpits and at an oriental airport that has fresh water in the toilet you can rinse more. People who can afford it can pay for a shower and a bed at major airports, but if you can't then realise this will do just as well and for free.

As per the moisturiser below, if you haven't carried deodorant "borrow" the duty free tester perfume!

Choose your clothing carefully. Cotton is breathable and doesn't make you too hot or cold during the changes in temperature between transit, takeoff and landing. Trousers, a cartigan, a t-shirt, a jumper or big scarf and closed in shoes will tend to be your least smelly option for an outfit, as well as providing warmth and comfort, which are equally important.

3. SKIN CARE TIPS:

Before the flight, moisturise your skin excessively; especially your face. You can carry some moisturiser with you on the flight to top up or use the testers in the stopover duty free shops when desperate!

Some of the airlines now have a "mist moisturiser" in the plane bathroom. This is really nice as it has an anti-bacterial and moisturiser all in one.

Do not touch your face except for moisturising and definitely don't wash your face with soap even if you are dying to because all your pours are opening up and your skin feels awful! Touching your face will just lead to more dirt getting into the pours, etc.

4. SLEEPING TIPS
Sleeping is probably the hardest thing on the long-haul, especially if there are good films to watch all night long. I don't have much to say here, I recommend watching the films but also trying to get as much sleep as you can at a time during the flight that matches as closely as possible to night time at your destination (if that makes sense)! So in one direction it may be better to wait to sleep until the second half of your flight, but in the other direction it may be better to sleep as much as possible at the beginning of the flight. You decide. I can explain better if you want me to.
Just know that the more sleep you manage the better you will feel on arrival at your destination. Good luck!

5. HAIR TIPS
Well, as with the skin, the hair dries out first and then reacts by getting really oily. I recommend tying or pinning your hair off your face and trying not to touch it for the duration of the flight.

6. YUMMY MEAL OPTION TIPS
Well this tip is just something I've learnt to avoid making a bad meal choice on the plane. I've noticed a correlation between which meal is the best option and where was the last stop-over location or sometimes what nationality airline you are with. For example, if you just left Venice, Italy the chances are that the pasta option will be better than the Asian rice option. But if you just left Bangkok then the rice or noodle option will definitely be better than the pasta option. It seems so simple that it's stupid, but I've found that by following this principle I usually end up with the best meal option on each flight!

Hope this advice may help you arrive a less grumpy, thirsty, smelly, dirty, ugly passenger next time!